Big Machines

The last two days I have milked Bianca single handedly. Towards the end, she gets fidgety, and almost upsets my bucket, but the board in front of her hind legs prevents her from moving too quickly.

She gave a little over 10 pounds of milk today, too! More than a full pound more than she has before.

Saturday was a day of big machinery. While I spent hours gradually picking up the disaster that had become my house, Phil and Butch again worked all day on the fenceline: Butch with his bulldozer and excavator, and Phil with his chainsaw.

Phil was one tired man by the time evening came. He fell asleep over his dinner even! (But he might be getting sick. Isaiah wasn't feeling well this evening, poor guy.)

They have done an amazing amount of clearing. Starting from our road, Old Green Mountain Road, they have opened up a trail as far as I can see into the woods ...

and further on.

The most difficult section to date is the gully that runs across the fence line. Butch has filled in the gully a bit, but he (rightfully) hesitates to fill it in too much, lest it create an unwelcome pond on the neighbor's land.

For a section there, the fence line was lined with large pines. Phil would drop them, then buck them (cut them into sections), and Butch would push them away.

Abraham was happy to go see Butch's equipment and the new road.

At the same time, our hay-man Tyson came over to rip the neighbor's land. His tractor is absolutely enormous.

He said that the field was one rough ride, maybe the roughest he's ever driven. The rip would clog with the bushhogged downed trees, so he would have to stop and push them aside.

Some of the soil he could rip to 18 inches; some he could rip to only six. That's a pretty big difference in soil quality, or in the size of rocks right beneath the surface!

What a difference there is between the ripped soil and the weedy sod.

(Side note for you who pray: Tyson took time away from harvesting his corn and beans in order to rip, as a favor to us. If you could pray that he is not financially hurt in any way because of this favor, I would really appreciate it.)

Sunday, Tyson came over to finish ripping. Not normally a church goer himself, he wondered if we were okay with him working on Sunday. I told him that Jesus himself said that it is good to do good on the Sabbath, and I figured ripping was doing good.

By the time we returned from church, he had finished ripping, and begun discing (you can see the disc in the foreground: it looks like a bunch of plates in a row). The ripping is like taking a bunch of knives and cutting slices in the ground; the discing makes a smoother bed.

Sadly, the disc soon broke, and he finished up the day coming to the orchard and ripping a few of our tree rows. When we go to spread minerals this year, they should end up in the rows much more readily than last year.

This was a pretty delicate balance, since our rows are not much wider than the tractor. (We hadn't known anyone who could rip last year, and we weren't convinced it would be good. By next year, we figured the apple tree roots would be too spread out to be able to rip, but we seem to have read something that said this year, a year later, would still be okay. We hope we didn't just murder our orchard entirely. That would be a bummer.)

But, with some incredible driving (note how he's turned backwards, looking behind him while driving forward!), he managed to rip rows between trees. Amazing.

The fall colors continue to be stunning.

Jadon raced in on Friday and said, "I found a walking stick!" We had seen one once in Texas. What strange, large bugs they are!