March Madness: March Update

Spring is in the air and earth.  The fluctuating temperatures of the month of March brought days in the 20s, to days, like yesterday, where it almost seemed summer was in the air as the temperatures climbed upwards of 70.  With the sour cherry tree about to burst forth in white blossoms outside our living room window, it seems our garden should be fully planted, but since March was a month of madness for us, we lost our opportunity to keep up with the conservative families up the way who already have rows of perfectly planted onions and pristine weed-free peas.  Yes, our garden sits a little vacant, as we seem to be too nervous over these fluctuating temperatures (and chance of snow in the coming week) to break ground too early and destroy our crops.  

That doesn't mean, however, that we are sitting on our hands waiting for the weather to warm.  March has brought plenty of life, and some death, around our place.  

In just a month's time the shelves on our indoor seed starter begun to flood with the sight of green goodness.  From cabbages and marigolds, to tomatoes and peppers, and even some herbs along with other types of green, life is certainly coming into the place.  Each year we figure out, a little too late, that the year previous's seed starting unit will end up being too small.  It's a common occurrence we have year after year, and you think by now we'd learn; however, this year we did learn... only the greenhouse isn't done quite yet, and as it is unheated with these fluctuating temperatures, we will still have to wait a little until we can actually use it.  

You may also notice some green sprouts on the floor down there, which is barley and wheat fodder (well more like sprouts) for the chickens.  Using feed grain we purchased from McGeary Organics in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, we had been a little unsuccessful with our unskilled fodder attempts, but after adding some seed starting soil (that the Mr. mixed himself this year), the green sprouts sprung forth, and the chickens love them!

One can hope that our chickens will continue to love all the green.  Even with the fluctuating temperatures, their egg laying has certainly increased.  All four of the ladies are finally laying now, and not just freeloading off of GMO-free and GMO-free/organic feeds.  We ended up with a whopping 91 eggs for the month of March, which is up from the 49 in January, and 54 in February.  The hens seem to finally be coming into their own, and they are still a little over a month shy from being a year old!  

The hens were also introduced a few days ago to the rooster, and the chicken coop and runs opened up so they have access to both sides.  You may notice that I said rooster, and not roosters.  As I had mentioned earlier, March had brought with it some death around here.  From the beginning we recognized that our chickens were not pets, but rather food.  We treated them humanely, spoiled them with grapes and earthworms, and I would even talk to them in the mornings when I was doing the chores; however, two of the roosters had to go to allow the third one to be kept for breeding, and to maintain the delicate balance of life at the coop.  

The roosters decided themselves who the victor would be after two of them took their job of being the lead rooster a little too seriously, and caused injury to each other.  The injuries, mixed with their personalities, made the decision easy, and that night we butchered for the first time.  As I was a kid who grew up in town, rather than the country, this was not an experience I was eagerly anticipating, and the whole tale can be left for another time; however, I would like to leave you with the warning that YouTube videos do not do the sounds of gutting a chicken justice, and I was so glad that it was after dinner.  Weighing in at 5lb 2oz and 5lb 10oz, they were our two largest (and meanest) of the birds who were constantly battling it out with each other and us.  One of the birds had taken a good sized peck out of my arm, drawing blood, when it was first moved into the coop last year, and what we presume to be the same bird, also ended up spurring my mother when she was feeding them one day.  Thinking back on it... why did we wait so long to get rid of them?  

Now all of the five remaining birds - one rooster and four hens - are happily pecking away and exploring in their enlarged coop.  Even as I write this, the rooster is eagerly crowing in the morning.  We added in some extra features, such as hanging produce baskets, and have temporarily enlarged the coop and run to allow them the extra room until we end up with meat birds (whether we get lucky and a hen goes broody, or we have to buy some to replenish the flock).  

On the few "free" days and evenings we had, we managed to get the plow wire brushed down, and the seized discs on the disc harrow free.  Although all of the implements (aside from the plow) still need a little more work to them before they can be used, we are at least one step closer to getting our garden ready for spring planting.  Even our landlord has once-again allowed us use of his rototiller to ensure we can get the garden in the ground when the David Bradley is being a bit temperamental.  With all that has been going on around here, I am eager to see what surprises April will bring. 

Our New Farm Equipment

     I've seen plenty inventive cost effective ways of plowing on homesteading blogs from pigs, dogs, horses, tractors, rot-o-tillers, and even people power.  We were looking for a cost effective solution as well, and stumbled across Mother Earth News' article from 1982 and quickly found what we imagined to be our simple solution!  (Or, so we thought.)  Since Craigslist is the new newspaper classifieds, we figured we'd start there and eventually found a poor man's tractor for a reasonable price, followed by an assortment of attachments for reasonable prices.  They all needed a little bit of elbow grease to put them into working order, but to the Mr. they appeared to be a treasure trove of possibility (and to me, I admit, a fairly rusty-looking pile of metal that still had glimmers of its old red paint scheme with their remaining rusting and bent model number tags in a disarray).

     When our David Bradley Super Power Garden Tractor was new back in 1951, it would have come straight out of the catalog from Sears, Roebuck & Co. and had an astounding 14 attachments to its name, with over a dozen other attachments added to its fieldwork arsenal throughout the next decade.  Now it's 2015, and that 64-year-old antique is beginning to show its age.  I've had more than one relative raise their eyebrows at the notion we are attempting to "Farm with an antique!?"  But, it's so much more than 64 years of painted and manicured rust!  Toted as a time-saving and labor-saving device, the 1952 catalog boasted that it could "Do more work than seven men" with tools that were built like large farm implements.  Behind this metal beast was a 2 1/4 horse power, "super power" engine "for top performance and heavy work"; an engine that is now dwarfed by the power of the one that sits on our portable generator.

In 1952, this was a reasonable advertisement in the
Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s catalog.

     The original David Bradley garden tractor had been released in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression and the line continued through 1964.  During this time the country was gripped by depression, its eligible young men (and married men like my great grandfather) turned out to wartime service, and then came back with a boom to a multitude of veterans marrying, raising families and finding the stereotypical American Dream in suburbia with a small rancher surrounded by a manicured lawn inside a white picket fence with a happily barking dog and two children.  It was picture perfect America.

Ad for the David Bradley Tri-Cut in 1958

     As a twenty-first century woman, I can attest that a lot has changed since the apparently picture perfect 1950s when this garden tractor was considered the workhorse of the "sun-down farmers" suburban home.  Every advertisement for the garden tractor during the decade showed a man behind the handles tending to his vegetable garden.    Where's my tractor to play work on?  Apparently, I'd have to wait until 1958 when the David Bradley Tri-Cut (lawnmower) with a push button electric start and no clutch but "simple levers" came onto the scene with a woman on top of it.  Don't worry, I could "mow in comfort and safety" as the machine actually does "all the work."  Thank goodness it's 2015, and I might actually get the chance to play work with our Super Power too!

     As I previously mentioned, our David Bradley Super Power was showing its age.  We somehow managed to lug the thing home, not kill ourselves or the machine as we unloaded it from the back of a pick-up, and get it safely to the ground so we could fill it with some gasoline and new oil and test it out.  (According to the man that sold it to us, it has been running in the spring, and we had done a few quick movement tests before we bought it to show that seemingly what needed to be operating was.)  So in went the fluids.  The Mr. wrapped the pull-start cord around the motor, and gave it a yank as I held onto the handles while positioned on our sulky.  Nothing.  We tried again.  And again.  And again.  Still nothing.  Greeeaaatttt.

     That's when I realized that antique second-hand machinery from a catalog was actually a blessing.  Unlike the multitude of automobiles, trucks and machinery out there today that is computer-chipped, something from 1951 (when computers were the size of an entire room) isn't about to have a chip in it, so it becomes a lot easier to fix it yourself.  Sears, Roebuck & Co. made our lives even easier.  You see, every David Bradley Super Power Garden Tractor would have come from Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s catalog so it would have been shipped in parts packed inside wooden crates to the individual who purchased it.  That also means that it came with a 19-page instruction  manual on how to assemble, troubleshoot and run the machinery, and the engine itself came with a separate 19-page instruction manual as well detailing the same three things.  That computes to 38 pages of help for us!  Thanks to the multitude of David Bradley collectors out there a website was already created that had gathered all the manuals we needed, and if a manual tells you how to put something together, then you can be sure, you can also take it apart!

I'm still not sure what was easier, seeing something first
hand or looking at the two-dimensional sketches of a
machine, as both appeared quite foreign to me.

     Throughout the course of the next few weeks we got to try our hands at a variety of tasks, and the Mr. got to attempt to teach me what various parts were on the David Bradley.  There was the disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling a carburetor whose fuel reservoir looked like a heavy snow with the float cemented firmly in the middle of it... taking apart a stuck engaged ball lock clutch (thankfully we couldn't get it started our first time or I would have been in for a wild ride)... tracking down a replacement glass fuel bowl as ours was cracking on the outside and held together with wax, but still sound-ish on the inside... tracking down a replacement clutch facing as the one had rusted and broke into seemingly a zillion pieces... and finally replacing the original spark plug with a new one after we couldn't get it to spark (later to find out that the old one sparked anyways as there was a different issue.  Don't worry the original plug's back in the garden tractor now.)

     After spending hours and hours, we got what I once thought was a very rusty, non-functioning, over-priced lawn ornament running (with an additional two hours of help from our landlord's farmhand who appeared a little skeptical at first).  I have to admit, I was more than excited!  Finally our own piece of garden? farm? equipment working!  There was only one problem (other than the oil spewing into the air like Old Faithful and the gasoline running in a steady trickle down the edge of the engine like a slightly dried up Niagara Falls): once you made the needed adjustments it was either in constant motion or no motion at all.  Ugh.  Back to the shed it went, where we tore it apart even further this time, but at least with the satisfactory feeling that we saw it run... away down the driveway that is.

      A few days later, we pulled it back out of the shed into the driveway.  Apparently there was a ball bearing issue, or a gasoline issue, or a clutch issue, or a choke issue, or... we tinkered around with so much we're not quite sure what actually did it in the end.  There were no Niagara Falls.  No Old Faithful.  No perpetual motion.  Just a David Bradley Super Power with its fading paint looking a little sparkly after having who-knows how many quarts of oil and gasoline wiped from it.  The only thing left was to hook up the sulky and test it out!

     Surrounded by conservative Mennonite and Amish farmers, as well as small scale and industrialized farms with their tried-and-true farming techniques and implements, I once again saw us as the spectacle of the neighborhood as we each took a turn around the yard, proudly perched on the seat of the sulky behind a running David Bradley.

     Much to the Mr.'s dismay, I now see the operating David Bradley with a sulky as a riding tractor instead of a walk behind, meaning for him, it will be an even longer wait until he can get a real riding John Deere.  (For some reason, he disagrees...)