Tag Archives: Farm Tools

Basic Farm Lessons: Part 3

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  • Caring for tools: A couple of hours each year of rubbing linseed oil onto wooden handles will keep tools at the ready for years to come.
  • Obtaining tools: Take a few hours twice a year to attend a farm auction. It is an inexpensive way to pick up tools you did not know you needed—three dollars for a tool to remove bark from a log.
  • Your copy of the Rural Weekly Informer: Take the time to talk with the neighbors. Whether hearing of a death, of a birth or just plain old-fashioned gossip, this may well be your only chance to gain valuable knowledge of your community.
  • Never gossip … well, never call it gossip: Control the smirk on your face as you work the latest gossip into a conversation. It is more seemly and manly to assume a mature visage, as if imparting this bit of news for a valid reason.
  • Beating the heat: Wake when it is first light, go to the garden and pull weeds. Reentering the house, remove the annoyingly smug look on your face upon finding your partner sucking on her first cup of coffee.
  • Beating the heat #2: Starting mid-July, take a late afternoon walk in the woods with the dogs. It is a smart thing to do. The weather is too hot for work under the sun, and the chanterelles are beginning to carpet the ground under the mixed hardwoods.
  • Dog races: Let the dogs run unrestrained after the bolting deer. They won’t catch them, and the chase takes them far from the fawns hidden in the brush.
  • Sound show: Use an approaching thunderstorm as an excuse to sit and watch the horizon, listen to thunder and drink a cold beer.
  • Dinner plans: While sipping that beer, mentally review the larder. Dinner should be based on what you have provided.
  • Reaping what you sow: Perfectly marbled ribeyes from a steer raised out on your land, potatoes dug minutes before baking, juicy tomatoes still warm from the sun—a fine homegrown meal is well worth the time and sweat. It’s an essential farm lesson that needs learning only once.photo (5)
  • Farm flexibility: Company showing up unexpected requires only extra place settings and the ability to not fuss about quantities in a recipe. A handful of this and a dash to the garden are all that is needed when friends sit at the table.
  • The purpose: A missing lamb takes priority, dinner can wait. Because without first being a good husband to the animals in your charge, the table would be bare.
  • Light show: Before sleep, walk to the top of the hill. Admire the lightning strikes in the tops of thunderheads near the Kentucky border. Pat the heads of your dogs, and walk back home in the dark.

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Reading this weekend: God Against the Gods: the history of the war between monotheism and polytheism by Jonathan Kirsch. 

A Farm Toolbox: Fence Pliers

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Equipped with a beak like something evolved in the Mesozoic, the fence pliers are an essential tool in our toolbox. Never lonely for long, they are brought out several times a week. Even on a casual walk in the back forty to hunt rabbit, I’ll make room for a pair in a back pocket: sometimes, even the casual walk entails an unexpected spot of fence repair.

Fence Pliers in the Library, with....

Fence Pliers in the Library, with….

A classic tool designed for multiple uses, the fence pliers have beauty built into their design. The hinged head includes the beak on one side and a flat face on the other. The beak is perfect, using a hammer to strike the opposite face, for digging fence staples out of old wooden posts. The curvature allows the user to rock the pliers against the wood and ease out even the most stubborn of staples.

The toothed jaws are handy for crimping the wire in an old fence line. A crimp every couple of feet will tighten up the most sagging line. And that opposite end to the beak, the flat face, serves as a nifty hammer.

The handles, when pulled apart, expose a guillotine on the head that cuts barbed wire easily … if the user has purchased the correct pair. In the world of fence pliers, a standard cheap pair will cost about $12 and a lifetime of frustration. Splurge a little for a pair made by Diamond and you will thank me.

As our British cousins might say, fence pliers are a dead useful addition to any farm toolbox.

A Farm Toolbox: T-Post Jack

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Fencing, that constant companion of all that we do on our farm, is made easier with the metal T-post—which itself is made easier to put in with a T-post driver and easier still to remove with the post driver’s first cousin, the T-post jack.

All fences that go up will someday come down. After some years of using brute strength to pull old T-posts from the ground, often finding them bent and unusable, I spotted this beauty at a local farm supply store.

Proper jack position for removing a t-post.

Proper jack position for removing a t-post.

Brilliant: a jack, one of the oldest of man’s tools, designed to tackle one of his oldest chores, fence building. Among the simplest mechanical devices invented for applying force to an object, the T-post jack makes lifting and removing T-posts remarkably effective and easy. A simple downward popping action on the handle and posts emerge from the ground a few inches at a time, straight and reusable.

And my back, likewise, remains straight and reusable.

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Reading this weekend: Xenophon’s March: into the lair of the Persian lion by John Prevas. Terrific story that makes me feel shame about complaining about the daily walk to the mailbox.

A Farm Toolbox: A Spinning Jenny

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The spinning jenny is not a perfect tool. Nor is it a beautiful tool. But it is a tool that is a delight to use if you value your back as much as I value mine.

Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.

Our spinning jenny is admired by one and all.

 

The problem with starting farming at age 37 (15 years ago now) is that all of the common sense things you’ve learned to date are no longer useful. Things like the best walking route through the neighborhood to get to Bill Meyer stadium for an evening baseball game, or the best time to get a seat at Harold’s Kosher Deli on Saturday morning…. All were now useless. All new knowledge was hard won.

So for the first couple of years farming we built fencing the old-fashioned way: with sheer brute strength, mostly mine. I’d pick up a 50-pound-plus roll of barbed wire to chest height and begin walking backwards. Hundreds of yards of the stuff, up and down hills, through woods and across sunny pastures, lift, step back and back, until the strand was stretched.

One day, talking with an old farmer, I pondered that it sure would be nice if there were some tool you could use to unspool barbed wire. He suggested I purchase a spinning jenny. I did that afternoon, for about $10. And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

Fencing is still hard work. But a spinning jenny makes the job easier, and that is what a good tool is supposed to do.

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Reading this weekend: Conspirata by Robert Harris. The second of his historical novels on the life of Cicero. 

A Farm Toolbox: a Dutch hoe

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It may sound like the start to a naughty joke, but my life really did improve when I brought home that Dutch hoe.

It has a six-foot-long ash handle extended with an eight-inch steel shank, and a half-moon hoe on the end. It has an elegant form and is effective when working through soils with good tilth. I can weed the garden for an hour without straining my back.

A half-moon Dutch hoe

A half-moon Dutch hoe

 

The traditional style American hoe requires a rigorous up and down chopping that wears out the lower back and arms. Definitely useful with heavier soils. But for a garden where the soil has been improved with amendments and is easily worked, the half-moon hoe is a dream. The extra-length handle allows my 6-2 frame to stand upright. The cutting blade is angled so that with a motion like sweeping a broom I can cut through the soil and weeds.

The Dutch hoe is made by DeWit in Holland, and I purchased mine at a farmer’s conference a decade back in Chattanooga. A quick rub of linseed oil to the handle every few months and a quick sharpening after each use and this hoe should easily outlast me and my back.

I have a variety of hoes to choose from depending on the task at hand. The half-moon is the only one that is a pleasure to use.

My beautiful hoe.