YouTube removed this one so its on the FB Page It does have some strong language in my rant in the latter part of it. The One on FB actually has me driving the tractor into the pond and pulling mud out LOL and Rant about Shit Birds. Can't believe FB didn't Censor it and YT did. I do have pretty significant speech impediment but can keep it under control fairly well with a lot of thought about it. Reason I don't talk in most of my videos or to anyone on the phone Link on a log chain broke a long time ago and I caught the whole chain on the right cheek and jaw and half to the throat, LOL the voice never worked right again after that with out a lot of effort. Thus my stopping sometime mid sentence and the long pauses between thoughts becoming words. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1222229641806765 YouTube did not find this one to be offensive https://youtu.be/QXWVUzPorM8
Really nice little spread ya got there Mr Krap . Yea , I thought I seen a little spike on one of them deers . I don't blame ya ,, that's a nice peaceful little spot ya got there by your ponds ,, it wouldn't take much to get used to that . Congrats to ya ,, lookin good .
Those two deer were funny they came burning out of the cornfield at a dead run to the edge of the mud and stood there sniffing ang and hoofing it. I knew as soon as I got off of the tractor to get the camera to catch them on it they would haul ass. They did not disappoint. They are both Bucks one a little year old spike buck and the other older and looks like maybe six points. I will go up on Mount Krap some evening and get the big racked bucks on video. Have irregular that has been around a long time, year after year he looks like he is walking around with a pair of crab apple trees all knotted together on top of his head. The next biggest is a solid near perfect 12 pointer (Varies Year to year) but he always puts on a wide rack a half dozen or so 8-10 points that come and go. Yesterday morning there were at least 50 turkeys in the hay field and on the lake dam chasing grasshoppers. LOL the big Toms might be boss but they are not very graceful in the hopper chasing. A couple of black bears have stopped for a drink and roll over at the lake spillway and moved on to the East in a straight line. Guess they came from MO and are heading to Indiana. The Old Cougar with half a tail crosses the dam every 22 days like clockwork. A couple of Bobcats visit the lake almost every morning at sunrise and get a drink and disappear back in to the West Woods. Eagles, Hawks, Great Horned Owls and even had a Osprey nest in the dead Red Oak behind the tractor this year. (Why I didn't cut the Red Oak down as planned) . Next year I can start keeping Bluegill and Green Sunfish for the frying pan. At the Rate the bass are growing a few of the bigger ones may spawn next year. Cool weather has triggered their gorging instinct and they are eating everything that will fit in their mouths before winter arrives. I expect all of them that I stocked will be well over 2.5 pounds this time next year but still no keeping the bass until 2026, I want them well established and spawning heavy before I start broiling their fillets. Red Ear are doing good, White Crappie are a total wild card I did not even know I had until I started catching fingerlings in the minnow traps. Not worried about the crappie getting out of control, they seem to be the Bass, Green Sunfish and Bigger bluegills favorite snack. Can take or leave the Green Sunfish...... The Birds decided I would take them LOL. Had a blast catching the bigger ones with a ultralight spinning set up over the summer. The rip rap piles by shore and the lake spillway rip rap all have breeding populations of fat head minnows gifted to me by the birds. The bigger fastest growing bass pretty much move from rip rap to rip rap stalking the fat heads. I only stocked 450 LMB in the Lake, 50 in the little pond and 100 in the big pond. At a $1.35 per they get expensive fast. Hatchery I got them from is becoming very well known for their superior bluegill and bass genetics. So the 1000 bluegill I stocked in the lake, 500 in the little pond and 1000 in the big pond should improve the bluegill gifted by the birds. Yep when I looked at first 40 acres in 2007 I was like THIS IS THE PLACE! Was seeing ponds and a lake back then among all of the other potential this place had. The first thing every visitor has noted right off the bat is how quiet and peaceful it is here...... other than all of the Nature Noise. There are times I would like to murder every Cicada on the years they are thick. It has everything now to be 100% self sustainable...... If I ever get around to building the frame and putting the pallets of solar panels together into a working array. Nothing difficult about putting it all together and into the combiner boxes and into the charge controller to the battery bank and out through the inverter. Just boring , tedious, time consuming work. I look at the stacks of angle iron for the frames and the 150 panels and lose all motivation to start putting all together. I really should since the electric is not getting any cheaper per KW. I figured the house and other buildings at needing 30kw so over sized it to 60KW with a 10k AH battery bank. Still can't grow coffee, tea or sugar cane here so I will never be 100% independent unless I give up those three things. I have a contract with my Amish Friend for a pair of Percheron Foals when they are ready next year, he is doing the basic driving, pulling and riding training, all I will have to do is finish them and refine the training to dead broke dependable, a very easy task with the highly intelligent and eager to please Percheron Breed. Still have my buckboard and ground driven hay equipment and saddles in a barn. Seems to me a pair of big draft horses that are ridable are a good investment for my situation at this point in history. Why burn diesel when I can burn pasture, hay and oats. KInd of wish I had not sold all of my horses and mules but on the other hand am glad. LOL I had way too many and just didn't have the time in a day to do everything and take care of them and keep them up to speed..... and did I really need 11 horses, 4 mules and 3 Mammoth Jacks hehe. Mammoth Jacks on my Percheron mares made some real big and sturdy Mules back then. Time now days is a lot less important than it was in say 2020. A whole lot less stress in my life and I find everything moving at a slower less hectic pace working for myself instead everyone else. Yep Life is GREAT here!
Obviously, you're an expert with a box blade. I haven't used one yet but next year/season will be my first attempt with one. Did you have rains or what caused this? Is this something you will have to do constantly over time? Maybe this was something you left until now to finish up as I thought the lakes/ponds were finished. Damn that's a pretty place! EDIT: And yes, I would have got the tractor stuck! LOL!
I just ran out of time in 2022 to get the North arm of the pond done. I didn't get anything scraped out in the tail. Not horrible when the pond is full but it has been a exceptionally dry spring and summer so the water level is down 2' 8" from the full mark. So it was a good opportunity to build the land bridge across the spot between the woods and the main tail water. The full water line is at the top of that strip on the left that I scraped. This pic is before I started backing down into the water and pulling mud out up on to that strip. I dug that hole at the end out another 2' deeper before the seepage made it too soft to risk even backing in to it. In the video you can see that I am very careful not to go off the edge of that drop off. When the fall rains come and run off happens it will fill back up and flood a couple hundred feet back into the woods through the 15" pipe under the land bridge. It is done in the sense that it holds water and even down 2.5 feet is a good size surface area of water. It is not done in the sense that I will forever be finding and working on tweaks to make it better. I pulled A LOT of top soil and sub soil mud out of it yesterday and added 8" to 12" of depth to it. There was way too much shallow water that was only 4-6 inches deep along the edges. Like the shallow flats from the North Corner of the dam basically to the land bridge. Shallow water heats up and evaporates off a lot faster than even 1' deep water does. So I am not only adding depth, I am greatly slowing evaporation in the future. The trick to working a box blade in the water and not getting stuck is to start on the edge and pull the soft stuff out down to the hard pack virgin clay under the mucky stuff. Little wheel compact and sub compact tractors just don't work for this. The tires just are not big enough to get the traction needed. The R14 tires that everyone is going goo goo ga ga over now days DO NOT WORK FOR THIS, the R4 Big Ag Bar Tires are the right tires for this work, they bite in and shed the mud out. The R14s just turn into mud packed racing slicks in this environment. I have a set of R14s for the M5660 and I will give them a lot of credit where they shine. On dry land they have 4X better traction and pulling ability than the R4 Ag tires. Anyway if you start trying to pull 10' off the bank you are just going to get stuck fast, if you start chewing into it on the edge and work your way out to 10' off the bank you are generally going to be fine as you have that hard virgin clay under the tires that is sold enough to hold the tractor bu soft enough to let the bars bite in. The real secret is to keep it geared low and not let the back tires spin to much. You can dig holes real fast in that stuff with spinning back tires that you won't be able to drive out of. Before I started the video, I had already pulled most of the soft mud out. Only the area with the vegetation was still 8-12 inch deep soft stuff. In some of the pulls you can see the strips of hard clay curling up out of the box blade. I am just pulling up strips of hard packed gray clay in most of the video. Gotta remember in that 6' box I am pulling 2000 pounds of wet clay and that ripper shanks are tearing up underneath for the next pull. I am also pulling the weight of the water in front of the box. I was either running in Low 1st or 2nd gear to minimize the rear wheel spinning. Low 3rd gear is to fast and the wheels break traction and spin way to easy in 3rd. Can't go any deeper than half way up the rear tires. The engine exhaust on the front of the tractor is a few inches higher than the half way up the back tire mark. You never want the exhaust or air intake under the water It got to where the bottom was solid enough that I finished up just driving back and forth across pulling until I was getting at the 2.5 feet half way up the back tires point. in the center. I could have switched to Oliver and kept going deeper as his straight pipe is high on the engine and comes out the top. LOL can pretty much run Oliver with water in the seat. Drawback is Oliver is 2wd and the 4 wheel drive of the Kubota is far superior here. I should never have to do this again in my lifetime. 40-50 years from now it may need the silt pulled out but that will be Mini Me's Problem not mine And if all of the stuff I am doing to catch and trap silt in the run off works as intended it may be 100 years or more before it needs cleaned up. LOL I did box blade this very unhappy guy out yesterday. I think he wanted to bite me
Found a pic from 4 weeks ago of the North Arm Tail before I started pulling mud and changing things. Water was getting low then lost a lot to evaporation and no significant rain. Have had several 1/2 to 1 inch rains but none of them made any run off that got even close to making it to the lake and ponds. Crops and Trees soaked it up as fast as it came down. Very dry spring and a even more dry summer does not = good pond water levels LOL.
I spent a couple of hours yesterday pulling some more muddy clay out and making the raised point bigger. All of the mud that was on that shoreline bare spot is what I am standing on taking the picture. It was enough to raise a 40x20 area up. One of the most powerful and under utilized features of box blades is the back side and back blade. In Reverse it turns your tractor in to a mini bulldozer. You can do the math to figure out how much went into raising a 40x20 area up a average of 3' high. After I got all of that cleaned up along the shoreline, I pulled a lot more out and farther up to Raise the area along the woods to the land bridge up a little better and a foot. I am going to spend a few hours this evening scraping that bare spot down to even with the current water line and that will make that area 16-18 inches deep when or LOL IF the rains come Still need to scrape out and clean up the end. When the pond is full again, the high water mark is at the top of the 15" culvert in the center of the land bridge. I did some mud pulling around the South Arm last night. I want to raise the South Side of the point up and make the slope a little more gentle for mowing purposes. Like the North arm when the pond is full the water floods back in to the woods about 200' at about a foot deep down to 4" deep at the tip of the tail. It has just been a extremely dry spring and summer here. I measured the high water rod yesterday and the water line is now 3' 1" lower than the full mark. So if you picture the water having 37" more water on top of what is there now you get a picture of just how hard the evaporation has been on it. I really can't complain about this dry year, the water only being 8" to a foot deep in the arms has given me the opportunity to add more depth to areas that were to shallow and add more depth to areas that were running 3-5 feet deep when full. I can't just drive the tractor back and forth across the South arm like I did in the North Arm. In the center running out past the little island...... I cut a trench 12' wide and 8' deep. One does not want to even get a tire over the edge of that cliff. That would require a call to my friend Matt and saying hey Can you bring the big Cat challenger and pull me out with the tracks. In my original plan for ponds and lakes flooding back into the woods was NOT part of the plan. The Big pond was not even a part of the original plan. The big pond came about last year because I had 3 more Mount Kraps and needed to do something with all of that dirt. So I mined out the hole that is the little pond now for the 85% Gold clay to build the Key and core of the big pond dam and pulled the 3 unwanted mount kraps onto the back side of the dam core and scraped the water side dam slope on. The Big Pond dam is 450' across the base and 36 feet wide on the top and 500 feet long. LOL Kubota should be paying me to make videos showing what can be done with their little 57hp M series Utility Tractors The little trees in the picture above are Persimmon trees I planted 6 years ago from little seedlings. This is the first year that they have made any significant amount of persimmons. Hands down the best selling product I have ever had are the persimmon jellies. We were making 5,000 pints every late fall after the first hard frost turned the tannin into sweet sugary stuff. I invented a machine that separated the seeds and skins from the pulp and juice. Nothing on the market could survive the persimmon seeds going through them lol they totally destroyed the tomato strainer spiral with the pumpkin seed screen on. So I tinkered together one using a old medium size Lem Meat grinder and found a cast spiral and modified it to work on the Lem and tinkered together a stainless screen with enough space to let the hard persimmon seeds pass through and still sent the pulp and juice through the holes. Anyway I ended up with 5 gallon buckets full of skins and seeds. I just dumped them on the edge of the woods. Every spring a billion little persimmon seedling would pop up out of the pile where I dumped the buckets. Sooooo I grabbed 20 of the seedlings and planted on the edge of the woods in the low spot where they could tap in to plenty of ground water and had rich soil to grow in. Out of the twenty 6 survived and 6 years later here is where they are. The Big Persimmon grove over on the Northwest side has 100 persimmon trees some 40 feet tall and a whole lot bigger than these young ones. SO a unintended consequence of build the big pond is that it floods and leaves my new persimmon grove in better than a foot of standing water. They won't live with their trunks in standing water for more than a couple of years. So one of the pond tweaks I need to do is raising up the ground around them 10' out from them to keep the standing water off of their trunks. If these were just the usual Native Persimmons I would have already pushed them out and cleared the area. They are Native Persimmons but these little trees make the biggest native persimmons I have ever seen and the absolute sweetest Native or Asian ones I have ever eaten. I think it comes down to the super rich soil there and the easy access to the ground water under the soil....... Just perfect persimmon conditions. The Persimmons Jellies are one of the few things I still make a lot of and sell. Hot Jalapeno, Rose Hip, Honeysuckle, Crab Apple, Mint, Cinnamon and spice and just plain straight Persimmon. LOL I am usually completely sold out by Christmas, the customers don't buy it by the jar they come and buy it 4-8 cases at a time at $5 per pint or $4.50 per by the case and only having $1 into each pint it is a nice little chunk of late fall and early winter bonus money and I enjoy the long process of making the stuff. And then there is the Fact that I just love eating persimmons. What I find interesting is that most of the customers use the jelly as Pork, Poultry and Lamb Glazes. My Amish Friend John and his Wife have been hard on me for years to show them how to make it. His wife makes a persimmon jelly that is very good but nothing even close to mine. Not much in the way of Persimmon Jelly out there available to buy. The secret to mine is the process it takes 2 weeks from straining to hearing the jars pop as they seal. After I do the final straining I am left with a lot of pulp, that is not wasted it gets cooked down with a bit of cinnamon and turned into Persimmon Butter that sells out as fast as the Jellies at $3.50 per half pint. I would love to say I invented the unique process for making the stuff but that process goes back more generations in my family than I will ever know for sure. I just improved the process with seed and skin separation part. My Grandma taught it to me by doing it with her back in the 70s and 80s. Just like my Grandpa taught me how to work a poor mans bull dozer (Box Blade) LOL tells you once puts on the tractor and puts you to work yelling pointers at you as you go. World of difference in his Ford 8N and the Kubota M5660. I still pull his 8N out of the shed now and then for mowing, discing and plowing. Very good old tractors the Ford Ns are, Also affordable and easy to restore. A good Choice for a new homestead/farmstead Not wanting to go eyeball deep into debt with a $40,000-$100,000 new tractor. That old trip bucket on Grandpa's will hurt or kill you in a heart beat is you don't have a high level of respect for it! I Still need to get the chicken wire roof on it. But my personal Chicken Yard and Henhouse finally has Chickens in it! I pulled 50 of the pullets from the mess for my own eggs. I ended up trading 450 of the pullets for 4 hair sheep with John. He had too many sheep and not enough Chickens LOL I know what he is going to do...... He is going to keep some of the pullets for himself and take the rest to the small animal auction Fair enough and a fairly equal value trade. I love BARTER Always someone that wants what you have and they have something that you want. He ended up with a bunch of Half Grown RK Bargain Bin pullets and I ended up with a Ram and 3 ewes. I have been wanting to get some hair sheep for a while, after spending a good bit of time with his herd, I concluded that Hair Sheep are nowhere near as offensive as Goats What ever hatchery RK is getting their chicks from now days SUCKs at Sexing. 25% of the Bargain Bin Pullets I bought are growing up to be Roosters LOL. Which is GOOD for me as I would buy straight run over pullets every time. I kept 2 Rhose Island Red Rooster and 2 Buff Orp Roosters out of the mix. I can maintain or grow the flock numbers well into the future. The Roosters will go into their own pen when these guys start reaching sexual maturity and laying eggs. I am not into the fertilized egg thang The Hatchery Sucking at Sexing is BAD for people that don't want or can't have Roosters. A hatchery Like Cackle runs about 5% off on their sexing. Looking for what amounts to a little pimple on a chicks but takes some skill and it to be expected that a few cocks will get through. Anyway I pick out a couple of each Buff and RR hens that are broody and mate the RR Roosters to the Buff Hens and the Buff Roosters to the RR Hens. That cross makes a meatier bird for broilers and a very good hen for laying. I am eventually going to break down and get some Barred Rock Hens to breed with the RR Rosters to make black sexlinks. When I was selling dressed and bagged broilers everyone wanted the 5-6 pound dressed Cornish Cross meat birds. I personally don't like eating the Cornish Crosses, I do prefer the old school heavy heritage breeds and crosses between them...... that are more in the 2.5 - 3 pound dressed and bagged range. Bigger is not always better and very often Less is More And yep there are 50 half grown chickens standing there. We use A LOT of Eggs and I make most of Poo and PoPs Dog Food that will once again be heavy on eggs and well when the hens get old and spent they boil off great to add meaty protein to the girls diet. Very little of anything gets wasted here, it is either Composted, Eaten or recycled.
I knew it was going to happened eventually and today was the day. Pulling and Pushing puts a lot of strain and fatigue on the best of metal and King Klutter is very far from the best of metal I am not going to complain even a little bit about the King Klutter 6' box blade, it worked much better than I ever expected it to. I honestly expected to it to bend or rips before I got the top soild scraped out of the lake bed. It went on through that and did a lot of other big jobs that should have bent it in half. I get bids on my jobs from various contractor friends just get a idea of the value of the work I am doing now days. This $1100 box blade did $90,500 worth of work since June of 2022, I call that a damned good return on investment. King Klutter call their 6' box blade a heavy duty one...... I call it a medium duty one. Anyway their 4' 5' and 6' Box Blades get my full stamp of approval. They all will last a average property owner a lifetime. I called my local Kubota/Landpride dealership a bit ago to see if there ever got any of the oddball size 8' wide, deep moldboard, 3pt, actually really heavy duty box blades in and how much financial pain getting one was going cause me. Out of all of their dealerships they have exactly one at their dealership way down in Alabama at theor dealership on the gulf coast. It will be transferred here and start its trip this afternoon and arrive Friday Afternoon. Brand New and still in the original shipping crate for $2575. 8' wide are oddballs because they are designed to work on the M5660 through the M7060s or the 57-71hp tractors. The Bigger Kubotas are better suited to 10'+ Pull Behind Box blades and the Smaller Tractors like the L Series are better suited to the 5'-7' box blades and most M series owners either run a 7' or bump up to the 10' pull types. I like the 8's they are big enough to move 1.5 tons and not flinch but small enough to still be able to maneuver in fairly tight spots. They are also more solid than the 10' models 2' makes a lot of difference in the leverage to the center. The 6' King Klutter? I will cut the whole top 3pt part off, heat it up orange hot and beat it back into shape. Cut that weak square tube on the back off totally and replace it with 2" angle iron. And weld angle iron onto the tops plates to reinforce them. And probably bore through and bolt more angle or U iron un the bottom. Once something bends from metal fatigue and is heated up and bent back into shape it will never be as strong as it was before the bend. Changing the Square Tube and Beefing the top up with 1/8th inch angle will make it stronger than it was before the bend. But that will wait until winter, I have way to much to wrap up in the next couple of weeks and really needed to stop playing in the dirt and mud anyway to get those things done.
