STILL Clearing Out the Pasture

April 04, 2019

STILL Clearing Out the Pasture

When I showed up this morning at 9:15, I saw this. I was going to give the pigs their de-worming pellets, but I just couldn't do it quite yet. They were fast asleep! I LOVE watching them sleep. They snore, they smile, they move around on top of each other. It's quite hilarious.

Slumber party!

The others all stretched out in a long parallel line!

Are they not the cutest?! Between the photo above this one and this one, one pig moved from the other pile to this one. He just went over and laid on top! This is what they do! The rest grunt and squeal and express their dismay, but they are too lazy to move!

Last week I had made a For Sale post about large landscaping rocks that I was offering for free if the "buyer" would pick up. A gentleman responded (as did several others), but we had to postpone the activity due to rain. Well, we both concluded that today was dry enough, so we set an appointment for 9:30 A.M.

He brought a compact tractor with a front-loader and went right to work. That little 28-HP tractor was quite the workhorse!!! He said he bought it 10 years ago and just loves it. It made quick work of those stones. It was impressive!

That little tractor took those big stones with ease!

The rocks are loaded!

I was happy to see more items leave the pasture!!! I just love the thought of a clean pasture! We have already removed 1300 pounds of iron, several posts, and these rocks. I have the numerous pieces of large concrete (even discovered a couple more this morning when he was loading the rocks), two vinyl-clad wooden posts, small broken concrete we found underneath the rocks, and the telephone poles.

He loaded down that truck and trailer so much! Way too much, if you ask me! His jack was scraping the ground as he drove away! Oh, well, they are GONE!!!

He even took a few loads of sand...and barely made a dent!

Even with the rocks gone, the pasture still looks like a mess!!! You just can't see clean when it's still dirty. I KNOW that I am making progress, but I want it all gone!!! Unfortunately, the concrete removal is going to cost me money.

Underneath all those rocks was small pieces of broken concrete! I'll have to get rid of these when I get rid of the big pieces.

A surprise mess underneath the large rocks. So much more to clean up!

I decided to make today a pasture clean-up day. My goal was to get the burn pile removed. That would prove to be an all-day chore. The burn pile is a mess of...everything. On top I noticed several pieces of metal (paper clips, nails, staples, springs, and on and on). It's obvious this was just a catch-all pile for burning. But it's also obvious that the previous owner tried to burn hay. And the trick to burning hay is to BREAK IT UP before burning. Seriously, if you just throw a hay bale into a fire, it won't burn all the way through. The outside will burn, but the inside will not. It's just too densely-packed.

The messy burn pile covered with ash, metal, and lots and lots of hay. It's in the MIDDLE of the pasture!

It's a mess.

So I was facing a very large densely-packed mess of lots and lots of hay bales. LOTS. It was back-breaking work. The more I dug, the more I found! I originally tried to burn the flecks that I found. I burned two hay bales from last week that I had dragged out of the hayloft and into the pasture. Unfortunately, they received 1-2 inches of rain on them, so they weren't the best. But I would do my best to spread the wet flecks from the burn pile out to dry over the fire I had started on the telephone poles, but that was just slow-going. The hay was just too wet from the burn pile.

Heavy wet flecks were pulled out.

They were too wet to really burn. My fire wasn't doing so well this morning.

A huge mess of hay twine pulled from the muck pile.

I took the magnet out there and pulled out lots of nails and other various metal.

So then I decided to just spread it around the pasture. That meant a lot of walking around and flinging. And these pieces were so heavy!!! I would stab the pile, pull out a moldy, wet, messy fleck and try to fling it off my pitch fork. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. It was just muck. Heavy muck. And it reeked of manure, too. It was likely just wet hay, but it smelled!

I took several breaks and tended to the fire. The pigs were finally waking up and moving about in the pasture. They had slept all morning!!! But these ding-dongs would root next to the telephone poles. Right next to the flame! Of course, they would get a singe and fly off! But this happened over and over! Ding-dongs!

The chickens have made the farm their home. Here they are comfortable sitting after a long walk around the fenced pasture. They forage together.

I headed to Dad's for a quick lunch.

Once back at the farmstead, I really went after the burn pile. This morning was sooooooo slow. But I had a goal of getting that thing leveled. The deeper I went into the pile, though, the messier and heavier and wetter it got. But I was determined. Stab, lift, lift harder, heave. I slowly saw the pile going down. C'mon, Andy, get this pile gone by tonight!

I would take more breaks with the pigs. With the sun finally starting to break through a bit, they were out just loving the pasture. I LOVE that these guys choose to root instead of eat the feed. I mean, pigs will be pigs! They just stick their snouts in the mud for hours, looking for those delicious worms!

The pigs' favorite daytime activity: rooting for morsels in the mud!

This black bag was found by the pigs. I lifted it out of the mud.

As pigs root, they actually help you clean your pasture! They pull up everything six inches from the surface. I've found wood, metal, bricks, stones, twine, wrappers, and this mess of plastic. It was all buried, likely for years!

The pigs have helped me clean up the south side of the barn. They loosen up bricks and wooden posts and everything else!

My favorite (the biggest black one) is about the friendliest pig ever. If he sees me, he comes running towards me and then starts grunting right before he gets to me. He LOVES to be pet behind the ears. The others run off if I do that, but he just loves it. If I leave the pasture, he sometimes follows along the fence! He's great.

I finally flung the last heavy mess of straw or hay or whatever from the bottom of the burn pile. It was soooooo wet. I get the impression that either this was a hole that was tried to be filled with hay, or this was a feedlot where they just stacked hay and then tried to burn it when they moved. Whatever the case, the stuff at the bottom is THICK. And wet.

The burn pile has been reduced to a mess of wet chunks of straw.

The burn pile has been leveled. I plan to till all of this up to make it break down to dirt easier.

I want to till it all up and try to break it down, because the pieces of straw or hay are actually quite intact. The middle had rotted so bad that it broke up when you flung it. But the bottom was just SATURATED straw. So heavy.

A good tilling a few times over should break up most of it and made great soil!!! If only I could get grass out here, this could be a beautiful pasture!!!

I was happy to notice that this afternoon the telephone poles really started catching fire. I was able to get them up on top of each other, so they should burn mostly through. I'll probably have to set them back on each other another day for one last burn, but this afternoon's burn should do 80% of the poles. That's great! I had several!

In other news, I've got a pretty big problem with my homemade waterer. It leaks. It leaks out of our "bad" hole that we drilled. The waterer was EMPTY this morning! Not good. The pigs didn't like it. I could tell. I'll have to make a new one.

The waterer leaks out...and leaves a mess while doing it.

I've got a water leak problem.

Around 4:00 P.M., I decided to do something that I wanted to do a couple of weeks ago. I lit fires to the 4.8 acres in front of the house!!! I lit and lit and lit. After I lit the first few, I knew I was committed, but as I walked that 5 acres, I was thinking, "Wow, this is bigger than I thought!" It's a long walk to the street! But I lit the grass field to get rid of last year's dead cover. The grass took immediately, and I filled the sky with smoke. It was beautiful.

My neighbors probably hated me.

I filled the sky with smoke.

It burned for probably an hour or slightly more. But it really made the field look clean. It's ready for grass now! In two weeks, this will all be green.