Goodbye FOD

Something is missing from the landscape of our farm. For FOD has gone, moved to a new home. As much as I liked the idea of having a tractor, FOD was just too big and cumbersome a beast for my needs. He was just sitting forlornly outside, gradually getting rustier.
In fact, he had become something of a liability. On the infrequent occasions when he was moved his battery would always have gone flat. His front arms had sunk to the ground, preventing him moving and his only use for the last year or so was as a shelter for the sheep and as an occasional shelter from the rain if I got caught out in the open.

So when somebody offered to take him off my hands, it solved a bit of a problem. Four blokes turned up with a spare battery and set about getting FOD started up and moving. There's no way I could have done this myself. I was anxious that the bucket, which weighs a ton, went with him too, but this had been taken off and left in the spare veg patch quite some time ago.
I did not have high hopes of anybody managing to drive the tractor across the sodden soil far enough to retrieve the bucket, but it did just about make it. The job of manhandling machine and bucket into the correct position was not an easy one and required muscle, brute force, a lot of levering courtesy of a couple of large wooden posts and a fair bit of luck.
But eventually the pins were in place, which made FOD even more cumbersome to steer and even heavier to sink into the mud.

But eventually he was out and ready to go.

Gerry - look carefully, he's seated in the small bucket on the front - couldn't resist one final ride.
Then FOD was off on his longest journey for quite some time. Good job it was on country roads.

And there goes my dream of taking him out onto a busy road and holding up all the traffic!

 

Dejected in the Meadow

Monday 17th September 2012
More fine weather

Well, I like to think of it as a meadow, but its really just ungrazed grassland and this year it's been taken over by sow thistles. Initially growing in clear lines, which I've since learned are a sign of ancient ridges, it has slowly spread, encouraged by this year's mega conditions for weeds.

One day it will be a meadow, but at the moment it's the last part of my 5 acre plot which remains slightly untamed.
Last year Don cut back the long grass for me early in the year and it was alive with bees and butterflies during the summer. So my plan was to get it cut and under control, then to keep it short, cutting a few times during the year, for the next year or two to get rid of the taller weeds and encourage a thicker sward.

So it was with some excitement and a great sense of anticipation that I climbed up into the tractor this fine Monday morning and went for a spin around the tracks in the meadow. The Fod, as my tractor is known, is very heavy on the steering but I basically had this great, chugging machine under control most of the time!

This was the first time I'd driven the tractor on my own.

Buoyed up by this, I continued with my plan and, with a lot of help from Don, hitched up his cutter to the tractor and began to scythe my way through the jungle of overgrown grass and thistles. In a few hours time it would all be chopped down and a big job would be out of the way. I had a real sense of achievement. My fear of machinery would be one step closer to being overcome and I would be confident and independent enough to manage my meadow on my own.

Until...


As I looked at the machinery behind me, I noticed smoke! Quite a bit of it.
Basically the sow thistle stems had jammed up in the machinery. Don came over to extricate them and I carried on, in slightly wiggledy lines but still crudely getting the job done. A couple of times I had to stop and pull out more sow thistle stems, but if I could just get it done the once and keep on top of it then things could only get easier in the future.

But then, while cutting a fairly straightforward strip of grass, more smoke. This didn't seem quite right and when I lifted the cutter, there, hanging out, was a broken rubber belt.

One broken piece of machinery.

 

My heart sank there and then. Not only would I not get the job done now, but I had broken Don's machinery and I felt awful about it. I sheepishly towed the rig back and knocked on Don's door, broken belt in hand. He could not have been nicer about it, but I still felt totally dejected.

Just as I was really starting to feel like I was getting on top of everything for the first time, this goes and happens.
Just two more hours and the job would have been done. Now I would be faced with a whole autumn and winter of pulling oversized weeds before I could have another bash at the grass in the spring.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Don had had his meadow
cut and baled by a local farmer.
This is what mine should be looking like.

I'm normally pretty optimistic about things and don't shirk a job, however big. But right now was one of those moments when I felt totally deflated. There's been a good few of them in our couple of years here, but they've been more than compensated for by other things and I'm stoical enough to remember this when things go wrong.

Anyway, thank you for indulging me this one miserable post. Tomorrow I'll bounce back. I always do.

The Taming of the Fod.

This is why we do it.

Saturday 11th August 2012
No comment necessary

The Fod
Today was a very, very good day. And not just because Mo Farah won the 5000m gold medal.
I have mentioned previously my innate fear of machines. Well, in some of my pictures you will have noticed an old blue and white tractor. It's a Fod. I think it was once a Ford.
You may also have noticed that it is always in the same place. Well not any more.

With Don's help we sorted out the battery and started up the engine. That was Plan A.
Plan B involved Sue and Don taking the ignition unit, complete with snapped off old key still inside, to a local agricultural merchants to fix / replace!
Eventually, Sue managed to do a twenty-four point turn to face the tractor the other way. She finds the steering rather heavy!

Today it was my turn to learn to drive the Fod. I was not worried by its size, the awkwardness of the steering or even the noise. No, for me the major worry was that it has too many pedals, one of them being a clutch pedal. In my limited experience of driving a manual gearbox car, my left and right feet have totally refused to work together. Being tall, I think they are too far away from my brain. The signals get confused and my brain blanks. Invariably the car stalls and people behind me start getting impatient!

But today a very helpful friend came round to teach me to tame the Fod. I was immediately pleased to find out that two of the pedals are both brakes and that the accelerator is a lever by the steering column. This was fantastic news, since it meant that my two feet would not need to communicate with each other!

In no time at all I had it mastered. Well, at least backwards, forwards, start and stop.

I now have plans to purchase various attachments and to build Fod a shelter, but that's a job for autumn or winter.

For now, Fod and I shall be transforming the meadow and I will no longer be quite so reliant on other people.
I would do it tomorrow, since early next week looks like rain, but I have an even  more exciting enterprise to attend to - remember I mentioned Cayuga ducks?