Month: September 2016

Problems

Sometimes life is a series of unfortunate incidents. Somehow that seems to be our life more often than not. I often laugh such things off. Who else could these incredibly crazy things happen to all the time but us.

The excavator wouldn’t start and we concluded it was a dead battery. It took days to get the excavator back up and running. I was behind on my krater digging plans, but I had the will to catch up. Four kraters dug, 8 more to go. I could do this.

Then the front loader began making an awful sound and blowing colored smoke. I took some video and took it to the tractor dealership. There were several suggested possibilities and we began ticking through the list. The tractor is now not making that horrible klunking noise. Hopefully the problem was nothing more than water in the line. If it starts making the noise during our big test run tomorrow than we are looking at a new engine. An engine so expensive we could buy another car. Now I’m behind again.

The weather is changing, I am not going to catch up before my window closes. Plans are going to need to be modified. Disappointment fills me near to bursting. I will rally. Things will be ok. The trees will get planted as they always do.

Please let the tractor be ok!

Digging Kraters- What to do with all that dirt

Digging Kraters- what to do with all that dirt

A big factor to consider when doing dramatic earth works is what you are going to do with all of the dirt, wood, etc you create by doing it. If you are clearing trees to create a silvapasture, do you have a plan for those cleared? Hugukulture beds to create? When digging 35 acres worth of kraters around three feet deep that is a lot of dirt excavated out. What can you do with so much dirt?

That largely depends on the situation you are in and what kind of dirt you are excavating out. We have various types of earth being excavated from our kraters at the moment and three methods of dealing with them.

Pond Clay

The black earth we excavate out is piled up and moved to the area where our natural swimming pond is being made as it is a great water holding clay. We appear to have more of this clay than I expected so perhaps we’ll be building a few more ponds in the future.

Gravel

The gravel we excavate out is piled up and moved to our road and drive way which are in deplorable condition. I don’t know if we’ll ever dig up enough of this to fill our need.

Everything Else

Everything else is piled in one big pile and moved to our dam site. We have been building up the dam for awhile now but it has a long way to go before it will be sufficient to hold the amount of water we desire.

 

The top soil is scraped off before hand and piled up to be put back into the krater when excavation is complete.

 

I hope this look into our earth moving practices helps.