Mr Skippy the engineer… Again…

So, I’ve recently been doing some overhaul/repair work on bits of farm machinery that have been lying around the place since the last ice age. Most of the work is simply trying to get old imperial bolts off, and replacing them with metric, because I do love metric and those freaking 16ths and stupid fractions of inches were annoying me. I am not a fan of imperial, stupid measuring system.

This was my first one, a cultivator thingy. I initially had to weld one of the supports that goes to the top link back in place, but the only welding experience I’ve got is some introduction stuff from when I did Aerospace… Long time ago… So I took it up to the Farm Workshop and let them weld it on. Next I had to thin out the tines a bit, giving the current 3 at the front, centre and in line with the tyres, two in the gaps, then 3 in the same as the front, then 1 in the centre at the back. These were all fitted with shiny M10 bolts… You have no idea how annoyed I was with the dumbass imperial bolts on it before……….

Oh it’s beautiful…… Mmmmmm M10s…

 

Next up was another cultivator that has been missing a tine for a long time… It has been a door wedge in the root store for quite some time.

Simply job of reattaching it…

Happy days!

This is a little bit of a boring one

Smokey!

Now then.

So, it is winter/spring time. Technically it is winter, though with recent weather it’s seeming more and more like spring is here. The other day it went up to 13^oC, pretty toasty for a January day!

I’ve just come off the back of a week of morning milking on High Farm. This entails getting up at 5am, walking to High Farm, about 15 minutes away, having 1st breakfast, then making a big pot of coffee (Actually I’ve been experimenting, and discovered that 50/50 coffee and hot chocolate is amazing. Very tasty…Sorta a mocha).

Then it’s off to the barn, to chase some cows into the milking parlour and the rest is kind of self evident. Now, a 5am start does sound simply unpleasant, but it does have some nice side effects.

First of all you see the sun rise, and usually, the moon set. This was taken just before breakfast I think. The moon was just dipping below the horizon, as the sun came up on the other side, giving the moon a lovely yellow/golden colour.

The downside being that I get a distinct lack of sleep and then have to work hard all day…

But anyways! With Winter, the rangers usually burn areas of the moors around Yorkshire. In the summer the moorland is too dry and can just spiral out of control, and around now gives the heather just enough time to grow shoots which the grouse love.

The smoke often blows over the valley, which in the evening gives some very nice silhouettes against the sun.

 

What else… Oh, I went to York recently and got a rather nice photograph of the sunset:

 

I’ve got some more, but they’re still on my camera, which is not currently with me!

Anyways, sleep time! Skipper out.

Gingerbread things!

So, last night I made little gingerbread things. I started out with a plan to make a gingerbread log cabin, cutting a large tray of gingerbread into strips and then overlapping them to make a log cabin. In the end there wasn’t enough gingerbread so I made these things instead:

So, the recipe:
175g of Butter
175g of Sugar
4 tablespoons of golden syrup (Pretty much just emptied the pot in…)
700g of plain white flour
2 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda
3 teaspoons of ginger
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
2 eggs
If you want to make a gingerbread house, double or even triple the ingredients, this is nowhere near enough for 1 house…
Stick the sugar, flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon together.
Melt the butter in a pan, then pour it, and the eggs, and the golden syrup together with the rest…
So everything is together. Mix it like crazy so it makes a paste, sometimes it’s thick, sometimes it’s runny… Doesn't massively matter as it’s going in the oven anyway.
Leave the ball of dough in a bag in the fridge for half an hour, it’ll get cooler and expand a fair bit.
While it is doing this, grease a tray, the one I used was too big, but just choose one you think will fit, if not, make 2. Then put the dough in the trays. Roll it out with a rolling pin till it’s about 1cm thick, can be as thick as you want really. The thicker the longer you’ll have to cook it for, the thinner the shorter…. Still with me?
Great! Pop it in the oven. 180C or gas mark 6. If it is about 1cm, leave it for 15 minutes and then check it. If you prod it with a knife and some comes out still on the knife, you need to leave it for another 5 minutes or so. It’ll look nice and brown, but not dark brown… then you’ve messed up and burned it, but light brown… Sort of… coffee coloured.
Then, bring it out of the oven, and while it is still warm, cut it with a knife into what ever shape or size you want it, can turn it into a gingerbread house or just make little biscuit things like I did, they taste nice as hell if you like gingerbread….
Happy… Last week of advent?
-Skipper

Birdhouse with someone….

Okay, apparently I’m not even allowed to refer to people by their initials anymore… So… I now work with a Mr X, a Mr Y and a Mr Z in the afternoons, as well as Gilberto and Tom… because they’re not vulnerable adults and I can call them by their names…
So, Mr X and I were building a birdhouse. It is meant for a present for his brother, and instead of buying one for £10, we decided to make one instead.
So I spent a good morning designing a birdhouse in Google Sketchup. Making all the dimensions nice, and working out how many pieces we needed to cut etc.

These I then drew out on paper, cut out and used to mark off onto pieces of wood. These were then cut out:

Somehow my precision engineering from my plans, translated into plywood resulted in non symmetrical parts… and pieces that no longer fit… But no matter! We shall prevail!


I didn't realise how freaking big this is...

I have the best job in the world.

I have come to this conclusion a few times in the past week. First was during the evening when Tom and I were moving a trailer. It was a cool, clear evening, just about 4 o clock. The sun was just setting below the horizon, and from the other side, the top of the moon was just peaking over the wall. It’s times like these where you wish you were carrying a camera at all times. It was beautiful.
The second time was on Monday (12th). Tom and Gilberto were out at training courses, so I had the farm. We had all finished work at 12, and the villagers went in for lunch. My work wasn’t entirely finished as we have two heifers at the back of the dale, about a km away. These heifers needed some hay, so I loaded up the tractor and drove up. It was also a beautiful clear, crisp day, just before lunch.

It’s times like these I love to be a farmer in Botton Village. We have the best job in the world don’t we?

First Snow!

So, a few days ago we had our first snow fall. I can’t really call it a real snow fall as it looked little more than frost, but it was actual real snow!

Didn’t last for very long, but it is certainly getting colder. Was around –1 this morning, with the bull’s drinking trough being completely iced over. When I took the ice out it begun to refreeze almost immediately. Warmed up to +4 during the day though… Well, I saw warmed…..

Yesterday the sky at about 7 in the morning was really amazing, such cool colours:

The light on the ground was really golden, was very odd. Cool, but odd…

What else… Oh, Honey Bee Nest have woolly pigs:

And no, they’re not a cross between a sheep and a pig, that’s not biologically possible.. Or at least I doubt it is…

Muck Heaps

No I have not posted in a long time, I am sorry.

So, what have we been up to? Well, a while ago I mentioned that I had taken the muck pile from the barn into the field. In order for the muck to break down properly it needs to be kept warm and moist. Too much water and it’ll wash the nutrients away, which kind of defeats the point of muck spreading.  The muck heap is finally complete, and the other day we added the biodynamic compost preparations. These are 502-507.

• 502: Yarrow
• 503: Chamomile
• 504: Nettle
• 505: Oak Bark
• 506: Dandelion
• 507: Valerian, which is the only one that is sprayed around the edges of the muck

502-506 are incorporated into a small ball of mud or muck and put into the centre of the muck heap, each one separated by around a metre from the last in the order above. My job was to make the little balls and pass them to people to put inside the heap. I think we made around 50 balls in total.

The muck heap, before the fleece

We added the fleece during really high winds, which made moving a 25m long, 4m wide fleece into position under 40mph gales was rather challenging. Finally we got it on and weighed it down with tyres:

Completed muck heap. Oooh look at all those tractor marks though… Luckily we’re ploughing it soon!

Looks rather good too!