Have the Tool Before You Need It
This could be a bullet-point from my post earlier this week. After another long day on the farm prepping for our first market year, this is something I wanted to share. I’m also going to add a tag “Farm Rules” for little lessons learned like this.
Be ready
After many lost battles with the wind, we took down our portable canopy for the last time last fall and invested in a steel shelter for the gals and their “feed pile”. One very satisfying part of putting this up was securing it by sledgehammering long rebar stakes through the frame.
We kept the chickens in the same location all winter, so that they wouldn’t overgraze all the grass. Also, we are now building our beds in the paddock they’ve pecked clean for about 4 months now. Playing with inputs and outputs is fun!
Now that everything is growing, it’s time to move our girls. This will be the first time the heavy duty carport thing needs to be moved. There were some things I didn’t prepare for, but getting those gnarly stakes out was not one of them.
In a mini-barn raising of sorts, my friends Jeff and Andy helped assemble the structure in a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon. Andy pointed out that a handyman jack would make removing the stakes a lot easier. He also described how he would do it specifically, but I forgot that part. Thankfully I at least remembered his advice to get the jack, and shortly thereafter Beth’s family asked what I wanted for Christmas — fresh on my mind, this made the list.
It sat, in the box, since then. Until today, when I really needed it. I used one of my favorite tools on the farm, paracord, tying onto the massive nails and pulling them out with the jack.
In this whirlwind of a season, not did this tool being available save a couple hours in the middle of a workday, it prevented a ton of potential stress at just the wrong time. I would have been trying to figure this out, in the middle of the busiest two weeks this year, imagining all the cars of my train colliding into each other and exploding. Instead, it was a carefree hour or so, learning to use a new, pretty awesome, piece of equipment.
