The Fish Truck. The Tractor, and the ATV
It was a busy weekend for us on a lot of fronts.
First off, Supercore decided to donate his ATV to camp. He’s still coming out for season, but he wanted to get the ATV out of his garage. It’s a 2016 Arctic Cat Alterra 450. It will become a key implement in our operation, especially the big push on food plots coming in August. I trucked it down in pouring rain on Friday. I had thought I’d missed the rain, but a pop-up thunderstorm hit just as we were attaching the trailer hitch. It followed me all the way around I-275 and out the AA highway.
Saturday morning, Moose and I popped it off the trailer. It had one eccentricity: you had to turn the thing off to shift gears. Moose played around with the idle and got it right.
The Fish Truck
I distinctly remember that in 2012, Moose and Company announced that the Mooselette was in the oven. To celebrate, I drove into town and met the fish truck at Barnes Lumber and bought some bass and bluegill and stocked the pond out by the first barn so that my first grandchild would be able to fish. 6 years later, Mooselette caught her first fish.
The new pond behind the Tobacco Barn was ripe for stocking, and I remembered the fish truck was coming. We all rode to Falmouth and I collected 150 hybrid bluegill and 5 pounds of minnow. We split them between the new pond and the Lost Loch down the hill. I’ll throw in some bass in the fall.
The Tractor
We spent Saturday afternoon doing tractor chores. Early on, on the advice of Wes Mattox, the local wildlife biologist, we used Kentucky’s Habitat How-To’s as a guide for managing the farm for deer and turkey. There is a lot of low-cost and no-cost solutions in those articles. One of the strategies we used was Edge Feathering, which has you letting successive layers of stuff grow up in bands of increasing age. Basically you get lazy about mowing the edge of your pastures and let stuff grow. We started 25 years ago. This was going to be one of the last years we could mow the oldest stuff with a rotary mower before we were left to do it with a chainsaw. Moose has been working with the tractor this past week, getting those most mature strips knocked down. He got Angus out and gave him a lesson on tractor safety and mowing technique. We finished up the exercise by beginning to clear around the big Walnut tree back at the The Thoughful spot. I got the Silverado stuck. Moose and the tractor got it out.
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It’s not an adventure ’til the first vehicle gets stuck.
This is the anniversary of the biggest one of these mirings. Back a few years ago, I buried the Silverado on the turn going into the campground. I had just mounted the winch on the back end of the truck which made it useless. I had to walk back and hike out with a hand ratchet– 4 hours to move the thing about 3 feet.
This current fiasco was about 50 yards away. We just need to stay off the roads until July– period!