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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 8, 2021 20:53:00 GMT -6
The Claw! My tip or trick for the day is the recommendation of using a straight claw framing hammer as a weed digging tool.I have a 22 ounce, straight claw framing hammer that works better than any gardening tool I ever had, bar none!Weeds this tall and this well rooted would be very hard on a person's back if tying to pull by hand without assistance from some kind of tool. This is where a good, long handled claw hammer really comes in handy.Just pull the weed tops back, so that you can feel them 'turn loose' when you hit the root just right with the claw of the hammer.Once you find the edge of the root system, just pop it out like a nail. This weed had a root about 7" inches across. Hand pulling this weed would more than likely have resulted in breaking the stems off at ground level, leaving way too many of the roots in tact. Using a claw hammer eliminates the root system, killing the weed, rather than just setting it back. It only took a few minutes of work to pull this entire wagon load of weeds. Using the claw hammer is so satisfying that I end up pulling several wagon loads of weeds per day to be used as mulch to put around my elderberry and thornless blackberry plants.Another load of weeds going to the berry mulching project.The berry bushes love this, so do the earthworms! I like to mix the weeds with dead leaves and seasoned chicken litter from my henhouse. This trio super charges the berry plants. Some of them already have 17 new suckers popping up around the original stick that I poked into the ground, as recently as February 2020. They are only a year old, but under these conditions, they grow like crazy! (I'll post a photo at the end of this series below.)More weeds going to the mulch piles.Weed mulch piled around a new berry transplant. These mulch piles retain moisture and help keep the tender roots cooler on really hot summer days. They also promote earthworm activity, bringing much needed Oxygen to the new root zone. One of the elderberry plants with 17 new chutes appearing this year. This was only a twig poked into the ground a year ago. This particular elderberry plant is taller than I am. It too was only a twig poked into the ground in February of 2020. After poking the cutting into the ground, I fed it a ration of weed mulch, seasoned chicken litter, and dead oak leaves. A little extra effort often pays off in spades.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 8, 2021 22:02:17 GMT -6
That’s just amazing. We use weeds to mulch as well, but our piles aren’t nearly as lush as yours. We just don’t have the rain for it. (Our thistles can get might big, though.)
I like that claw hammer. It looks a lot easier to carry around than our hefty weed-pulling tool. It’s called a Puller Bear, and it has been a huge help to us in uprooting woody thistles, and horehound, and hackberry volunteers. It’s heavy to haul around, but it can pull roots out of our rock (sometimes). It has been a great tool for us, but the cost increased a lot since the time we got it as steel prices and shipping have become so high in recent years. I thought I’d mention it, though, because if you ever were to happen upon one secondhand, it would be a great resource for uprooting woody plants.
I don’t have a picture, but I’ll try to remember to get one and edit it into this post.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 9, 2021 7:08:53 GMT -6
chrysanthemum,
Thanks, for the Great tip! That looks like an awesome tool! My wife bought one very similar to that once, but it had a plastic part that broke after the first 50 sprouts or so, and could not be repaired, because it was made in China.
The "Puller Bear" model I just looked up, due to your recommendation, looks like it ought to last a lifetime and then some! Personally, I think money spent on well built tools is money well spent. Thanks, for that post!
I'll try to attach a short video clip below.The reason the woody-type weeds here are so lush is that this used to be a 65' x 85' hog pen. We raised as many as twelve head of hogs per year in that enclosure for quite a few years. Over time, they built up the soil there pretty well. When feed corn prices got so high ($10.00 per 50# bag) that it became cheaper to buy pork at the grocery store than it was to feed out your own hog, (even if you did your own butchering) It was then that I converted the old hog pen to an elderberry and thornless blackberry patch. Since locally, there is an invasive type of weed that has a downy seed similar to thistle, it invaded our bare ground and quickly took over.
Once I have the invasive woody weed problem whipped, I'll sow a cover crop between rows and maintain the walkways with a flock of geese. I currently have 15 geese, 5 adults and 10 newly hatched goslings. They'll keep that area well groomed if I ever get the sort of grasses growing there that they enjoy grazing on. Sweet Pea, Clarence, Petunia, Maybelle, and the clan.Here they are, doing their job keeping the new weeds in check. This is the border line between where I have cleared weeds and where I still have more work to do.This is Sweet Pea, always the opportunist, looking for me to turn up another juicy grub. He and Clarence are quite the entertainers, both vying for my attention as I crawl along popping out weeds and crickets. Geese are just the right balance of weed control and pest. They don't seem to bother the fruit much, but in winter, they do tend to crib the bark off a few berry bushes. Fortunately, nothing the berries can't recoup from.
I've tried chickens to do the same job, but they constantly scratch my mulch away and constantly seek the berries, plus, they can fly to some degree and reach berries that geese would not attempt to reach, even if they liked eating them.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 10, 2021 7:38:29 GMT -6
I love the stories of your geese. I read your whole thread in the domestic critters section early on when I discovered the forum and then passed it on to my eight year old to read. She loved it.
It does sound like a Puller Bear would be a good tool for you given that you have an invasive woody weed problem. It doesn’t work well on tender weeds because the powerful jaws just snap the stems, but it’s great on tougher things. We use it on thistles, and it’s a help because the thorns on those things go straight through our leather gloves. It’s also helpful as a back saver, but it is very heavy to haul around. If we had a working hand truck, I’d be tempted to move it long distances on that. I took it up our steep driveway a couple weekends ago to let our nextdoor neighbors borrow it, and that little climb left me out of breath.
I am very impressed with the build quality. The only “weak” part is the cotter pin that lets you adjust the opening of the jaws, and that is easy to replace. There is no plastic in the mechanism.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 10, 2021 12:14:12 GMT -6
Do you have an Atwoods Store where you live?
The Atwoods Store in our area carries just about any cotter-pin, linch-pin, type thing you can imagine. I buy them by the dozen to keep in the toolbox of our tractor. Things like that come in handy when it's a twenty-minute drive to town to buy parts every time you break down. Before Atwoods came along, I'd use old nails bent over to do the same type thing, but cotter pins are a lot easier to remove.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 10, 2021 20:20:10 GMT -6
No Atwoods stores for several hours, but we do keep a few cotter pins on hand in my husband’s toolbox. I think Tractor Supply might be our local version.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 27, 2021 9:17:53 GMT -6
Saving Seedlings from light freezes Do you have any old gallon-size plastic milk jugs? If you don't, your neighbors might save some for you? They come in very handy as heat tents on chilly, frosty nights, or as rain caps during pounding hard rainstorms.
If you cut the bottom out of those, they make good mini-greenhouses for young tomato starts.
Hank Ballard told me when he cuts the bottom out of his plastic milk jugs; he only cuts 3 sides and leaves the 4th side as a 'flap' to put a rock or a brick on so the wind won't blow them away.
If you cut a line across the bottom of a milk jug at the center and split it two ways, you will have two 'flaps' to anchor down.
If you have two flaps, you can also use those later, as an extension to make the milk jug taller as the seedling grows.
If you cut the top shoulders off of one milk jug and staple it to the bottom of another milk jug, you can make it taller. Or you can fasten them together by cutting interlocking tabs. Just be sure to wear your garden gloves, so you won't get cut using a razor knife.
In the off-season, you can slip one jug inside the other to store them over the winter. (Just be sure no sunlight can reach them, as the plastic degrades).
During one cold Spring snap, I drove out to Lowrey Schoolhouse and asked them if I could have all of the gallon size tin cans they used that week. They even washed them for me. By week's end, I had over 100, one-gallon size tin cans! I used those to set over my tomato starts at night and saved them from more than one frost, but the milk jugs work better because they allow sunlight in. Plus, they store better too. If you cut both ends out of a gallon can, it will make a base for fitting a milk jug on top to extend it higher, so the combination of the two also work well.
The old gallon cans came in handy around here for several years as feed cans, water cans, nail sorting cans, tick granule spreaders, and fishing worm cans. I even cut both ends out of the gallon cans and flattened them to use as birdhouse roofing material and sold a few bluebird houses at the Farmer's Market.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jul 13, 2021 16:39:00 GMT -6
That’s a picture of some of the cedar saplings I pulled up with our Puller Bear this morning. Most of them were fairly small, but the one with the extensive roots showing was at least six feet tall. I had to pull from a couple of different angles to get the roots to the point where they snapped off. The Puller Bear is a great tool for that. We live at the end of a culdesac in a residential neighborhood. There are some lovely oak trees on our property by the street, but they had cedar trees practically suffocating them when we moved in. We cut down the cedar from under and around the biggest oak a few years ago, but these are saplings that had grown up underneath the tree. I wanted to get them out before they got bigger.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 13, 2021 19:21:47 GMT -6
Wow! That's impressive! That was a huge root ball to have to pull out of the ground!
I used to run inmate work crews in several prisons across the State back in the 1990s. We had to do everything by hand. They'd uproot trees by hand that were so large we had to drag the stumps off with a tractor. They'd use axes and mattocks to dig a circle around the base of each tree, chopping off all the roots as they went. Eventually, they'd reach the tap root and then would chop the tap root in two with an ax. When the tree fell over, there'd be a small hole to fill. Most of the dirt would be knocked loose from the roots during the digging and chopping process, so not much dirt was needed to fill the hole when the tree was removed.
When we moved here in 2004, that's how we removed almost all the trees around our house. We only paid $30,000 for the house. It was an abandoned, foreclosure, 3 bedroom brick house that had been on the market for 5 years. It hadn't had an offer in all that time, so they had delisted it. Trees were growing up all around it. It looked terrible, but it was structurally sound. It just took several years to get it back into any kind of good shape to look at.
We pulled several trees with log chains and a truck, after digging around the roots that way. We had a wood stove, so nothing went to waste. It's amazing what A person can do by hand with an ax and a mattock.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 13, 2021 19:34:32 GMT -6
Figure 8 water Hose storage
I worked as an Electrician from 1980 to 1998. In all those years, we pulled miles and miles of wire and data cables. Many times, we'd have to pull the wire off a single reel to premeasure it for a multi-cable wire pull. When doing that, we'd lay the wire out on the ground in a big figure 8 pattern, so that it wouldn't tangle up as we pulled it into the conduits.The same thing works for pulling long water hoses across your garden. I was working in the garden a few days ago, pulling 200' feet of hose out of a figure 8 pile where I had stored it the last time it was used. It never kinked or got tangled even once. I've done that for so many years that I just take it for granted, but I stopped to think maybe that trick might help someone on the seed savers site, so, I took the time this evening to write it out.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 13, 2021 19:46:19 GMT -6
Watering Before Weeding A few weeks ago, we had a fairly dry spell (just long enough for the ground to get crusty and hard) not a drought of any kind. It made weed pulling really labor intense because the weed stems would tend to break off at ground level, rather than coming up by the roots. So After a day or so of fighting the crusty soil, I decided to water heavily the night before pulling, or to water heavily the morning before pulling that evening.
It's amazing what a labor savings a little pre-watering can provide! To me, it was very counter intuitive to water a weed patch, but if you are certain you'll be returning in a few hours to pull them up, it's a real back saver to do so ... Just a little trick or tip that might help someone else to know about some day. It worked really well.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 18, 2021 17:34:22 GMT -6
Thanks for the figure 8 tip! I water dry ground before weeding as well. It does require a heavy soak and a wait for run off like you suggest.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Aug 15, 2021 14:26:28 GMT -6
Watering Before Weeding A few weeks ago, we had a fairly dry spell (just long enough for the ground to get crusty and hard) not a drought of any kind. It made weed pulling really labor intense because the weed stems would tend to break off at ground level, rather than coming up by the roots. So After a day or so of fighting the crusty soil, I decided to water heavily the night before pulling, or to water heavily the morning before pulling that evening.
It's amazing what a labor savings a little pre-watering can provide! To me, it was very counter intuitive to water a weed patch, but if you are certain you'll be returning in a few hours to pull them up, it's a real back saver to do so ... Just a little trick or tip that might help someone else to know about some day. It worked really well.I don’t have any 200-foot hoses, but I have a number of shorter hoses hooked up in various places around our property. A number of them were left behind by the previous owners, and they’re good solid hoses but have some kinks that like to form. I’ve been trying to lay them out in figure eights when I don’t have them stretched out full, and I’m liking the technique. Thanks for mentioning it here. It’s good to have in mind when having to water (which is pretty frequent down here, even with our unusually wet summer this year).
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Aug 15, 2021 14:46:19 GMT -6
Glad to hear that tip could help someone. It was shown to me by an old man, back when I was an apprentice. I'm not sure it would have ever occurred to me to lay wire out in a figure 8 pattern to keep it from kinking if he hadn't taught me that early on, but I've been doing it that way ever since.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jan 1, 2022 11:46:19 GMT -6
Making a Labor-Saving 2-Wheeled Wheelbarrow Last Spring, I broke the old handle on my wheelbarrow while hauling chicken litter to put on my garden, so I went to the lumber yard to buy two 2x4s to make another pair of handles from scratch. The cost of lumber at the time was so high that it would have cost me $22.00 to buy two 2x4s, eight feet long to make the new handles. But not everything had gone up so drastically as lumber had at the time, and I found two pre-made wheelbarrow handles for only $28.00
It was against every fiber in my being to buy already made handles when I have the tools right here at home to make them myself, but because of the small price difference and the time it would have taken me to make them myself, I bought the pre-made handles anyway.
While I was at it, knowing that all the hardware had to be removed anyhow, I decided to add an extra wheel. I bought a solid rubber wheel, so it will never go flat. Since I live near Tahlequah, of course, I could not find a wheel to match the one I already had, but a guy has to work with what he's got, so I ended up with a mismatched pair of slightly different diameters. I also bought a length of 5/8" steel rod to make a new, wider, spindle to accommodate a double wheel design. The old spindle was only 12" inches long. I would need a 24" inch spindle for double wheels.
When I got home, I drilled a hole through each end of the 24" inch spindle to accommodate a cotter pin. The wheels are now held in place by a washer and a cotter pin rather than just jamming the wheel hubs between the two wooden handles as it was before. I used the very same brackets and the very same holes as were already there for the old one-wheel design.
The only modification I made was in setting the wheels to the outside of the spindle, rather than at the center of the spindle. Hence the new 24" inch wide spindle. (Easy as pie!)
Now, my wheelbarrow doesn't fall over when the load is not balanced, and it is much, much, much, easier to handle. I'll attach a few photos to show just how much easier in a minute.
I had a 200-pound log that needed to be carted away from my yard this weekend, and was able to easily lift it with one finger using this new design!
Not only does the double wheel make it easier to lift a job, it also makes it way easier to balance. Try lifting a 200-pound log one-handed with a single wheel and see what happens.Closeup of the new configuration with both wheels set to the outside of the wooden handles, rather than to the inside. The wheels are slightly different diameters, with different profiles and different widths, but not enought to hardly notice as you push a load. Closeup showing the cotter pin and washer setup that holds the new wheels in place. I just drilled an 1/8" inch hole through a piece of 5/8" steel bar-stock. Closeup of opposite wheel and washer setup. The finished product with the front bumper bolted back into place. Nothing on the wheelbarrow had to be changed, except the placement of the new wheels to the outside of the handles, rather than the single wheel in the center. This is me, lifting the 200 pound load with only one finger. (The trick is in the balance that this new setup provides). You can lift anything with one finger if it's balanced. To give you an idea of the length of this log, the wheelbarrow handles are 5' feet long. I'm 6' feet tall. This was a hefty load that I was able to place on the whelbarrow by myself, without tipping it over, and I was easily able to lift it once it was balanced in place. Once it was balanced, I was then able to push it down the road far away from our house to dump it, so no termites will migrate to our home. Easy-Peasy, no strained back, nor busted gut required, just a little engineering and some forethought. (And an extra wheel of course).
This was an easy, one Saturday afternoon project to build, and it made my wheelbarrow a much handier tool.This would have been tough to move without a wheelbarrow, and probably impossible for one person to load without two wheels for good balance.Using the two wheeled wheelbarrow to haul logs out of the woods, one handed. The length of these logs made it impossible to use both handles to lift this load, so I was able to move it a long distance using only one handle. The second wheel provides a cross transfer of weight, allowing the operator to pick up heavy loads one-handed.
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