Mid-Winter Tractor Adventures and Kitchen Remodeling

Big thanks to The Greenhorns for linking to us in their blog. ‘Twas our blog’s biggest day yet, surpassing the many visits we received as I was live-blogging about our April 1st Flood.

Since we closed up shop for the winter, we’ve been mainly lying low – avoiding the holidays, ordering seeds, playing with Felix, making a planting plan for next year, replacing the bearings in the spader, totally gutting the kitchen on the farm… you know, ordinary stuff.

Wheeee

Gutted Spader

Gutted Kitchen

In the midst of this “relaxation time”, I stumbled upon a tractor for sale down in California that I have been coveting – a Kubota L245H. If you recall, some time ago, we wrote a few posts about what tractors are for – one of which is to kill weeds. Since most farms use pesticides to kill weeds these days, tractors that are made for row crop cultivation haven’t been produced since the early ’80s. As you may know, last year we bought a 1951 Farmall Cub for cultivating, but I’ve been wanting something more modern (i.e. reliable) as our cultivating needs increase.

Enter the Kubota L245H, a 25 horse power tractor produced from the mid-70s to the early-80s made specifically for row crop cultivation.

L245H

During this time period, a bunch of companies made similar tractors. International made  the 274, John Deere made the 900HC, Ford made the 1710. All of these tractors have belly-mount hydraulics and an offset cab, just like the Cub. However, they are significantly bigger, have a 3-point hitch in the back, a diesel engine, and cost a lot more money – it seems rare to find one with low hours for less than $10,000.

But suddenly, there one was. It was down in California. It had low hours (1400). It only cost $6500. I had to have it. Buying something sight-unseen is always scary. But the tractor yard that was selling it was very helpful, running a bunch of tests on it at my behest. Convinced it wasn’t in any worse condition than you’d expect for a 30 year-old tractor, we sent them the money and they shipped us the tractor. And then… it arrived.

If you are ever in a situation where someone is shipping you something really large and heavy, like, say, a tractor, and you don’t have a loading dock or ramps to use to unload it, I recommend requesting your large and heavy load be shipped on a trailer with a tilt deck. Our new tractor, however, was not. There it was, 36″ off the ground on the flat-bed of the trailer with no way to get it down.

We stood around scratching our heads for a while. I called a few neighbors to see whether they had ramps, or a loading dock, or a hill an 18-wheeler could back up to. But to no avail. Then, the driver suggested we build a ramp out of a pile of fill on the adjacent property. With the big tractor, I pushed and pulled and scooped the fill to make a ramp. It took a few tries, but finally, the big truck was able to back up to it and I drove the new tractor off. Phew.

The Ramp

Backing up

Aaaand...

Down the ramp

This was a lot more stressful than the pictures make it out to be…

Coming soon, a blog post about cultivation and cultivators.