Posts Tagged woodpeckers

A quick update on the undertakings at the Wallow.

After changing the blades and topping off the oil on my riding mower, the engine refuses to start. It’ll crank, but not turn over. I’m taking this as a learning opportunity. Changing the spark plug is pretty easy. I figured out how to change the oil, which was also pretty easy once I found the drain plug. I also figured out how to disassemble and clean the carburetor, but forgot the step where you have to drain the gas tank and disconnect the fuel line. When fuel started leaking out of the carb, I remembered the guy in the video saying that the carb held a small amount of fuel and it would just drain out. But the fuel kept on coming! The carb in this mower is gravity-fed; there’s no fuel pump. This means that I was just draining the fuel tank out onto the ground through the carb. Oops. I quickly re-tightened the bolt.

I climbed our 30′ extension ladder to spray wasp killer into and around the woodpecker holes, so as to kill off the wasps that the woodpeckers are likely going after. Woodpeckers or no, there are too many damn wasps in that vicinity. Must go! Then I sprayed expanding urethane foam into the holes. Tomorrow, I’ll go back up there and cut away the excess foam so it doesn’t look like our house has cancer. I’m getting more familiar with the 30′ extension ladder, but it still scares the shit out of me.

We raked up much of the hay that had been drying in the yard today. It kept getting re-rained on and then left out to dry and then re-rained on again, and I just got tired of looking at it. It was mostly dry, but still some wet, and anyway, now it’s in a big pile and covered with a tarp. The ultimate destination is to be mixed in with pig manure and turned into compost, so it won’t matter much if it’s a little bit pre-composted. It’s exciting to think that lawn clippings, which I would previously have considered to be waste, will turn into compost that will feed the garden instead.

A guy with a tractor is coming tomorrow to bush-hog the field. After that, he’s going to turn the top layer of soil for us and Issa is going to plant a pasture seed mix called, “Laugh and Grow Fat Hog Pasture Mix.” It’s a winter seed mix that contains four plants that hogs like to graze on. We were planning to put a winter grass like rye in the field anyway, just to give the weeds a little competition and to enrich the soil, but Issa found livestock-specific mixtures, and we liked that option better. If we’re going to grow something, we might as well grow something the animals can eat.