Took about 10 days of patient (mostly) waiting to get my Mahindra 1526 tractor back from the dealer’s service department, who did a 200-hour “scheduled maintenance” on it, e.g. changing all fluids (engine oil, transmission/hydraulic oil, front axle grease, etc.) and filters.
I ask a lot from that tractor, probably more than it was designed for, so I take good care of it. For example, I’m using the front loader to dig a pretty good sized farm pond, down to about 8+ feet in depth, and should probably be using a backhoe implement, because the loader isn’t really designed for digging like that. Puts a lot of stress on the loader, thus on the hydraulic subsystem.
The swarm of bees I caught and hived a few days ago have already consumed the 8 quarts of bee syrup I put in the top feeder the other day! Damn … those are some hungry bees. But, they are still very docile and seemingly busy busy busy building out the comb infrastructure, so feeding them is the lease I can do. They will pay me back in honey later, trust me. 😉
Chickens, ducks and rabbits are all doing well.
Discovered … quite surprisingly … a tremendous amount of veggie seed growth in the soil block mini-greenhouse. There’s a school of thought that you should water new soil block seeds for the first three days to allow them to get established … then water them aggressively every day. So, today was day three and when I opened the greenhouse I was shocked to see a LOT of green. The cucumbers in particular ‘went nuts’ and sprouted up about 3 inches in 3 days! Yikes, I’m going to have to brave the heat this week and get the first few seed beds prepared in the raised bed plot.
We had a severe thunderstorm watch in effect this PM, but didn’t get any rain overhead. Beautiful evening clouds nonetheless.