Easy Sunday: Scenes from the vineyard on the first day of war

Some people think my vineyard posts are a waste of time. 

That may be especially true today, on the first day of a war.

Skip this post.

The news has an ecstatic tone. We did it! We got in the first punch! They are crippled! They will slink off and comply! We have dared them not to retaliate, and we mean it!

Japan must have felt this way the day after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Amid this news, I am retreating for a day into the little problems and quiet joys of my farm. In a complicated, conflicted world, it is good for my peace of mind to deal with little problems with little solutions.

I am on my way to Portland to pick up my nephew who will spend part of the summer living at my farmhouse while he prunes my plants. He breaks the expectations about White native-born workers.  He is an excellent worker. He works hard at a fast pace. He gets up early to be in the vineyard at 6:00 a.m. to beat the heat. 

Here he is last summer, holding the tool that tightens up the trellis wires.

Here I am last summer on a hot day. I am getting too old to do hard farm work.

A big part of farming is keeping one's equipment operating.  Here is the larger of two tractors I use in the tight spaces of the vineyard. I keep the front end loader up high so it is out of the way when I am working around the vineyard. The trellis wires and post are just out of range.

Here is a detail from the above photo -- the right side of the tiller. It is missing a part -- the right skid. 

I damaged the original skid when I hit it against one of those round end posts made of recycled oil well drill pipe. Stuff breaks. Sometimes it is "operator error," like this time.  Sometimes the equipment just breaks on its own. That is farming.

I shouldn't operate it without the skid, but I had a job to do. I was extra careful not to hit anything. 

Here is what the tiller should look like. The photo is from the John Deere dealership where new ones are for sale. Frontier is a John Deere brand. This shade of green is John Deere's color. Notice the skid on the bottom and the fender flare at on the left, which is attached to the skid. Notice that this part is not on the photo above.

Unfortunately, John Deere doesn't have the skid in stock. In fact, it isn't available anywhere in the John Deere system. The parts people told me the skid is made in Italy, and they are on back order. New ones won't be made until September, and that is a "maybe." It is a $150 part, plus shipping, if and when they have it.

John Deere's trade color is green. Komatsu brand's trade color is orange. The Komatsu people have a similar, but not identical, tiller skid. The Komatsu people don't think the equipment needs that fender flare to the rear.

Komatsu had the skid available now, in a Kansas City warehouse. It costs $30, plus another $24 in shipping. I ordered one. It is painted black.

I broke the left skid, too, but fortunately John Deere people had the replacement part on hand. Here's what I did to it. You break stuff you fix stuff. Farming is an endless repeat of that. Irrigation equipment is especially temperamental.

My parents bought me a tricycle toy when I was four years old. It was a miniature version of the tractors grownups used. It wasn't as fast as a normal tricycle, but it had the traction a four-year-old boy wants when aiming for mud puddles. I loved the toy. I bought this refurbished one two years ago in an impulsive moment of sentimentality. I keep it in our living room. 

The toy imprinted the John Deere brand on me, so in adulthood I have bought only John Deere equipment.

My nephew's task will be to prune the grape plants. Mine is keeping the ground free of weeds, which I will do with the tractor and tiller. My multi-year project is to rid the vineyard of any of the puncture vine, the problem I described in former posts. To get every single one out of the field I need to keep the ground bare for another year so that I can see them to pull them before they go to seed. I'm making progress.

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