I had a digger here for a day last week and we completed a few small jobs that have been on the agenda for quite some time and I have to say, small they may be, but I took great satisfaction out of getting them done. The digger was booked for Saturday morning a week ago and of course after booking it the forecast decided to predict torrential rain.

It seems like every time we turn a sod around here it starts to rain. Thankfully this time the forecast was wrong and the rain didn’t arrive until late Saturday evening. The first job was re-piping a drain that we opened almost four years ago. The drain is situated close to some trees and the tree roots had penetrated the pipes and blocked them and the water was running down the field, leaving things very wet. The drain was opened to let the water away, with the intention of coming back to re-pipe it at a later date. Unfortunately, the later date proved to be four years later.

The tree roots had penetrated the pipes and blocked them and the water was running down the field

Electric fence

I had always kept an electric fence around the open drain to keep stock out of it, up until this spring that is, and of course with no fence the cattle were down in the drain and blocked it again. We now had part of the drain open and the water still running down the field, not an ideal situation but on the bright side it made me get back to the job and finish it properly.

When the digger was in the field, I also got it to pull down a few low hanging branches that would have stopped me getting the field ploughed tight into the ditches. Something I’m hoping to get done next year. Much simpler and safer than having to climb up a tree with a chainsaw.

Water pipe

The second job on the agenda was running a water pipe from one side of a field to the other. It’s a four acre field which only had a drinker in one corner. That meant I always had to graze it in a wagon wheel formation, with the electric fence always running back to a point in the corner so cattle could get back to the drinker. It's ok in dry weather, but a bit of a mess if it was wet. Now I have a drinker half way across the field also and can divide it into three nice square paddocks, leaving grazing it a lot simpler. As the saying goes, it’s the small things in life that make you happy and sure here I am delighted with myself!

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