Yesterday after work I finally managed to connect with the horse farm guy near my work, whom I've been talking to, who has manure for free as well as a huge pile of blackland prairie soil he is willing to have hauled off. He loaded my trailer for free, too, with his big ass tractor, and I made my way north and west to the 'stead, a distance of about 30 miles. I explored some new backroads, trying to find a way to get from point A to point B without having to drive on the Interstate or 183N. I wanted to go slow to keep from having the load all blow away. I've found that if I drive 50mph the poop stays put without a tarp.
It was an interesting drive from a geographic perspective. The horse farm, just to the north and east of my office, is just on the very southern edge of what was once the Great Plains, and you can still get the feel for that, even though the native grasses are long gone, and the buffalo that roamed here are ancient history. Actually, just to the west of my office, across the freeway, is a street called Chisolm Trail, and the funny thing is that it actually is the original Chisolm Trail that herders once used to drive cattle from South Texas to the Kansas railheads.
I drove north and then west, into rocky outcroppings where limestone has been quarried for 150 years, and is still being strip-mined. Mostly you don't see the quarries, which are not visible from the road. This is the northern edge of what is called the Texas Hill Country, which is the part of Texas that's generally considered the most beautiful part of the state, although it's always been on what we call the "dry line" between East and West. Drought cycles have always been a part of life here, at least for a long time.
John Graves wrote about that in his ecologically precocious book, Goodbye to a River. He wrote that back in 1959, long before anyone ever talked about climate change. I have a copy of that book I got him to sign around here somewhere. He died a week or so ago, John did. He was one of our best Texas writers, about the age of my own parents or just a few years younger. I'm sorry he's gone, but he was getting really old. I think I've read everything he ever wrote. He lived just to the north and west, up in Glen Rose Texas.
He and Fred Gipson are about my favorite Texas authors. Gipson has been gone a for a long time, but he also wrote some books, not as well known as the ones they made into blockbuster movies, like Savage Sam and Old Yeller, that also touched on themes of what we'd now call permaculture. He wrote a great little book called The Home Place, about a guy who moves back to the ranch he grew up on and works on improving the soil and bringing back the native grasses. That was in 1950. Wherever you find yourself, if you look, you can always find someone who trod a similar path before you came along.
I drove through the countryside, which is filled with small and some larger ranching operations, mostly part of the fossil fuels based Big Ag paradigm, but also lots of places occupied by folks who just love the country, and raising horses and cows and goats. There are literally thousands of small freeholders in the rural country around Austin, each with a family trying to carve out their own little piece of the American Dream. It isn't as easy as it used to be, but most of them look like they're prospering. But the money generally doesn't come from the land, but rather the land is a place to spend the money from some job working in corporate America.
On my place it looked like maybe I'd gotten a half inch or so of rain, the big holes in the creek with standing water in them, but still far from full or running.
I dumped the little trailer and grabbed a beer from the fridge in the cabin, which is still hanging in there but not cooling like it once did. It will be replaced with a smaller unit with an Energy Star rating, something better to run off the panels when that eventually becomes a reality. Afterward, I didn't hang around, but headed back down the 183 corridor, which put me at my door in West Austin in a short 45 minutes. Much of the way is a toll road now, with a 75 mph speed limit. I hauled ass and was home long before dinner time.
I played around with the PMA welder head I ordered, which came in yesterday too. I am trying to use a standard bracket from theepicenter.com to mount it and a 10hp diesel. I don't understand everything about this one yet. It looks like it might have to have a battery to work, which is a disappointment for a device that is supposed to generate electricity. It's part of the welding control module, whatever that is.
I also picked up two 1 hp 48V PMA DC motors which can be used to generate engine driven DC too. It now becomes all about fabricating mounts and sourcing pulleys. It is simple to rig a v belt drive, but not necessarily easy to find the right components to make the drive parts of these things do what you want it to do, which is to deliver a specific rpm.
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Topic: Meanwhile back at the 'stead (Read 226111 times)
November 12, 2012, 03:20:35 PM