Technical Difficulties

Things were moving along well in the compost making, but I hit a temporary snag this morning.  The chipper/shredder has been bogging down lately when I feed material into it, so I checked the flails for sharpness.  They were completely rounded off.

So it's time to sharpen them again.  The machine had been left outside in the weather for years, so when I inherited it there was a lot wrong with it.  One of the problems is that the system of pins that holds the flails in place got corroded and froze up.  I tried fixing that, but never got anywhere with it.  So my only way of sharpening the flails is to hone them with stones mounted on an electric drill while the chipper is lying on its side.  It's tedious, but doable.  Replacing the whole machine would cost about five or six thousand dollars...so that's not an option for me.

I need that shredder to work well, so it's time to get busy grinding. I'll get it done.

This has become a miniature farm here, since I grow a lot of my own food.  In the enterprise of farming, fighting with old and heavily used machinery is generally where you spend a lot of your time.  It helps to know of a good welding shop, or know how to weld things yourself.  I bring my welding jobs to a local shop, they don't charge me that much to do small jobs.

Tomorrow is the official date for harvesting my potatoes...eighty days from planting.  I'm optimistic about a good harvest, the vines grew well.  So maybe by the end of the week I'll be eating homegrown new potatoes...looking forward to that.  The last bag I bought in the store were all green from being left out in the light too long.  Only two left, I'll be glad to see the end of those.  I've read that you should never eat green potatoes, but I can't afford to go throwing out a whole bag of potatoes on my income.  I'd be happy if I never had to buy another bag of store potatoes again.

My homegrown potatoes are so much better that there's just no comparison.  They're usually perfect...no greening, no soft spots from blight, no scars from digging tools, no rotting at the core.  The quality of produce sold in stores has been declining steadily since I was a kid...along with everything else I have to say.