Another weekend of cleaning up the homestead has come and gone.  This weekend I focused on hauling scrap iron to the local recycler, picking up trash and cutting down some trees to make room for a pole barn.

For those of you following this blog, yall know some of my family members, and their friends, used a piece of the homestead as a landfill.  They did not have permission to dump trash in a washed out area, they just did it.  Most of the stuff is glass, metal and plastic.

My brother has a tractor with a grapple on the front it, which is what we used to pull a lot of trash out of the hole.  Now that the trash is in a pile on flat ground, it’s time to sort through it and dispose of the trash properly.

When we first started cleaning out the hole we started loading various pieces of scrap on the trailer.  This weekend right off the bat the first load was ready to go.  The scrap metal on the trailer was a mixture of wire, box fan, washing machine,,, and a few other things.

Here in Jasper Texas on hwy 190 east we have a metal recycler. Which is where I have brought 2 trailer loads of scrap iron so far.

To make room for a shed a pole barn some small trees needed to be removed. The logger did not cut these trees, so I had to do it by hand.

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Now that the trees have been cut and some of the small timber has been thinned, its time to call in a stump grinder.  A stump grinder is machine with carbide bits which cut the stump down to below ground level.  No digging around the stump, no burning the stump, no pulling on the stump with a truck,,, nothing but a machine that turns a tree stump into chips.

Instead of buying a stump grinding machine that would rarely be used, I called a contractor that works by the hour.  In 3 hours the contractor had ground 109 stumps.

There are a number of stump grinder designs on the market, some of them look like large tillers.  The one the contractor used attached to the back of a tractor and was operated by the power take off (PTO).

Why are we having stumps ground?  The stumps are in the way of driveway, chicken yard fence, chicken coop and where the shed is  going.  Instead of having to drive around the stumps, and waiting for them to rot, now the stumps are ground 6 – 8 inches below ground level.

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This is part 2 of a moving to the Homestead series.  See this link for part 1.

Where do you want to be in 10 years, how about 20 years?  That question is not about financial stability, or your career, where do you want to be physically in 10 years, what do you want your life to be like?

I want peace and quiet in my life.  I want a back porch where I can grill some steaks, listen to the wind blowing through the trees, hear the chickens,,, and that is all I want to hear, except maybe some music.

I want a small garden that my wife and I can get fresh food from.

I want my chickens to be able to free range as much as they want, because happy chickens lay plenty of eggs.

Where do I want to be next year (2013)?  I want to be living in peace and quiet. But first, my wife and I have to get there.

One of the things that has to be taken care of before we are able to put a house on the land, is some of the timber has to be cleared.  As much as I despise cutting trees, we have to make room for a home.  Not only room for a home, but the fence rows need to be cut.

Nobody has lived at the Homestead full time since the late 1970s, which was when my grandmother passed away. Mom and dad moved from the Jasper Texas area in the late 1970s and have lived in Bridge City for the past 35 years.

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