Broken equipment is a constant feature of life on the farm. And of course, equipment only breaks when we need to use it. Today the starter on our big 40-year-old tractor broke just as I was beginning to mow hay - hay that was already way late in being harvested and way over-ripe due to all the rain recently. You've heard the saying, "Make hay while the sun shines." We've had a lot of clouds lately. But all clouds have a silver lining, and this particular one was no exception.
The first thing I do when a tractor breaks is to call Zip's Repair Shop in Zeeland. Jason, the owner, asked me to describe the noises I heard when I tried to start the tractor. He suggested I remove the starter from the tractor and take it to Floyd's Electric Motor Repair in Grand Rapids. When I pulled the starter off the tractor, I found that the housing had broken and the teeth on the starter gear were mangled.
That starter was a sorry sight (see photo)! Fortunately, I was able to remove the pieces of the broken starter housing so they wouldn't jam up the flywheel. I turned the motor over by hand using a large screwdriver to inspect the ring gear one tooth at a time. I was lucky again - no broken teeth. Broken teeth on the ring gear would have required pulling the engine out of the tractor - a major expense.
I took the starter to Floyd's Electric at 8:30 am. The technicians immediately dropped what they were doing to check out the broken starter while I waited. They looked up part numbers on the computer and found that it would take at least a week to order another housing to replace the broken one. To save time, they sent me to Wayland to the tractor bone yard (salvage facility) to see if they had a similar tractor out back with an intact starter. As luck would have it, the bone yard had no similar tractor from which to scrounge parts.
The technicians at Floyd's Electric then went upstairs and looked through rows and rows of old starters they had saved, until they found one with an intact housing similar to the broken housing on my starter. The main difference was that the number of screw holes and the locations of those holes were different than the screw holes in the housing of my broken starter. The technicians machined new screw holes in the old housing to make an exact fit for my starter. Then they replaced the gear and spring on my broken starter. Finally, they put my old starter on the test bench to be sure it had a lot of life in it yet before giving it back to me.
At 2:30 pm Floyd's Electric's technicians called me to say my starter was repaired and ready to pick up. They even gave it a new coat of paint. They had me back in the field 6 hours after I took the starter in, and they charged me only half what I expected to pay.
Who knew such a business existed any more? Floyd's Electric in Grand Rapids is definitely the kind of business we all want to do business with!
April showers bring May flowers, which bring wild strawberries in early June. Uuummm! Patches of wild strawberries are abundant throughout the fields at Wild Rose Meadows. The key is to first find a patch of ripe strawberries, and then to pick the berries that are exactly ripe. All wild strawberries taste good, but when picked at exactly the right time, they are exquisite. Plump, juicy, sweet, glowing bright red against the dark green backdrop - they are wonderful.
Wild strawberries are much smaller than their domesticated cousins. The berries vay from the size of a pencil eraser to the size of a marble. A person has to pick a lot of wild strawberries to get full. Wild strawberries taste even better than domesticated strawberries. After picking and eating a few, our fingers are bright red for the rest of the day, but we don't mind.
The cows like wild strawberries, too. When we walk through a pasture where the cows have been, the strawberry plants stand out, but there isn't a berry left on the plants.
Traditional old fashioned bright orange poppies call out "farm, " don't you think? Allis Chalmers tractors were painted bright orange to match oriental poppies. The Allis Chalmers Corporation called it "Persian Orange." Dave's Grandma and Grandpa had a poppy patch just a few feet from the back porch. When the poppies bloomed we knew it was time to start harvesting the hay crop.When we moved to the farm in the month of September a number of years ago, we didn't know the treasures waiting to be discovered the next spring. You can imagine how excited we were when the snow melted and a parade of flowers started popping up around us. The first flowers that spaing up in the yard were the bloodroots brought up from the woods, and helliborus that stays green all winter. Then the trilliums surprised us, followed by bright bulb plants - white and pink hyaciths, yellow daffodils, blue squill and red tulips.
By late April the flowering trees and shrubs burst into bloom - cherries, dogwood and quince, followed by snowballs, bridal veil and viburnum. The flower gardens turned bright lavender and pink with money plants and phlox, interspersed with purple spheres of alium. Peonies announced the transition into summer, and the processsion of flowers continued well into the fall.
One of the benefits to living on a farm is room - plenty of room to plant all the flowers a person's heart desires. We are thankful that the people who lived here for 30 years before us like flowers as much as we like them.
One of the questions people always ask when they visit Wild Rose Meadows is, "Why are those pieces of wood floating in the cows' water tanks?"There are three reasons:
- The floating pieces of wood discourage ducks from landing in the water tanks to take a swim. Ducks like the plastic ponds when natural ponds dry up in hot weather, but ducks are pretty messy. They can foul a water tank quite quickly. We like ducks, but we don't like them in the water tanks.
- The floating pieces of wood offer safety to cats and chickens that accidently fall into the tank when they perch on the side to take a drink. Without something to hold onto, the cats or chickens would drown before we could rescue them.
- The floating pieces of wood give our honey bees a place to land when they drink. Bees need water, but if they land on the water they can't take off again, so they drown. Bees can land on the floating pieces of wood and drink water while safely staying dry.
A 180 acre farm requires a fair amount of work to keep things running smoothly. Here Dave is harvesting hay, which is the winter food for our cows. Cows graze fields for grass in the summer. In the winter the cows eat hay, which is simply grass that has been mowed, then cured in the sun, and baled for storage.
At Wild Rose Meadows we harvest 350 tons of hay each year. Our herd of cows will consume about 120 tons of hay during the colder months of the year. The rest of the hay is sold to help cover expenses of the farm.
In this photo, Dave is raking hay with grandson Jacob several years ago, using an antique Farmall Tractor built in the 1940's. The hay rake is a newer rotary rake that operates off the tractor power take off. The rotary rake sweeps the mowed grass into windrows. We turn the windrows over two or three times with the rake on successive days to get it dry enough to bale. Hay starts as fresh grass at about 65% moisture and ends up quite dry at about 16% moisture.
The haying process takes about 5 days from the time we mow the grass until we bale hay.
Welcome to Wild Rose Meadows – our little hobby farm that got out of hand. Wild Rose Meadows is now 180 acres into which we pour our hearts, our time and all of our money. It’s a little slice of heaven a mile long and a quarter mile wide.
Our house and barn are located on the north road, while our other barn is located on the south road a mile away. A beautiful trail winds across the fields and through the woods from one barn to the other.
Visitors tell us we live way out in the sticks. They get off the expressway onto a two lane paved road, turn then onto a gravel road, and then turn again onto yet another gravel road. We are surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn and soybean fields.
When we take the back way into town, we are only 12 minutes from Meijer, Wal-Mart and Home Depot. We get to the store faster than most of our friends in town. It’s our best kept secret. We don’t want everyone else to move out here!
Wild Rose Meadows is located in Southwest Michigan, 3 miles off US-131 Expressway, about 20 miles north of Kalamazoo, 25 miles south of Grand Rapids, and 25 miles southeast of Holland. The farm encompasses four different areas of woods, two creeks, and a dozen hay fields, including the “hidden field” that only our grandchildren know about and the “enchanted forest” where there is a tunnel of trees through which we take the grandchildren on hay rides.
We are blessed to have been entrusted with this jewel of nature, and welcome the opportunity to share it with as others who seem to enjoy it as much as we do.
Tales From The Barn
These are true stories about Wild Rose Meadows, a family farm at Otsego, Michigan. The authors of Hoof Prints are Dave and Mary Van Antwerp, farm owners.
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