Sunday, March 11, 2007

Beneficials


Spring is an awesome time. There are so many tiny reminders that the world is awakening and starting all over again. Like this lady bug. I came in from the orchard yesterday and out of the corner of my eye saw that something was crawling on my shoulder. Not knowing what it was I batted it off and then discovered that it was a lady bug. I was relieved she wasn’t hurt. I picked her up and watched her as she crawled over my hand and sleeve. What a marvel these little bugs are, red like an m&m with spots. I led her to a lemon tree where she crawled from me to a new leaf.

Lady bugs and green angle wings are beneficials, those insects that we need more of. They eat the bad ones. Our modern chemical sprays are designed not to harm them. Thank goodness.

My Tractor


A few days after Christmas I bought a tractor—a used John Deere 430 with 2,000 hours on it. My friend Bill Milligan said that at 2,000 hours it was just barely broken in. It has a bucket on front and a blade on back. I can finally grade my roads and no telling what kind of jobs I’ll find for it. I’ll need it a lot in the future when I make some changes to the orchard.

When Dale delivered the tractor he spent 45 minutes telling me what was what. It has about 26 gears and hydraulics to operate the implements. We were sitting out in front of the barn doing all this. After he went through everything, some things twice, I got up in the driver’s seat and worked through the gears and saw how the speed is adjusted with a lever on the dash. Time to park it beside the barn. I put it in low speed forward gear and put-putted toward the barn. I maneuvered it to where I wanted it, lowered the speed and stepped on the brake pedal. Nothing happened. It kept put-putting along. I stomped on the brake again and it still moved forward—right through the fence and the locked gate, knocked them both down, rolled over them and headed to the orchard. Dale finally came running along beside me yelling “Step on the clutch. The clutch!” I stepped on the clutch and the tractor stopped abruptly. And that’s how you stop a tractor. The one thing Dale forgot to tell me.

(The break peddle is just for slowing it down.)