Spring, summer, and fall are full of activities. Winter offers its own special brand of fun. March… March. March is still cold, but also wet. There’s snow, but not the right kind of snow to play in. Everything is wet and muddy, but days are getting longer.

It occurred to me one February that I have maple trees all over the place. I don’t really know how many or exactly which ones are definitely maples, or even what kind of maple they are, but they’re there and they’re certainly substantial in size.

Maples make maple syrup. Turns out, this happens in March, in this area. So let’s begin, with minimal research and some loaner taps and buckets.

I have maples?

Since this “sugar season,” I’ve spent enough time looking at maple trees to be able to identify them most of the time, even without leaves. When you’ve never had to do that before, however, it’s pretty challenging. There are several different appearances the bark can take on due to a number of factors. Leaves are by far the easiest way to identify species, and in winter, the best you can do is dig through the snow to find some leaves, and hope they’re from the tree you’re trying to identify. Some plant identification phone apps can help, but they don’t always get it right with a picture of the bark.

In my case, working backwards helps: I find it easier to identify basswood, birch, ironwood, poplar, ash, and oak. If it’s none of those, odds are it’s maple. I confirmed with several leaves hidden under the snow which species of maple was predominant and, good news: they’re sugar maples (also called hard maples). All maple trees produce sap that can be made into syrup, but sugar maple is the least diluted.

Very quick syrup lesson

• Sap flows when nights are below freezing and days are above freezing, broadly speaking.
• That sap, assuming from a sugar maple, is about 40:1 water to sugar (more specifically, the specific sugar concentration desired for maple syrup).

I’ll give you pretty much all of the knowledge I had going in. You turn sap into syrup by making the water go away in the form of steam. At a constant boil, the water evaporates and the sugar does not, and if you know when to stop, you’re left with syrup. When you filter that reduced product adequately, you stick it in a bottle and voilà, maple syrup. It isn’t rocket science, but as I would learn (and still am), you can make it very, very complicated if you want to. So, the process I was entering:

• Tap maple trees with a “spile”, a spout with a hollow cone that is inserted into a drilled hole in the tree (these holes heal themselves and aren’t harmful to the tree)
• Hang buckets and lids from the spiles to collect sap and prevent excessive rain, debris, or rodents from falling in
• Collect sap as it drips into the buckets
• Boil the sap for long enough to make it look like syrup
• Filter the boiled sap through… something to remove “sugar sand,” or niter, from the syrup, and bottle it

Simply apply heat

As usual, this was last minute the first year and I wanted to keep the cash investment low. The cheapest way to process sap is a pot on a stove top, but you don’t do that because the slightly sticky steam will ruin your house, and the gas or electricity will add up in cost. Wood being the cheaper fuel, you can create a brick structure outside and put a grill over it for a firewood evaporator, but a lot of heat will be lost. The lowest investment approach that’s at least somewhat efficient is called a barrel evaporator, usually made from a 55 gallon drum or an old oil tank.

I bought one of these locally plus a 16”x16” evaporating pan on Amazon. In lieu of fire brick, I dumped some sand into the bottom of the barrel to add some insulation, cut a hole exactly to the size of the pan (the less air leakage the better), and the evaporator was solved. For now.

Time

There’s a lot of waiting on syrup processing, followed by a lot of fast-paced, carefully choreographed timing. Sap only lasts a couple to a few days once it’s out of the tree, longer only if you have cooling capacity (including large snow banks). Realistically, you have two or three days to harvest the sap and get it to a boil. During evaporation, the game is always ensuring there is enough sap in the evaporator and never letting it get too low or too closed to “finished”. How this works varies wildly depending on the setup, but what I call the “walk away time” is how long you can leave the evaporator alone without even slightly risking burning your pans. This does limit the other work or activities you can do while boiling is in progress. Being that I live 2.5 hours away from this property, my friends know that for the month of March (give or take a week or two), I only know my schedule a couple days out.

For a rough sense of how long initial evaporation takes, it’s common to measure an evaporator’s evaporation rate, in gallons or litres per hour. I don’t recall the rate of this particular setup, but it was likely in the range of 12-14L/h, meaning it would take ~6.5 hours to get 100L of sap ready for the next steps, which would take at least another couple hours. 100L would produce approximately 2.5L of syrup.

Finishing

This first year, I lacked the infrastructure to “finish” my syrup at the property. Instead, I would drain my sap from the evaporator when I thought it was getting closer to syrup (say, it’s now 4:1 instead of 40:1). I then drove it home and finished in my kitchen, using an array of pots and pans on the gas stove. Moving the near-finished syrup from the evaporator is common practice, as the evaporator is designed to boil as fast as possible, and does not have an “off” switch when it’s done.

Using a refractometer, I’m aiming for about 67-68% sugar content. When I reach that value, the heat is shut off, and it’s straight to filtration, perhaps the most important step for a quality product. I started out using gravity filters, cone-shaped filters of various grades, simply pouring sap in and letting it seep out the bottom into another pot. A series of more porous pre-filters catch the bulk of “niter,” or “sugar sand”, that naturally occurs during boiling, preventing the more expensive main filter from clogging up too quickly. Apparently that sand makes good coffee sweetener, but I wouldn’t know.

My first few boils were bottled into old whiskey bottles, some mason jars, and at least one pickle jar. To prevent mold growth, I boiled the various vessels before pouring near-boiling syrup in, and capped promptly (with a sanitized cap). Bottles with a narrow neck are preferable to mason jars and the like, as contact with air is where mold growth will start. By the way, that little “handle” that’s common on maple syrup bottles is there for absolutely no good reason. Syrup is shelf stable if bottled correctly, but should be refrigerated after opening.

Expansion

It’s tricky to write about things in the past, having evolved since. A common practice among hobbyist maple syrup producers, however, is changing just enough variables every year to make the following season unknowable. You can always throw a couple/few hundred bucks more at it (or many thousands if you’re really excited), tap more trees, swap out buckets for lines with collection points, improve the evaporation process and filtration, add reverse osmosis to pre-concentrate sap before boiling, even… ahem… build an entire sugar shack to contain this hobby that consumes a month of the year.

Remember, the goal is to provide unlimited maple syrup to your loved ones, friends, neighbours if you like them, and give you a default stocking stuffer/housewarming gift/thank you that nobody can ever be mad about (it’s true, I promise). The market rate for a litre of “home made” syrup is around $25/litre, but everybody who has ever made it knows it should be about $100.

If you know me well, ask me for some syrup. Quantities become limited as winter approaches and supply dwindles.

More photos

One more tractor thing. Just one more.

As I mentioned in the first tractor-heavy post, a tractor is a core on which to install tools. I’ll go through my solution for each task:

• material handling (pallet forks)
• clearing snow (snow blower? plow?)
• logging (pulling logs out of the forest for primarily firewood)
• firewood splitting
• wood chipper

Making tractor do stuff

There are two places to accessorize a tractor. The loader, which uses standard mount points for buckets, forks, grapple, etc., and the 3 point hitch (3PH or 3-point). For the latter, an implement can use either or both the power take-off (PTO), or hydraulic remotes (quick-attach ports to plumb into the hydraulic system, each controllable from the seat).

In order of purchase, here’s the stable of implements.

The loader

This tractor has an ALO quick attach on its loader. Any form of quick attach is simply a means to change attachments without using tools (usually), as opposed to taking out a couple bolts and using a hammer and punch to knock pins out in order to change attachments. ALO is common for slightly larger tractors, while “skid steer style” quick attach is the norm for compact tractors, sharing attachments with construction equipment. They’re similar, both requiring a handle or two to be rotated 90º to release the attachment.

A shortcoming of this particular tractor is that it doesn’t have “third function” plumbing, a way to describe hydraulic ports out on the loader arms. This would allow for a grapple, a bucket with grabby arms for handling logs and the like. It would be prohibitively expensive to add third function hydraulics, unfortunately.

In lieu of a grapple bucket, I bought a set of forks to make moving bulky or long materials easier. The forks themselves can be spread apart or pushed together to match the load they’re faced with. Without forks or dragging the log long-ways, moving a log would generally require wrapping them with chain in two places to attach to the bucket or loader itself, which I did for a few weeks and can’t recommend.

Logging winch

I wouldn’t have thought to look for a winch for this purpose. After all, can’t you just put a chain around a fallen tree and drag it out with, you know, the tractor? The reality is, unless the tree happens to be immediately adjacent to a road, it’s going to be hard to pull it out. Especially if the direction of the road isn’t the direction you initially need to pull the log in.

Enter logging winch, my first PTO-driven implement. Mounted to the 3-point and connected to the PTO, the winch contains a spool of heavy duty braided steel cable and a clutch. The cable runs through some configurable pulleys and away from the back of the machine. The bottom of the winch, meant to be sitting on the ground when in use, is a blade designed to dig in and prevent the winch from pulling the tractor instead of the load. The cable includes multiple means of fixing itself to logs.

In a rare occurrence, I bought a brand new thing for this role. I went with the Wallenstein FX110, an 11,000LB pull capacity model. Made in Canada (not far from me, in fact), 5 year warranty, and visibly well built. I’ll get into the details on how logging works with this thing another time, there’s a lot to it and it’s very, very fun.

Snow blower

I’d only seen one winter at this point, but it was clear that the snow gets deep, and that the private section of road (1.4km worth) is not consistently maintained by anyone. I’ve been asked why I didn’t get a plow for my Tacoma, and the answer is simply that it isn’t big enough and plows are very hard on trucks, especially transmissions. I decided to go the route of a snow blower when I found a good deal on a used Walco MK Martin (also made in Canada) 7-foot wide model.

The blower is also a 3-point mount, with both PTO for the snow auger and hydraulics for remotely rotating the chute (for when you start blowing into the wind or at the side of your truck). Notably, this is a very typical PTO blower in that it points backwards, meaning you drive backwards to use it. If this doesn’t sound terribly fun, you’d be right, but remember that you get to do that while diligently contorting yourself to look backwards and being exposed to the elements in their entirety. So at least you get to be a popsicle, too. There are units called “rear pull” blowers that allow you to drive forward, and they seem to work as long as the tractor is capable of first driving through the snow head-on to get the blower to it (not always a given). These also wouldn’t allow you to clear by backing up to a building or dead end of any sort. Finally, they seem to cost three times as much, I’m not entirely sure why.

Apart from those downsides, the blower blows. After all, it’s a 61 horsepower snowblower standing a couple feet tall. With the right gear selection and throttle, it has cleared a metre of snow along the 1.4km of road, plus my driveway, in one pass. A second pass helps to widen the road a bit. There is a learning curve, and early in the season before the road is frozen solid, it’s easy to scoop some gravel accidentally, which is more a waste of gravel than anything else.

Wood chipper

Another accessory that turns rotational energy (PTO) into a useful mechanism. A wood chipper, at its simplest, is a giant steel “flywheel” with blades embedded in it. Because the wheel is a massive, heavy piece of steel, once it is up to speed, it has enough momentum to avoid slowing down too much as hearty wood is shoved through it I think somebody once called this Conservation of Momentum. I had a couple projects I won’t get into just yet that involved a lot of tree branches laying around, and as a pleasant side effect, a chipper produces wood chips as a byproduct, which is useful as ground cover.

I found a Wallenstein BX62 3-point chipper that was clearly a few years old, but had so little use that the paint on the input chute wasn’t even worn yet, and the cutting knives showed no wear on their first (of two) edge. The unit takes wood up to about 6 inches, depending on the species (6 inch pine? no problem! ironwood? let’s talk about shear pins!).

Both the snow blower and chipper have “shear pins” (or “shear bolts”). These are designed to break under high stress (specifically calibrated) before any other, more expensive components do. If a machine has shear pins on a hard-working component, one should also have spare shear pins on hand in case they try to find the upper limit of the machine. There’s nothing wrong with snapping a shear pin here and there, but it should teach you about the limits of the machine and how to operate within them. I’ve also blown the snowblower pin by inhaling a steel stake in the auger by accident.

Part of what made this unit affordable was that is a “gravity feed” model, meaning the only things sending wood through the chipper is gravity and the operator. The chipper tends to pull through material when it’s not too crooked (causing it to get caught up on the chute), and a little trick to “convince” it to eat is to stick something straighter in beside a hangup to drag it all in. The alternative is a hydraulic feed unit, which at least doubles the cost. These use a hydraulic motor with a set of teeth to force material into the chipper. It would be nice, but for occasional use, gravity feed works just fine.

Log splitter

I didn’t know tractor log splitters were a Thing. A log splitter is simply a hydraulic ram (like the shiny chrome things on the tractor loader that extend and retract) with a wedge on it, and a hard “stop” to push the log against, so it makes sense that it could be powered from the tractor’s hydraulics.

The only thing I knew going in was I was getting a Splitfire. They’re what rental companies generally carry, because they’re well built and put up with abuse. They’re also and yet another Made in Canada item. Their “trick” is that the wedge has two splitting edges, front and back, and a log can be split on either side of the wedge, theoretically increasing efficiency. Once again, I found a decent deal ($1,200 if I remember correctly).

Okay, so I did end up selling this thing. I bring that up so I can better list pros and cons of a tractor-mounted log splitter:

Pros

• Not adding another engine to maintain (before the property I had one engine, at this point… five and counting.)
• Height of the machine can be adjusted using the 3-point to find the comfortable spot
• Seems fun

Cons

• Puts hours on the tractor (on which maintenance is more expensive than a standalone small engine)
• Requires some set-up and tear-down to use (swapping it onto the 3-point in place of whatever was on previously, which can easily take ten minutes each for installing and un-installing)
• Can’t use the tractor loader to handle the split firewood, as it’s on the other end of the tractor, which is in use
• Can’t move the splitter around without a machine (freestanding units are usually on trailer wheels and can be muscled around a bit)

What it really comes down to is setup time. If the splitter never sits on the tractor by default (and it never will), it means that any time you decide you want to throw an hour at generating firewood, the first and last ten minutes are spent swearing at inanimate objects. It’s enough to stop those short firewood sessions from happening, and subsequently, enough to let your firewood stash run low (ask me how I know).

I found another deal on a standalone Splitfire, mounted to trailer wheels and hitch, with a Honda engine (the correct small engine) and sold the 3-point model on.

That’s it, that’s the Tractor Stuff.

That’s the fleet. By default, the tractor has its bucket and the logging winch installed. I don’t use the winch all the time, but it’s relatively compact while being nice and heavy, assisting rear traction. I have one or two more items in mind for the future, but nothing urgent.

The next post will not be about tractor stuff. promise.

More photos

The forest gets its first structure! Naturally, the tractor gets a home before I do. As a chaotic builder, this project doesn’t go off without some lessons learned:

• measure the thing that’s meant to go in the place and make sure the place is the right size
• if your building doesn’t have walls or a floor, consider the complexity of the roof
• you can calculate snow load and build accordingly
• my property is one inch of soil and then rock until the molten centre of the earth

Now let’s interrogate how I learned those things, and whether I’ve fixed mistakes (no).

Napkin sketch

The impetus for a tractor shed was the simple fact that sun kills machines. UV radiation fades paint, but more importantly, breaks down rubber and plastic. Hydraulic hoses, in particular, are very expensive (think hundreds of dollars for a medium length hose). Secondarily, it does snow here, and while the seat does (very luxuriously) flip forward to avoid getting wet, that doesn’t stop the entire machine being covered in a couple feet of snow. While a whole-ass building with climate control would be ideal, we’re not even close.

So, I grabbed the only piece of paper I had available (instructions for a grease gun, and not even a blank page), and scrawled a design like an animal. I probably searched the internet for photos of similar structures for up to twenty seconds. The design is a simple mono-slope, or “shed” roof—four posts, and some bracing to prevent racking in both directions (racking is a rectangle becoming a parallelogram unintentionally). I knew some of it would be pressure treated lumber as it’s in the elements, and I knew it would have a steel roof—long lasting, relatively easy to install on simple roofs despite my attempts to make it complicated, and lighter than shingle (I think). I had no intention of adding any sort of floor, because this is a tractor shed. for a tractor.

This would also be one of the first jobs for the tractor’s loader. After multiple minutes of consideration, I chose a flat (hah) piece of land just off the driveway that had only saplings on it, and scraped them off the dirt. I pushed the loosest of the soil straight back into the forest to prepare the site. I was excited to build, an ever prevalent theme, and figured I could clean up around the complete structure.

I landed on 10’ deep by 14’ wide for the structure footprint, with an additional foot of roof overhang on all sides. I’m not sure how I landed on this size, as the tractor with loader is easily 12’+, without any attachments. I laid out the footings using two tape measures and the only piece of elementary school math I remember: a²xb²=c².

Footing school

I’ve built enough that I understand the approximate principles of a concrete footing for a post. It’s not complicated, use a builder’s tube (Sonotube™, henceforth sonotube) in a hole to contain concrete, make sure the hole is deep enough to be below the frost line (4’ depth is common here), and put a saddle to hold the post in the wet concrete. One can put the post directly in the concrete, but I subscribe the idea that this approach will rot a post out and be impossible to replace.

With my footings measured out, I dug in each position to find the following depths before hitting granite bedrock: 30”, 18”, 12”, 4”.

Now, the reason one sets posts below the frost line is so that it can’t heave from beneath as the ground freezes and thaws. You know what doesn’t move when it freezes or thaws (at least not in a human lifetime)? Bedrock. So, depth isn’t really an issue here, and if I can fasten the concrete to the bedrock adequately, the depth shortage is a gift to my back.

The approach I settled on was drilling ½” holes into the bedrock, filling them with purpose-made epoxy, and sticking rebar (“reinforcing bar”—ribbed steel rod) into the epoxy-filled holes. I then cut the sonotube to the profile of the bedrock and place it over the rebar. Now the concrete, once cured, would be pinned to the rock. This approach would be repeated on other projects, as there isn’t much soil on most of this land, just enough to hide the massive sheets of rock.

While cutting the sonotubes level using a laser line, I realized how far from level the patch of land was. I had about 16” of variance from the back right to the front left. Oops.

Structure

I used 6x6 pressure treated (PT) posts for the corners, sat in the saddles that I put in the footings. Herein lies a mid mistake: I lifted the saddles ½” off the surface of the setting concrete to avoid rot in the bottom of the post. While a good thought, the embedded “stake” portion of the saddle is basically a piece of rebar, which has a lot of tensile strength (resists being pulled apart) but is soft and bends relatively easily. With this approach, the four points of contact to the ground are all somewhat flexible. In the future, I would use saddles with “uplift” built in. Still, this shouldn’t be a problem with a sufficiently strong structure.

Next, I laminated three 16’ 2x6’s together (glued and nailed every foot or two at opposing angles) for the front and rear beams that would hold the rafters. I chose 2x6 because… well, that’s the problem. More on this in a minute.

To complete the structure itself, I spent some time learning how to cut rafters from more 2x6 stock. Once I had one rafter I was happy with, I used it as a “story stick” and copied it for the rest of the rafters, making sure to use the same story stick for every rafter to avoid compounding errors.

Did you know you can use math to answer questions?

Back to those triple 2x6 beams. I guessed the material, and didn’t think hard enough. The first winter the shed was standing, I noticed a bow in the back beam, at the low end of the roof where the snow weight concentrates. The bow was enough that I put together a temporary brace for the center of the beam, a temporary fix which is still in place now, as the triple 2x6 is insufficient for its 14 foot span.

This is not a difficult problem to have foreseen. Were I doing this today, I would simply look up my local snow load, which is 2.7kPa (or 44 pounds per square foot), and use a span calculator to determine the minimum beam to adequately support the load. In this case, at least 2x10’s are called for. If it was for a dwelling, I’d want an engineer’s input.

At some point in the future, I might lift the roof off the beam and hot-swap it with a correctly sized one, as days are numbered for that temporary support before I accidentally turn it into scrap with the tractor bucket.

Roof

Here’s where things get a little sloppy. For the roof, I carefully calculated how little plywood I could get away with buying (plywood prices were insane at this point), and purchased underlayment, membrane, and strapping. I diligently screwed the plywood down and adhered the membrane around the low edge and sides of the roof, and then put membrane over the middle. I attached drip edge on the low side, and laid strapping every 16” or so horizontally across the roof.

Here’s the problem. Why was anything more than strapping (thin wooden lengths to give the steel sheets consistent horizontal lines to screw to) needed? While a roof should be water tight, this building doesn’t have walls or a floor. It should be inconsequential if the underside of the roof gets wet. Lesson learned—be aware of the building’s broader context. Not everything is a dwelling. The plus side: I could close this in at some point in the future and enjoy a more substantial and weather tight roof. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening.

Bonus: Floor!

A year or two after completing the tractor shed, I had leftover concrete in a concrete truck from another project. That concrete is paid for and has to be dumped somewhere one way or another, so the friends I had to help with the other project helped me throw together a quick and dirty concrete form to make use of the spare material. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t even level, but it was a foot-thick slab covering most of the floor space in the shed.

More photos

I can’t remember exactly when I decided I needed a tractor. I think I’d half-joked about it, maybe gauging friend’s reactions. I can say, however, that I understood effectively nothing remotely to do with machinery. I knew I needed help with:

• collecting firewood
• clearing the road in winter
• lifting things I can’t lift

That’s about it. While an ATV, which I already have, can do some of these things, it’s not what it’s made for and it will be slow work that wears hard on the machine. So, let’s buy a tractor then. Fair warning, this post is heavy on Tractor Stuff.

Tractors

I knew nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about tractors or machinery in general. It’s not that they’re particularly complicated, in fact they’re somewhat famously simple in many ways (after all, maintenance and repairs are often performed in the field), but there is a lot to know outside of knowing the machine itself, and they are unlike road vehicles in that usually routine maintenance isn’t carried out at a mechanic shop or dealer, as that would mean a long, slow drive on the highway, or hundreds or thousands of dollars in freight. I had never even changed an engine’s oil, so this should go swimmingly.

Anyways, knowing too little has never stopped me from diving straight in, skipping several research steps.

I’m so sorry, I have to describe what a tractor is

Tractors are the original “naked robotic core”. They provide a place for an operator to sit, an engine, transmission, wheels, and hydraulic circuit. They also include a “3 point hitch,” 3 arms on the rear of the tractor that can grab various implements (attachments), and a PTO (“power take off”), that allows sending engine power through a shaft into implements, for example to spin a snow blower auger or a mower. They don’t even necessarily have a bucket on the front, that’s a “loader,” and it’s generally optional equipment. A tractor on its own can only move itself and pull something behind it—the name covers it, TRACtor, they’re build to provide traction for whatever job you give it.

Tractors are given abilities using implements, including the loader. The main variables when choosing a tractor are size, power (usually proportional to size), open/closed station (whether it has an enclosed cab or not), 2wd/4wd, and hydraulic system implementation details. There are plenty more attributes, but this is called Cabin in the Woods, not Wow Tractors I Love Tractors.

There, that wasn’t painful, right?

So what am I looking for?

I started out looking at new machines, primarily Kubota. One valuable piece of advice I’d received was to buy a machine that had local dealers so that repairs and parts would be accessible. The other reason I was looking at Kubota was that they’re well known for compact tractors.

A friend had suggested that if I plan to be in the forest a lot, which I do, I should go for an “open station,” meaning no cab, no weather cover, no heat/AC. No cab means nothing to damage scraping trees and branches, the ability to reach “into” the cab from either side to adjust controls, and the possibility of freezing to death when clearing snow (but it’s spring, snow is like, so far away I might as well ignore it).

I imagined not a tiny tractor, but what I considered a medium-compact size. Something that looks like it can actually pull a log, but really, how much tractor does a non-farmer need? Well, as it turns out, the same friend that suggested I freeze to death in winter get an open station machine was insistent that the 26-40hp tractors I was looking at would be regretted purchases. Better to have too much than too little, it seems.

The one

I think I’ve mentioned before that I buy a lot of things used. If not, well, I do that. The driven-off-the-lot discount is too good to pass up as long as the product doesn’t look abused. Though the LX2610 pictured above was me looking at new machines, I quickly reverted to buying used when it became clear I was to buy a larger machine.

I looked at small handful of 55+HP units (my directive was basically “no such thing as too much tractor”) including an AgCo and a Mahindra, but finally had a close look at a Kubota M7040SU (sometimes called M7040SUHD, I’m not sure why). As with a lot of machinery, the power is in the model number - 70HP. The SU is apparently Special Utility and the HD is… Hydraulic Shuttle? For some reason? The dealer told me the SU meant it was equipped with slightly fewer “comfort” options, but the only example they could provide was that it lacked rubber floor mats. In a tractor. An open station tractor. Works for me. The most “comfort” option this tractor has is that the seat flips up against the steering wheel so rain water doesn’t pool on it (really a pretty valuable feature, to be honest).

I won’t drag you through every detail of the machine, but the basics are:

• 70HP diesel 4 cylinder, 4WD
• 1,070 hours (2015 year model)
• 8 forward/8 reverse gears through a hydraulic shuttle transmission
• loader with approx. 2,500lb max capacity
• 3 point hitch and ~62hp PTO
• “loaded” rear tires and double wheel weights
• it’s orange

I took it for a test drive in the lot, but it took a while to get the basics of operation down. I’ve heard it said that a new type of machine commonly takes around 50 hours to gain proficiency with, and that seems about right to me. The net new concept to me was the hydraulic shuttle transmission. The tractor has a clutch, and you can change gears while in motion, but the clutch is not needed for switching between forward, neutral, and reverse. I think you have to try it (or watch some youtube) to understand it. Forget I said anything.

Loaded tires are tires half-2/3 filled with a fluid to add weight to the machine, in this case at the rear. This is helpful because if you are carrying a lot of weight with the loader, your rear end will lose traction. The fluid has to have a low freezing point in colder climates for obvious reasons, and the common choices are a calcium additive or beet juice. I’m not sure which I have, and I hope to never need to find out, because these tires are almost as tall as I am. The rear wheels also have weights bolted to them, two large pieces of iron each at probably 150-225lb per wheel.

4WD is also relevant to heavy loader usage. When your rear end is getting a little light, you’ll still have drive on the front wheels. This is (at least in part) why pickup trucks, vans, busses, etc. are RWD: it is expected that most of the payload will be over the rear wheels, and will assist traction.

Something I was pleased to learn during purchase: zero-rated farm equipment in Canada.

Farmers typically do not collect tax on their sales, but they still pay the GST/HST on their taxable purchases. In recognition of potential cash flow problems, certain agricultural equipment is specifically identified as being zero-rated. The list of selected agricultural equipment is generally limited to major equipment of a type purchased exclusively by farmers.

In short, tractors with a PTO rated at 60HP or above (62, here, not to brag) are zero-rated and are taxed at 0%. This was pure luck, and I would have adjusted my search to this threshold had I known beforehand. Anyways, if anyone asks, I’m a farmer.

Finally, machine hours. Cars and trucks are, I think, the only types of vehicles that primarily describe their usage in mileage (kilometre-age?), because most of the time they’re in use, they’re in transit. Tractors are often moving while they are in use, but often very slowly and sometimes not at all, and in either case can be working pretty hard all along. I am not a mechanic by any stretch of the imagination, but with enough exposure, I think you get a sense of how to convert hours to how “used up” the machine is, along with visual indicators. Learning what to listen for in various areas (engine, hydraulics, bearings, pins and bushings) also comes with time. All of that said, a thousand hours is basically new as long as service intervals have been followed, and it would take significant abuse and neglect to significantly harm a machine by that point.

Delivery

I mentioned there’s more to know about heavy machinery than the machine itself. Well, I drive a Tacoma with a max tow of about 6,300lb. This tractor, with its loader and fluid-filled tires, weighs in the ballpark of 8,500lb. Even if a trailer weighed nothing, I wouldn’t be able to tow this tractor. The dealer was 2.5 hours from the lake. I took the dealer’s recommendation on a local transport and booked delivery.

Now, I’ve mentioned that the road I’m on is winding, narrow, steep in places, and maintained (barely) by the handful of property owners on it. This delivery was the second I’d ever planned, after the shipping container, and I was very careful to confirm the type of transport it would be arriving on. Given it was a heavy duty pickup and a long gooseneck trailer, I told the driver specifically where to drive to and wait for me, a part of the wider, more forgiving, municipally maintained road leading to mine.

This would be the first of many (oh so many) times my careful words were ignored. The driver called when he was half way down the 1.4km of private road, 700m past the point I told him to wait at due to known hazards, bottomed out on a crest in the road (one of several). I didn’t even tell him I was down that road, I don’t know where he was going.

I was not prepared for this, and it took at least two hours and a few damaged trees to negotiate with the driver how to proceed, get my tractor unloaded, and get him and his 35+ foot trailer back out. I didn’t even know how to properly operate my machine yet. The driver was clearly angry with me for the situation he found himself in and for the scratches and scrapes his trailer experienced, and it took everything I had not to throw it back in his face. Had he stopped where I told him to, it would have been a simple job and he’d have been home for dinner. Oh how I wish this were the worst instance of this I’d experience.

Implements

As I’ve mentioned, a tractor is an engine for whatever you attach to it. But I’ve gone on long enough, I’m going to make this a two-parter.

Almost forgot

It sucks when people don’t talk money at all. The machine was about CA$39,000 in spring 2021, and it was about $800 to freight it 2.5-3h away.

More photos

A bit of catch up. Some projects just aren’t super interesting, and in the early days, there were a few of those.

The summer of 2020, I basically left my tent pitched on the shoreline and different friend groups came by every weekend to get out of the city, where there was simultaneously not much going on and way too much going on.

Still, most projects were solo endeavours between visits. There remains no real plan for developing on the land besides “have fun with it.”

Dock

A dock was obviously at the top of my list as soon as I had firewood covered. As usual, minimal research was done and I have little experience with docks. Here’s what I thought I knew:

• Fixed docks, meaning docks that sit on the bottom of the lake as opposed to floating, are more enjoyable. They don’t move as you walk on them, with the waves and wind, etc.
• Fixed docks and frozen lakes don’t really mix, unless you lift the dock out before winter, either by hauling them out manually or using a large winch system that lifts them above the water. The former requires several people, the latter is costly and ugly.
• My lake is very small. The issue with docks and winter seems to be ice movement. Now, I haven’t yet seen a winter, but I don’t think the ice will move much on a body of water this small.

The easy path forward is a floating dock. While you can build docks around sealed plastic barrels for floatation, I found some floats near by that make building the dock very easy. These floats sit within the dock frame itself.

Building these went fast. The biggest challenge was building the first section, as I have nowhere flat to work. Once I’d cobbled together the first section and the “ramp” to connect it to shore, I launched it, and built the second section on top of the first.

The only contenders for decking were cedar and composite. I don’t like the look of pressure treated for decks, and it isn‘t necessary in a dock beyond the frame, which is more prone to getting (and staying) wet. Composite has a habit of getting hot under the feet (and is expensive). Cedar is also pricey, but is good looking, long lasting, and easy to work with. I coated the deck with a cheap sealer from a local shop, but that sealant failed within a year and the decking is now a typical “silver” cedar. It‘s due a sand and re-finish with a better product.

Lastly, I didn’t incorporate any kind of “ground anchor” in my original plan. I have two concrete anchors at the end of the dock to keep it from drifting too far, but this dock was simply resting on the ground for quite a while before I got around to improving that end.

Shelter

No, not for me. I like tents (for now). The shipping container is great for water tight security, but it’s small. I realize now I probably could have gotten away with a bigger one, but my thinking was that I didn’t want to do anything that could potentially tilt the scales against my favour with a building inspector having a bad day.

I found a vinyl carport for around $700 and figured that would make a good rain/snow cover for a while. I learned that 1) yes, you can put one of these up solo with a single A-frame ladder (but my tolerance for improvisation while working solo is high), and 2) you absolutely cannot allow snow to build up on these things.

I wound up ordering around 18 new pole sections to repair this after its first winter, and it met its final end two years later due to an unexpectedly large snowfall. These things probably work well if you anchor them very firmly across both sides and are able to push snow past a few inches off right away.

More exploring

For reasons I‘ll hopefully get to another day, I had a wildlife biologist walk through the entire property with me. He just about knew the land better than I, having reviewed aerial imagery and having a general familiarity with this part of the province. We walked through 5-6 zones of interest and he recorded flora & fauna species (including birds, by sound), density, and other things a little above my pay grade.

While the entire time I had him was fascinating, one particular moment stood out. We visited a corner of the property I would have assumed I‘d seen by then, but apparently had not. While most of the property is hilly with a pretty dense understory (saplings abound) or marshy, this far corner gives way to steep rock, very old Eastern White Cedars, and moss so deep you wouldn’t want to drop your phone for fear of losing it.

The couple acres in this corner are by far the most beautiful and I was thrilled to “discover” it last. I routinely visit despite the 25-30 minute walk each way.

More photos

I have a garage in the city and a truck to bring things to and fro, but it gets old loading and unloading the truck, and the truck needs to be able to haul building materials in to the property. Clearly, I need storage on the property that is 1) weather tight, and 2) secure, in which to store all of the new toys this place will necessitate give me an excuse to buy.

While working out a solution, I also began to warm up to the idea of an ATV (four wheeler, quad, quad bike, probably some other names I don’t know) for the purpose of shuttling stuff up and down from the lake more easily, as well as getting to the back of the property without a twenty-plus minute hike.

Shipping Containers

I’ve never touched a shipping container (“sea can”) before, but they came to mind immediately. They come in several sizes, they’re famously water tight enough to float for a bit after they fall off ships, they’re strong (they have to be in order to be stacked several high), and they’re a commodity, meaning they cost less than it seems like they should given their size due to how common and standardized they are.

Knowing that I’ll eventually build something on this property, I made sure the shipping container wouldn’t be a problem with the municipal building department. I couldn’t find any specific mention of containers, so the only thing that seemed to apply was a maximum footprint of 108 square feet before a permit is required (a building permit is always required if the structure is any kind of dwelling, regardless of size). This meant the smallest container possible, eight by ten feet, was the answer.

At the time, containers were in the ballpark of CA$3,250-$4,500 depending on its size and some other properties. I ordered a refurbished unit (re-painted and with lock hardware installed on the door) for $3,810, delivered from a couple hours away.

I’m out of space…?

I had planned a position for the container and dug out the four corners the container would sit on, and this would be the beginning of many struggles with figuring out where to put things–a funny problem to have on 69 acres. The developer had given me a decent driveway, as well as access down to the lake, and one cleared space near the beginning of the driveway. I knew right away that the cleared space would forever be necessary for vehicles, especially trucks, to turn around in, and promised myself I’d never screw myself by putting anything too immovable there. The container also obviously wasn’t going down to the lake; that would be prohibitively challenging and result in a giant steel box on my beautiful (okay, beautification in progress) waterfront.

Power lines follow my driveway, where in the rest of the area, they follow the road. Where the driveway turns left to go down to the lake, the lines continue into the forest. They are also followed by a relatively clear path in the forest towards my neighbours, presumably so crews could install the lines and maintain them. I actually learned later that my driveway was the original path of the road, and it was moved back, further from the water, before the lots were sold off to make more room on the waterfront. This created an enticing position for the container, as it wouldn’t require any clearing and a flat bed truck could back up to it in a straight shot. I did wonder about future line maintenance, but with a lack of alternatives, I decided the container would live here. Besides, I’ve seen videos of people dragging containers around with trucks and chains, surely it would be possible to move it in the future (I was completely correct).

Delivery

It’s time for me to learn What Other People Think of My Road. A few issues.

• I don‘t have a street address, or what‘s sometimes called a 911 address out here yet, so it‘s down to written or verbal directions. Some people are good with this, some people have no idea how to judge distance or, apparently, signage.
• I‘m down a couple kilometres of completely reasonable, municipally maintained cottage road, but then down another kilometre and a bit of private, owner-maintained road that is much narrower, hillier, windier, rougher, and, listen, it’s not the best, okay?
• I‘m not a truck driver, so I don‘t know what can and can‘t fit down my road, and if something gets stuck, it’s very unlikely anybody else can get in/out.

This driver in particular called me when they were half way down the private road, audibly spooked, and I drove out to meet and coach them. Realistically, they were fine, but I empathize; they haven’t seen that there is definitely a turn around space and that the road does not get significantly worse.

I had put some gravel and a cinderblock on each corner. I assumed that a steel (or “COR-TEN,” a corrosion-resistant high tensile strength alloy used for containers to prevent rust in a salt water environment) container would be best kept off the wet ground. I then learned, when the truck arrived, that a flat bed truck is not accurate enough to drop a container precisely on four blocks. I quickly gave up on my masterful foundation and threw the blocks wherever the container was going, and the impact of the container ended up shattering a couple of them. I have no reasonable way of remedying this, so onwards we go.

My takeaway from the delivery was that I know for certain that a 27-foot flat bed shouldn’t have any trouble on my road; I’d use this as an important point of reference going forward. This would not prevent me from finding out first-hand what does not fit down my road. Sigh.

Room for Toys

I genuinely don’t think the idea of an ATV entered my mind until the sea can was in place. As this is early summer 2020, it’s close to impossible to shop for anything. Additionally, though I was ahead of everyone on getting land, I was behind the curve on Country Toys. My requirements for an ATV were:

• is ATV shaped
• works

Really, I don’t know anything. I do generally buy things used, however, a market that had been thoroughly picked over in the spring. I found a 2016 Polaris Sportsman 850SP EPS an hour away at a dealer and made the deal. It’s funny to evaluate something you don’t understand; my “test ride” was more of a “what is an ATV” crash course. Anyway, that model name means:

• 850cc displacement. This is the physical size of the engine, and this number is high for a machine this size. I wasn’t looking for this. There are small European cars with smaller engines. This means only the first 30% of the throttle is useful and lively, and the rest simply launches you into low earth orbit, where there is no oxygen and you die. At least part of that is correct.
• SP probably stands for SPecial. I don’t know.
• EPS: Electric power steering. I didn’t really know this at the time, but EPS is not common on these machines. Unfortunately, I’d learn later why adding a bunch of not-strictly-necessary electrical features to machines that are meant to live in the mud and the rain isn’t great for longevity.

The wrong trailer

The other part of this deal was a trailer to bring the machine home on. I really didn’t think this through, and should have paid to have it delivered, as I didn’t know what else I would use a trailer for and the selection was limited. I knew I wouldn’t be trailering the ATV around much, if at all (this won’t ever become much of a hobby for me, it’s a means of transport on rougher terrain). I took the ATV home on a Polaris branded single-axel aluminum trailer. Aluminum is a premium, but is much lighter than steel and doesn’t rust after a few years. Did I mention there was limited stock and this was pretty much all they had?

It would only have made sense to get a more cargo-oriented trailer, but I had no way of knowing that would ever be a need, or what the right trailer would look like. I think these two photos do a decent job illustrating how this trailer was poorly suited to any future hauling. Besides what is pictured (trailer’s too little), it also has a lower weight capacity than the truck can handle, and the single axel means that any pothole is an event, bouncing that side of the trailer into the air. Things to address in the future.

The right trailer

No, I didn’t immediately trade in the ATV trailer. To complete the ATV, I purchased a trailer for it. I mean… for it to tow. Yikes, let’s just assume I’m talking about the latter from now on.

I found this Range Road trailer on clearance, its yellow paint was UV faded and… that’s all. Buying “used” is great. The steel panels are all galvanized, the front and rear panels are easily removable, and the bed can be released to manually pivot up and dump its load. Similar to the other trailer, one thing I’d change is getting a tandem axel (two axels rather than one, four wheels total) to better handle particularly rough terrain, but it’s no trouble unless one was to haul a person or two. Hypothetically.

For what it’s worth, Range Road gets a rare okie dokie from me. I also have a theory; this company’s logo is in no-shit Comic Sans, and the products are both high quality and relatively affordable. Less money spent on looking like a real grown-up company, more on developing good products at reasonable price points. There seems to be an inverse relationship between brand design prowess/marketing and product quality. I will stand by this until it bites me.

More photos

In May, 2020 I closed on 69 acres of vacant land on a little lake in the Kawarthas, north-east of Toronto.

I didn’t know I wanted this until, as I like to say, I got bored before most people at the start of the pandemic. I’m a border collie; I need space to play. I searched online for properties within 2.5h of the city, on water, and 50 acres or more. Why? Not sure, but I wanted a forest to play with. What does that mean? I don’t know. My timing was lucky; very soon after agreeing to purchase, rural and particularly cottage country property values inflated as people fled the now-unsettlingly-quiet urban areas.

During the brief search, I strongly considered larger properties that weren’t on shorelines (even more space for activities), but instead with streams or rivers running through or adjacent to them. I still like this idea and would consider it in the future; moving water is a wonderful feature even if it doesn’t support swimming or canoeing the way a lake does, and these properties are often larger, less costly, and more isolated.

Lay of the land

The property I landed on struck a perfect balance for me in more ways than I realized at the time.

The lakeside area of the property is on one side of the small private access road shared with a few cottages, and consists of about five acres with a steep hill leading down to the lake. Fortunately, the land developers built an access driveway down to a large plateau near lake level. A 30 metre building setback disallows building anything that close to the water, instead logically setting any structures at the top of the hill, hopefully with a view. It should be said, this hill doesn’t look like much, but it winds even fit people often. I’m not sure stairs would be significantly easier.

The lake itself is very small, around 35 acres and 750m at its longest. An upside to a lake this small that I hadn’t quite realized initially is that it is simply too small to bother putting a motorboat on. There are a couple tin cans on the lake with electric trawling motors on them, but those are silent. It is surrounded on all sides by private property, so there’s no legal, public access for others to launch boats from.

In the back acreage, on the other side of the road, there are several acres occupied by wetland that the local beavers flooded with a dam decades ago. The forest is primarily deciduous, and very diverse. Most commonly, Sugar & Red Maple, Black & White Ash, Poplar & Largetooth Aspen, American Basswood, Balsam Fir, White Spruce, Black Cherry, Red Oak, White Elm, White & Yellow Birch, and Ironwood. More on how I learned that another time. The area was selectively logged for more valuable, mature hardwood trees about 15-20 years ago, before the lots were severed off and sold.

As I found the first time I tried to circumnavigate the property with a couple friends, the wetlands make hiking the property boundary quite difficult, and in fact walking from the lake to the back of the property is almost impossible without getting your feet wet. Fortunately, access is made easy to the back third of the property due to another right of way (purple on the map) that cuts directly through to provide access to some other properties. Additionally, a legal ATV allowance (blue) cuts from that road through the back of the lot to a hydro corridor. Besides these passages, the forest is wild, hilly, and can be challenging to traverse in places. Steep hills (think several minutes of grabbing and pulling on roots) cut through the land in multiple places.

At the lakefront plateau, there’s a surprisingly good view. A past owner had clear cut the cedar trees along 100 feet of the shoreline, something you simply aren’t allowed to do even if you do own the Shore Road Allowance (I don’t). While I am no authority on the subject, I do know that shoreline ecology is sensitive, and often protected. This issue came up before purchase, and I had to confirm with every government body I could reach (not many, as you may recall, things were slightly out of sorts at the time) that the issue would not be pursued. It is my goal to re-plant and restore the ecosystem while attempting to maintain some of the view I’ve become accustomed to.

Confusingly, the trees that had been clear cut weren’t even put to use, they were in two neat piles on the plateau, divided into hardwood and softwoods. This created two immediate tasks. First, build a shelter to begin seasoning firewood in. I’m no firewood pro (what’s a firewood pro), but I know that split wood needs to air dry for a period before it burns well. Second, these wood piles were the obvious target for firewood, and I’d need to cut and split them. Yes, this was done with bow saws and the like for many centuries, but it is clear that eventually I’ll need to familiarize myself with a chainsaw… more on this later.

Making camp look less awful & breaking trail

My larger tent (the beloved MEC Tarn 3, going on a decade old) went up on a nice flat pitch on the waterfront, where it would largely remain for several months. The first truck load up was full of wood scraps from my home workshop that I was excited to finally have an excuse to dispose of (fire!), an array of small tools, a Honda EU2200i generator, and camping gear. I’d started to run out of reasons to visit home improvement stores since buying my home a few years prior, it was nice to have a new set of problems sink my teeth into.

There was no shortage of help for this season; nobody had anything better to do (and I like to think this place has some appeal in its own right). The first couple weekends, it was all about improving tent pitches, raking up sticks and leaves to burn, pulling logs out of the water, and dealing with firewood. I was also eager to start establishing a small network of trails so I could have a walking loop all of my own to walk, pensively, with a coffee.

My first work party friend group helped to cut a trail in one place where a trail obviously made sense by simply looking at the property map. I haven’t seen the vast majority of the property by this point, that would take some time, but a connecting path between the main access road and the right of way cutting through the back half of the property would cut a corner and be a good opportunity to practice trail cutting. On the map at the start of the post, this trail connects where the yellow road almost touches my property boundary to a point on the purple road above. You need to keep a light jog for this “shortcut” to actually be quicker, but it has more nature, so.

The following week, some more friends braved the bugs to attempt a walk of the property perimeter where the “missing chunk” is, bottom left on the map. This was almost impossible to do accurately, the marsh is wet, deep, and filled with debris. We stayed within about 30 metres of the line, but this can’t reasonably be a walking route without a serious time and material investment in boardwalks.

Burning stuff

Okay, more “preparing stuff to burn.” Those big piles of logs needed to be processed and stacked so they wouldn’t rot, and could begin “seasoning.” Seasoning firewood is simply waiting 1-2 years (depending on the type of wood and its condition when you start) for the wood to dry out to a degree that will allow it to burn effectively. If you‘ve ever seen water boil out of the end of a bit of wood in a campfire, well, that wood wasn’t adequately seasoned. In Toronto, you’d call it “dry cured” and charge $9/piece.

So, chainsaws. I hadn’t actually considered whether I’d need to get into this world. I own and enjoy using many power tools, including a table saw, commonly understood to be a dangerous tool without the right technique, care, and understanding, but chainsaws are next-level intimidating. Rightfully so, they command the same respect a table saw does in much more variable environments, and possible injuries are upgraded from fingers to limbs.

To make a long story short, I leaned hard on my friend Geoff for this, who as I understand it, was born wearing chainsaw chaps. I wouldn’t trust anyone else to give me the right education and I’m thankful I had the right mentor. He hooked me up with a Stihl MS271, all of the PPE (personal protective equipment), and a cool non-protective hat. We spent a couple hours in his forest going over fundamentals, and I asked “how do people leak red juice doing this part” 35 times (short answer: stand on solid ground before you run the chain, use the chain brake, don’t use the top of the bar nose, keep your chain sharp).

Back at camp, I spent some time every day processing those piles of logs into rounds, ready to be split into firewood. I’m still no good at measuring firewood in cords, but when every scrap of it has been split it was probably in the range of 1-2 bush cords. Oh, yeah–

• Cord (a.k.a. face cord): 4 feet tall by 8 feet wide by 16 inches deep
• Bush cord (a.k.a. full cord): same but 4 feet deep
• Apparently, a face cord can also be called a “rick”, but I might be being pranked.

Storage (and the very first build!)

Splitting was all by hand (not always mine) with 6lb and 4lb mauls. In need of somewhere to stack it all, I did what I often do: browse Google Images until I see a picture of something that makes sense, make a solid guess at how it could be constructed, and then attempt that. In this case, I enlisted my friend Nicole, who actually knows what she’s doing (this is a gross understatement). We (largely she) decided on a rough approach and build a shed capable of holding close to a bush cord, when stacked full. I used some leftover steel roof sheets and strapping to finish it off, no need to note that it had a rotten sheet of plywood on it for a year.

This was a simple project, but it has filled its needs very nicely. If I were to build it again, here’s what I would repeat:

• Two sides with a divider. If wood is going in the shed wet or not quite dry, there needs to be a seasoned (or more seasoned) side and a work-in-progress side. When one side empties, begin using the other side. The only frustration I find is not being able to keep the shed full at all times.
• Two stacks deep. One stack is unstable, three leaves wood in the middle with minimal airflow. Two is stable and gives the greatest seasoning speed.
• Open front & rear. This may be obvious, but the more airflow the better. If the structure can be in a sunny spot, even better.
• Wide floor gaps for stuff to fall through. This was a happy mistake; I didn’t have enough boards left to finish the flow, so I spaced them generously. This means there’s no buildup of bark, dirt, and mouse shit.
• This was a later addition, but kindling storage is key. I added mine below one of the front stacks of wood, but since kindling is lighter, next time I’d put it up high.

That’s enough

So, it was a struggle deciding what to include here. This post will probably be longer than average, and future posts should focus on fewer items. Who knows. Thanks for reading, anyway!

More photos