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

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).

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.

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.”

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.

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.