Portage River Farm

On Saturday morning, I headed out to attach the auger to the tractor for the first time. This proved to be a harder task than I had anticipated. First of all, I recognized right away that the large pin that anchors the upper point of the three-point hitch was too large a diameter to go through the hole in the auger. I ran out to the Tractor Supply Company store and picked up the one that I needed, grousing all the while that the tractor dealer had promised to throw in all of the pins and linkages that I needed.

Returning with pin in hand, I resumed the task of trying to figure out how to mount the auger on the tractor. In case you have never wrestled an auger before, they are very heavy and awkward to maneuver. A quick look in the Internet revealed that it is normally done by two people and the crafty farmers out there have come up with auger stands to hold them in position for easy connection.

Eventually I found that I could attach it by folding it up like a pocketknife with the auger and three hitches all facing toward the tractor. I attached the lower two points of the hitch and slowly drove the tractor forward, allowing the auger to bite into the ground and slowly raise up to a vertical position. From there I was able to connect the top-most hitch and raise it up for the drive to the building site.

Once positioned above the correct spot, the auger made extremely fast work of boring each hole. The trick was getting it into the correct position. The site that I chose for the chicken coop is surrounded by small trees which meant that it took some effort to figure out how to reach all ten of the spots where I needed to dig. Before long I was standing back and admiring ten perfectly bored 12" diameter holes.

I spent the rest of the afternoon filling the holes back in. For a couple of hours I carried old chunks of broken concrete, bricks and large stones to the site. The lower half of each hole quickly filled up with muddy water which geysered out with each stone I dropped and soon had me covered in mud from head to foot.

When I had the holes half full, I poured a bag of cement mix on top of the rocks to bind them together. I have been assured that advice that I got from the hardware store employee was incorrect and that the cement would cure in the holes just fine. I continued to fill the holes loosely to about ground level before darkness put an end to my labors for the rest of the night.