Sometimes I think my optimism will get the better of me.

This weekend I took up a freebie on offer via Facebook Marketplace. I try not to be one of those farms, where there is endless junk stacked up around the place. But at the same time, there is a lot of really useful stuff you can collect for free. The trick is to have a use for it that can be implemented sooner rather than later!

All my treeguards for the last year came from a place that was removing deer fencing. Hundreds of metres of 2 metre high ringlock fencing, in unbroken rolls, and more than 100 long treated pine posts. He was selling them, but cheap. Even so, multiplying out the volume it sounded like it would get up to $500. But it was nothing like that. The seller had put a price on them to sieve out the crackpots and tyre-kickers. When I showed up prepared to pay, and for what he saw as a good use of the material, he basically gave it to me for almost nothing.

So, this ad was for a huge pile of spoiled silage bales. The cockatoos had got into the bales and ripped them open, then they got wet, then they spoiled, and a year later he was left with a big pile of plastic wrapped sludge mixed with hay. Myself, I would have used them within my property, but he wanted to clean the whole mess up fast. On top of that, blackberries had arrived and started taking over the pile, and the bales were wrapped in a hedge of thorns.

The other part of my collection strategy it to limit my search to 50km. That cuts out the big towns like Wangaratta and Albury, but it stops me from agonizing over whether its worth 2 hours in the car for a roll of second hand barbed wire. Don't see it, don’t know about it, don't worry about it….

Cheshunt is 43 km from here.

But as the crow flies. There's a mountainous National Park between me and Cheshunt, and it turns out by road it was an hour and half in the car.

The bales were the large rounds. Optimistically I agreed with the owner that I could roll them out and mulch quite a large area. As I have said many times on this blog, I have a lot of repair work to do, and a lot of topsoil to replace from gold dredging. Seemed like a great idea. I took my big trailer, thinking I would come home with 6 large bales.

It was certainly a scenic drive. My GPS avoided the main road, clogged with tourists this week of school holidays, and I meandered east and south around the bottom end of the national park. We often miss rain that hits the mountain from this side, but you can see to the kilometer where it drops. The paddocks are lush and green, then suddenly a line is drawn, and they are scruffy and starved-looking.

My old ute doesn't like hills and doesn't like towing my big trailer. Put them together and its very unhappy. I have to watch the temperature gauge closely, and ease up when it reaches overboil. Its quite stressful. The road faded, the tar stopped, and it became narrower and windier, potholed and single-lane.

I showed ip later than I said I would, and we got on with piling the bales in. The technique was pretty brutal….charge at the pile with forks levelled, spear two bales, rip them free of the blackberries and dump it into the trailer before it all unraveled. We barely got four on, they were so big. (It’s a huge trailer, 8 m x 2 m). And the weight….! I don't have anything to measure it with, and I didn't think to ask, but I estimate they are somewhere between 300-400kg each.

So…home. I ignored my GPS' suggestion, and we went the long, flat way home. I had to pull over a few times on the Snow Road and let the accumulated traffic past. I wasn't going at tractor speed, but its madness along there and anyone travelling under 100km gets run off the road.

And when I got home…oh dear. How was I going to get these monsters off the trailer?

I started by cutting away the blackberries. I filled up two boxes with cuttings for the burn pile. By myself I wasn't going to pull those bales off the trailer. I doubt if three men could have shifted one. Being damp inside the bale, they had settled into a wedged shape in the trailer. Even if we could have managed the sheer inertia of the weight, the jigsawing into a wedged shape had cemented them in place.

I tried slashing open the bale and forking the content out. Half an hour later I worked out I would need to do that for a week to clear the trailer. Need another option.

Dealing with immovable objects (inanimate and alive) is something I have now had a lot of experience with. I wrapped a truck strap around one bale, hitched it to the towbar and slowly pulled the bale off the trailer. Success!

Rolling it out was a fool's dream. It wasn't until I had ripped away 2/3 of the bale that I could tip it and roll.

I did plan to take it to the far paddock that we are slowly filling with green waste. On paper it needs about 2000 cubic metres of topsoil to replace the missing soil and fill in the cavities. That's not going to happen, but we can cut and level what we have and fill the holes and finish up with an ok paddock rather than the original lunar landscape. Those four big bales would do a lot in one hit. But there's two narrow gates to get through, and one of them is currently under 30cm of water after all the rain. I would have to charge through the gate at a reasonable speed to clear the sludgy entrance, and the big trailer only has about 2 cm clearance. I think I have pushed my luck with this project enough…spending two days untangling a jammed, over-loaded trailer does not appeal to me.

So its getting dumped where it is, in the rip in the middle paddock. This rip was gouged out to take river stones to make a road. When we first saw it we looked at a half-metre deep trench more than 20 metres long and the width of a car. In 7 years we have slowly filled it with green waste, and in another two years I think we will have rehabilitated the space.

I think I can now bring that schedule forward a couple of months!

In theory, I could go back and collect another load. Nup.