In suburbia, the garden power tools I had sulked in the shed. On a nice sunny day I would have to wheel the lawnmower out into the sun and leave it bask for an hour or so before daring to ask it to do some work. Half the time it refused, turned its nose up and went on strike. The whipper-snipper was the same. I gave up trying to cajole it into partipating in any gardening activities, and didn't even use if for a couple of years.

But the tractor isn't like that. It WANTS to work, and its inability to get started was a source of embarrassment to both of us.

Admittedly it sat in the shed for 6 weeks after we took over the farm. But when I did need it, it couldn't get started. We tried a few different things. The issue seemed to be not enough charge to get it going.

This tractor has a little glow fuse on the dashboard. You turn this on until it glows red hot, then start it up. It seems to pull a lot of juice, and after, say, four attempts at starting the battery would not have enough grunt to turn over the engine.

We were starting to think about mechanics, but I finally got it going with a double-whammy....charge the battery to the max, then hook it up to my car's battery, and THEN try and start it.
To everyone's relief the tractor started, and its been fine since. The first urgent task was rotary hoeing the vegetable garden.

When we arrived the tractor was here. Mark, the previous owner, dropped it off a few weeks before we got here. But it was hitched up with the slasher. Proper farmers will scoff, but the process of unhitching the slasher and then connecting the rotary hoe was quite puzzling for newbies.There's multiple connection points, and adjustable arms that tension the machinery. And the pieces themselves weight hundreds of kilos, so moving them 5 cm to be close enough to buckle on is a complicated task.

But it got done, and the vegetable garden was hoed and now has begun to be planted out.

Near the house is a long "laneway". It doesn't gow anywhere special, but its a couple of hundred metres long and 6 metres wide, so it looks like a lane. Originally it was a berry orchard, planted out to blueberries, raspberries etc. But it had been let go, like the vegie garden, and was knee deep in grass.

The trellising for climbing vines is there, and built to last, but with the competing weeds the site is not viable.

Enter the little blue tractor. I dug out the visible berry plants, (and rhubarb too, I discovered), then let loose with my hard-working friend. It needs another go in a week or two, but I've cleared the first 20 metres or so. Once we've got that sorted out we'll look at the next area.

Might not all happen this growing season. Its a big job.