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Tractor
I make no secret of my affection for machines. I'm not troubled in the least by the noise or the fumes, although to preserve my credentials in a society where such effluvia are frowned upon I sometimes claim to be concerned. I go along with the principle that a good machine ought not make a nuisance of itself. Most of mine don't.
So the big string trimmer, the hedge clippers, the mowers and the rototiller all have a useful happy existence at Towerhill Cottage. Even the leaf blower, whose utility has been rightly questioned (the wind does at least as good a job gathering leaves) gets a friendly glance of approbation from me now and then. In some not wholly reprehensible way, machines represent my kind of gardening.
There is one machine, however, which has proved to be rather more difficult to assimilate in my little gas-guzzling family.
A couple of years ago we were visiting a friend in Vermont when I first saw a compact tractor. It was a lovely thing, bright red, not too big, but substantial enough to do serious work. It had a front-end loader capable of lifting an amazing weight of stones or gravel or sand; in the rear there was a power take-off to which, my friend explained, you could attach a variety of auxiliary equipment from a plough to a brush cutter. The day we arrived he was just finishing up mowing a meadow. I watched him disconnect the mower and drive the tractor into its own little New England barn. My heart leaped with longing.
Back home, I thought about it. I didn't really need a tractor--who does?--but I couldn't get it out of my mind. It was partly the size of the thing, not exactly miniature but simply scaled down somehow, bigger and much more tractor-like than a ride-on mower, without being excessively agricultural. I could tell myself that it would be useful, which is more than could be said for antique cars, another category of machine that had charmed and tempted me (fortunately unsuccessfully) for years.
In retrospect, I suppose this would have been a good time to forget the whole cockamamie idea. For a while I did. But then one day, while looking for something else on the Internet, I came across an entire book entitled Compact Tractor Buying Basics, which you could download for a tenner or so. I read this hungrily, and the next thing I knew I was poring over tractor magazines and studying small ads listing machines for sale.
It wasn't clear sailing. I still had enough self-control to realize that I'd probably best stick to a used tractor, although I did go so far as to look at a new John Deere compact, and to an equally pristine Chinese model that a dealer in Herefordshire had mysteriously started to import. The John Deere was certainly beautiful, but cost about £14,000; the Siromer was splendidly painted bright red and cost considerably less, but even to my untutored eye it was clear that the engineering left a lot to be desired. Besides, I was beginning to learn something about tractors--and there was a depressingly large amount to learn.
When you are looking for something like a tractor, it's natural to go to the Internet and browse. The first thing I discovered was that next to video games and porn, just about nothing else is discussed in the cyberworld with such enthusiasm, assiduity and sheer loquaciousness as tractors. People (men) with tractors just love to talk about them. They love to tell you what their tractors can do and how much they cost, how to fix them and keep them running, where to get parts and accessories, which brands to buy and which to avoid. I found out why Western countries are flooded with scarcely used Japanese compact tractors (government tax policies there force rice farmers to buy new after only a year or two, resulting in a large number of otherwise unsaleable machines being shipped overseas). I also learned why these otherwise perfectly attractive 'grey market' tractors can be a problem to purchasers--in cases where manufacturers have set up their own sales operations in foreign countries, they don't relish the idea of being undercut by cheap imports carrying the same brand name. Apart from bringing lawsuits against the importers, they won't sell you parts and generally regard you with contempt if you need servicing. And then there was the galaxy of brand names to sort out, most of them Japanese or Chinese (Hinomoto, Komatsu, Shibaura, Kioti, Kubota, Siromer, Foton, Benye, Shire) and even an Indian (Mahindra) or two.
I ought to have been discouraged, but wasn't. On the outskirts of Bristol I located a muddy one-time farmyard converted into an outdoor tractor saleroom. It was lined with plausible machines, all clearly oriental (whatever safety stickers that weren't already worn off were in Japanese or Chinese). Dazed, I put down a deposit on a Kubota with a front-end loader. It really looked the part--four-wheel drive, orange paint job still bearing the traces of mud from a Shikoku paddy, a diesel engine that roared into life with very little prompting from the salesman. It could be delivered by the weekend. I went home to wait, wondering whether I had been a little precipitate.
As it turned out, I had been. On the night before it was to arrive, I found that a neighbour had an identical but even better Kubota to sell, not a 'grey market' import but the real thing, at a considerably lower price. Leaving the Bristol dealer annoyed (but partly mollified by the deposit, which he kept), I struck a deal with the neighbour, who agreed to drive it over as soon as he finished grading his new back garden. A couple of weeks later I had it parked under an apple tree in the orchard: a B1750 Kubota, 760 hours on the clock (you measure tractor usage in hours, not miles), 20 horsepower diesel engine, a roll-over bar, even lights and a horn.
So at last I had a tractor of my own. The only thing lacking was a good reason for having it.
My first venture was to the wood, to grub up a stump. This proved to be hopeless; the tyres (nearly smooth so-called 'turf' tyres meant for use on golf courses) spun in the mud, while the front-end loader refused to dig in. I had better luck spreading out a fresh load of gravel for the drive, but an attempt to move a pile of manure again came to nothing because of the slippery tyres. The obvious solution was a set of 'ag' (agricultural) tyres with bar lugs. Pricy, but necessary.
I bought them. Now, at least, I could get a grip, although one consequence was deep, permanent ruts wherever I cruised--through the orchard, across the meadow, into the wood. The cost was adding up, too. The battery died, requiring replacement, and I started to worry about leaving the tractor parked outdoors in the Welsh rain. What I needed was some sort of shed. I remembered my friend's barn in Vermont--wouldn't it be nice to have a small barn like that to keep the tractor in? Something simple and cheap.
This idea gave rise to a lot of sketching and cogitation and consultation with builders. We needed a potting shed; adding that onto the side of the little barn seemed logical at the time, although this meant raising the main roof high enough to create a second floor. And if there was going to be a second floor, then I really had to increase the dimensions of the building in order to get the proportions right. No point in being chintzy, as we say in Michigan.
The result, six months later, was big and beautiful. Very big. I'm still admiring it. The potting shed is elegant and the tractor is comfortably protected from the elements. The one drawback, probably predictable, is that the structure ended up costing roughly four times as much as the tractor had.
I'd like to be able to claim that I've discovered all sorts of exciting new uses for my little Kubota, apart from feeding it money. I did manage to move a couple of tons of building stone with reasonable efficiency, and lifted two or three large bags of sand out of the driveway where a builder had left them. An attempt to hook up a log splitter ended in failure when I learned that the extra hydraulics supplied for implements attached to the rear end lacked the necessary pressure, and in any case drove the splitter wedge in only one direction. The battery, short on charging, is generally dead. Nevertheless, once a year come August, when I jump-start the engine, borrow a big field mower, and get out there to chug around the meadow topping the thistles, there's a thrill that none of my other machines can quite match. I'm inclined to persist. I'm bound to find something else to do with it.
