When Dad Cracks + Splitting Locust Posts (By Hand)

In today's vlog, we are restoring pasture with plants and animals, and the boys and I are splitting a locust post by hand with hand tools. And these days, in a rare event, I get to be the boys' hero again and show them they thought was impossible is possible. Let's get to it. Can't wait to share it with you. You want to go with Henry? No, can't say I blame you. By the fire. Coming.

All right, all right.

Well, I'm limping still, but it feels better. I gained another point or two on the pain scale. First time feeding chickens since Sunday. It's Thursday. Okay, that's a love, Jared. This is what just set up. Wait, what's wrong? The, the jack won't go that high? Yes, and we—

I need to buy a bigger jack.

And where's your handle? Why didn't you buy a jack on your shopping spree the other day?

Hey, it got expensive really quick.

Yeah, it did. So I'll pay for it, okay? I'll pay for the jack, okay? Because it'll save us a lot of money fixing things ourselves. Well, we could just get a handle for that.

Well, let's get two jacks. No, this one's actually broken. It's leaking something. We had to put all that wood under there so that—

well, yeah, you don't want to fool around with a jack because somebody could be under there and Yeah, this one's so old.

I mean, I'll keep it around and I'll use it for little stuff.

Okay, but well, let's get a handle for it. I thought we were doing raspberry, uh, trellises. Jonah's home from work today. I'm thinking it's a good day to do these trellises because I need their strength, I need their youth. If we're splitting locust posts by hand, that's a big job. It's a big physical job. All right, hang on, hang on. But first, we have got remove the pigs. We are moving them around, restoring pasture. We've got some Johnny Seeds cover crop mix that will grow good in the wood chips that's there, the sand that's there, and it will help us rebuild pasture. The geeks that want to take a screenshot, here, how's that? Can you see it now? All right, winter rye, field peas, crimson clover, hairy vetch, frostproof annual ryegrass, other crop inert matter, and weed seed 0.07. I read from highest to lowest. All right, look at this, look at this beautiful Ah, this is hope. This is restoration. This is using plants and the animals to do the work of the farm. Woo! That's probably all we need, right? For those 3 spatchcocks. Papa, we might have a problem. Okay, put some tape on it. Tape? I wish. How do you know it's leaking? Because you can hear it.

Here, maybe this needs to be drive-don.

It's such a big hole. No.

Well, if it's drive-don, the plugs will get pushed in because like we had—

you add another plug. We have—

there's 2 in there.

Add one more. Oh, we don't have no more.

We have one more. Look, I'm just sticking these ends in and it helped.

Stopped.

Yeah, if you guys can figure it out. I hate to have to buy a new tire. It's expensive. Get the water poured out, we'll get them moved, and we'll get the water filling up.

Yeah. Push, push! Good job. Don't hit that fence.

This is just leaking over.

Yeah, cuz it's cracked.

How did that crack? Do I ever run anything to vlog about? Well, do I ever run out of any problems? No. There's a crack in that trough. Push it in, pull that back, and then you pull it out. Okay, go see the line. Yeah, they got it back there. I don't know if this will reach, bro.

I don't know if that'll reach.

You're gonna have to hold it there, aren't you? Two choices here. The crack's right here, so as long as water's coming out, this is going to keep filling up and it's just going to keep running. We could put rocks underneath it so it sits like that. Oh boy, that's bad. That's all the way down to there. Or we can, we can set this ball to be lower. The trough won't get as full. Now we've propped it up and We lowered the ball. You could twist the ball so the ball will float up sooner, and so the new fill line will hopefully be down there below the ridge. You got that, or you need some help?

Yeah, maybe some zip ties.

If you tie it right there, it won't pull any further. Other way, you're backwards. Let that fill up and we'll prepare the ground. Wait, hold on, let's get their manure spread out. They always go to this corner or that corner, Papa. Okay. Oh yeah, it's a lot over there too, isn't it? We've got the manure spread. Look at this. This has gone from, uh, right here we have our hay balm, our cow manure, hay. It's just real brown. Well, look at this. When the pigs go through it, they've urined and pooped, and it's dark brown.

Look.

This is a light blonde brown, and then this is a dark brown. And it feels like there's a lot of soil in it already that the pigs have stirred up. Hey, are you making sure— you know, I was hoping you'd go kind of in an order. You're kind of going like your brain thinks. Come here, come here. You take this, you start in a corner here.

Whoa, give me some.

No, start taking a rake. And lightly rake it to let this fall in. Do a little prayer for the seeds. It's what God designed them to do, isn't it? To, to grow and restore and cover Mother Nature. It's a miracle. It's a miracle. Now Gideon's gonna take a rake, just, just lightly. Sun is gonna come. We're just gonna do this to cover up the seeds a little bit. There's not much of a more noble project, is there? Building pasture. Are we gonna split those logs in half? Let's do it. Go get our two splitting mauls, our one old wedge that we had, and then our three new wedges, and let's meet up the logs.

I was gonna clean up a bunch of them. Our redneck junk.

That'd be good. Uh, can you come see? Let's do that after those splitting logs. That'd be great because I really need y'all's use. The boys tried to split those logs on their own. They got ahead of me and they came to me and they said it can't be done, this is crazy. And I think this is a good opportunity to be dad, you know, to be— you remember when dad was your hero and he could do anything and he did everything and he was just Superman and he could do no wrong. That's long over. And, and then you grow up, you get enough brain space to realize your dad's not perfect. He can't do everything. He doesn't know everything. He makes mistakes. He annoys the crap out of you. Yeah, that's, that's where we are. I believe you can say it, uh, old enough to realize Dad makes mistakes and still too young to forgive all those mistakes.

There you go.

Good job, Henry. You're getting it. So close, so close. Yeah, now split that one, and that one will be our— the one we'll use for our arms. Do you want to race? I don't know if the little one is easier, but that's the one he picked. Let's go, Josiah! Race him! You can get your wedge started to where it'll stay in there by itself. That's really the hardest part.

I've almost got it.

Dad's got the persistence, the patience, the experience, and the belief. I know it's possible because I used to do this. You hate it, huh?

You think we could sell them for $8 a post?

Oh yeah, they're probably going for $8 a post now.

Well, no, people ain't ever— no, people aren't using these anymore. They're buying pressure treated.

I know, shame. Can you imagine if we were to build a fence out of this and do 100, 200 of these? I think Grandpa Henry just put his fence along on the, on the trees in the woods. On your mark, get set, roads, roads! Who can split the locusts fastest? Jonas, real quick, second wedge in.

Oh no, he got you!

I think we split them one more time. See, Jonas, this one's good. What we need with these is our crossbars. So would we be able to put that up like that and screw it in? What if it's instead of the round posts, we did these as posts because then we would already have a flat surface.

This is like a splinter waiting to happen.

It can go about right here and then put that in there, screw that in. They actually approved my idea. Call the Inquirer. We need to split a whole nother one just to get another, uh, another post. We had 2 crossbars on each post before. I think that's overkill. We're just— we're just gonna do one. What's the problem?

I need Dad. Okay, I hate this so much.

Like, uh, going snowboarding, I could dominate those boys and still be a hero, you know? Um, in a positive way, not in a degrading way. This was going to be my chance at something very useful, like splitting locust posts. So I go up to this thing and I start.

I'm used to machines and not this manual labor stuff.

Oh, it's so romantic though.

It's not, it's just painful and hot.

It—

look, it just put the edge off.

I'm thinking, is this possible? This has to be possible. I'm gonna keep going. Started to crack a little. It took a while, it took a lot of banging even for that, uh, peg to stay still, but it finally did happen. And even Jonah said, oh, it's cracking. And he got excited and I got it going enough. And of course they, they took it over from there. This was a special project because I used to do this with my dad 30 years ago. This is the kind of work he had us do.

All right, Josiah's got the rest.

I think secretly these boys must like doing this too because they didn't argue with me when I said let's split another one. Hand me another peg, John. You guys secretly like this, don't you? No.

Nope.

Why not? It's hard. This is man work.

It's hard manual labor.

Yeah, these can each be posts and we have a nice flat surface to mount our—

Don't we need to split them again?

Do you want to, or you want to just use them as they are?

Oh, splitting them again, then we would But she had more flat surface.

There's 2, 3, 4. That's it. We just need to split this one in half again to get another crossbar. That's a good crossbar.

Oh, how many posts do we need?

We need 4. 4 in the ground.

Here's 2 posts right here, 2 thick ones. Okay, then we split one more. That's 2 more thick ones. No matter what you do, this was the— and then we cut these into 2-foot lengths, and these are all 8-foot long.

3-foot lengths.

3-foot lengths.

Okay, so you can only get 2 out of each one. And but this is—

that's all you need.

Well, split that again then. No, this is plenty sized.

This is tiny.

No, it's not. When I was out there doing that, in a way I was communing with him because that was something he used to do and we used to do together, and I was communing with him. But now that he's gone, I was also replacing him. I have no dad. There is no dad. I, I am the dad. I am here now, and I am in that role of being strong and a leader for the boys and an example and stronger in many ways, sometimes in physical ways, Maybe not. There was that point too. There's always that point. It's like the log. There's always— you remember that too? When the point you saw your dad falter for the first time as an old, old, old man kind of falter. I don't remember the specific moment, but I remember the specific feeling, and it's awful. It's one of the worst feelings in the world to see your— to see your dad fail. In his strength. It's like that log. You chip at it and chip at it and chip at it.

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens. And then finally there's that little crack. And then it splits rather quickly. And that's like a man. Now think of it. I don't think I'm there yet. I think we're still pounding a lot on me right now. I don't think I'm about to crack. That's not what this is, but my dad has long cracked and split and gone, and now I am the dad. And it was— it's so fun to do this with these boys. You got those split. Good job. Hey, wait, let's get these cut up and ready to mount in.

Let's, let's build these when you're doing it.

Yes, sir.

You see how it has that one on the top? Don't do— don't do that. One—

one—

run one right here, and then you can run another wire through right here through top so you can have 3 wires instead of 4.

We don't need anything at the top.

We'll see how he's got 2, 4 wires. We should at least run one at the top top.

Let me show you why. There's no need. The wire just holds up the raspberries.

Yes, so they'll grow up through the middle.

Look, we're gonna have a bar. Let's say this is down on the ground. Let's say this is the top. We're gonna come here with our bar. Okay, like that, and drill holes through it. All right, can you cut our— can you run the saw? Yeah. Hey, we got some good kindling right here. Just see, locust kindling.

Are you kidding me?

We've got two. I really like the size of those. I'm convincing him we've, we've got to split this again. I'll work on it, it doesn't hurt. Wait, Papa, if we cut it first, we only need two more, right? How many more do we need? I just need 2 more, right? All right, yeah, this is what you do when you work with people. You compromise, give and take. All right, go. Let's saw it and then we'll— I think it'd be easier to split it being long, but yeah, we don't need the whole thing. So we sawn that. Now maybe if we put it against that pole, we can split it. Is it easier to split too? You're so happy. Oh, I'm so happy. Look, thank you, boys. So much more reasonable. All right, that's it for that. Last time we built these with cedar posts, we've already got one rotten. That's expensive and not as long-lasting as locust. Jonah got these locust off of his grading job. They're just burning it. So yes, it's more work. It's all work on us. We don't just buy it. But it's something that we can do together. And if I have to buy it, I'm gonna have to spend office hours most likely alone to pay for it. You're gonna put 2 in? How steady is it? Oh wow, it's pretty good. 3 more and then we need a drill. Oh, I did it easy right here.

I've dug 4 holes over here. Now we're gonna put the post in the ground. Oh, everybody's like, call Dad, he's so helpful. Nobody talks about how annoying he is though sometimes. We got the first one on the ground, now we're gonna put the second one in. All right, we've put two in, now we're gonna put in a third.

Had a quick phone call there. Well, sort of quick. These look good and these aren't going anywhere. I think one crossbar might be enough. If not, we can go up with another one. It rotted out in the bottom, even our expensive cedar post. I don't know, it did last 5, 6 years. This locust will be this in the ground for 30. Hey boys, these are legacy trellises. Yeah, you're real thrilled. Hey, wasn't this wonderful? This weather working together.

Yeah, it was great.

Saving money. What did we spend on this? Well, we already had the lags and we already had the screws. Did buy the wedges.

Wait, there's the old wedge.

Josiah, take it. They were $30 for 3, but we keep them. Let's check in on the buttermilk from yesterday. It is solid.

Look at that.

Smells sour. Stay sour. That's buttermilk. I'll just keep in the fridge forever-ish until we need buttermilk. We've got the trellises built. We got them installed. It looks so good. That's a legacy build up there. I communed with my dad. I got to show the boys that the impossible is possible, and then I got to see them go at it. They— it's just wonderful to watch a young man work, isn't it? It's just a great joy in life, isn't it? For, for the dad to teach and show something, and for the young men, the young strapping young energized men, to take over. And that's what happened. They don't get no more happier day than that, y'all. Happy day.