Oliver Hayes

Finding the best post drivers for fence installation comes down to one question before anything else: how many posts are you setting, and what are you driving them into? A 12 lb hand rammer and a 1.3 HP gas post driver are the same tool category, but they are not remotely the same purchase. Post … Read more

Mucking out stalls is the one job on a horse property that never ends. Every morning, someone digs into wet bedding, lifts out manure and piles, shakes off the shavings and starts over, six to twelve stalls at a time in a busy barn. The fork in your hands decides how that hour and a … Read more

The best wood splitting axes for firewood are the ones that match your body and the size of the wood you are actually cutting, and the Fiskars X27 Super Splitting Axe is the pick we keep coming back to. It splits medium-to-large rounds in a single strike, its composite handle soaks up shock that would … Read more

Maple sap is roughly 98 percent water, so turning it into syrup is a slow, hot, unglamorous job of moving water off the surface. The single piece of equipment that decides whether that job goes fast or slow is the evaporator. If you tapped 20 trees last season and now want syrup that does not … Read more

The best grain mills for home flour are the ones that give you an adjustable grind, a motor or crank you can actually live with, and a chamber that cleans without a screwdriver. After running all twelve mills in this roundup through wheat, corn, oats and rice, the NutriMill Harvest came out ahead for most … Read more

The first time our well pump quit was during a heat wave, three days into a grid-wide outage, with the water provider sending tanker trucks down our road. Nothing about that weekend was comfortable, and it changed how I thought about backups on the property. A hand-operated well pump is the oldest answer to the … Read more

A frozen-over water trough is not a small inconvenience. When the water in your horse’s or cattle tank goes solid, the animals stop drinking, and cold water below roughly 45F drives intake down sharply on its own. Horses that go short on water are far more likely to develop impaction colic, which is one of … Read more

A portable sawmill turns standing trees and land-clearing debris into framing lumber, siding, flooring, fence boards and dimensional firewood without hauling anything to a yard. On a homestead that is clearing land, building a cabin or a barn, or burning through several thousand board feet a year, it is one of the few tools that … Read more

The best adjustable bed base for a king bed is one that holds two adults plus the mattress weight with headroom to spare, moves quietly, and fits the 76 x 80 inch footprint your bedroom actually allows. After comparing 12 king electric bases on articulation range, weight capacity, motor noise, warranty length and clearance, the … Read more

An adjustable bed frame for seniors is a motorized base that raises or lowers the head and foot sections, and often the whole bed height, so a person can sit up, lie flat or stand with less effort than from a fixed frame. For an older adult it is less about comfort than independence: a … Read more