I came home from work yesterday and the weather was perfect for spraying weeds.  So I stopped at my in-laws to tell Donna I was going to spray weeds.  I need to use the “mule” four wheel vehicle with a small bed on back. It has a  25 gallon sprayer and boom I can attach to it so I can spray a 12 foot swath at a time.  Much faster than doing it with a wand.  Two years ago, I sprayed about 15 acres with a wand.  Never again.  I spent the next summer repairing the pump on the sprayer, replacing 4 nozzles, changing out all the tubing and mounting the on off switch on the roll cage so you could reach it from inside the cab.  Of course, before I could use it this time I had to reattach the hot wire to the switch, mount the boom and tie in the reservoir.  I was afraid I wouldn’t have any spray left over from last year, but luckily I found some from the year before!  So I had lots of spray to hose the place down.  One might question the wisdom of using a herbicide on the property.  That “one” doesn’t have to try and control noxious weeds on 10+ acres that have not been sprayed in a decade.  Once the weeds are under control and you stay on top of them, they are pretty easy to keep up with.  I have star thistle and Russian thistle and stinging nettles everywhere.  If you have ever pulled up stinging nettles by hand, you will know why I am spraying them now.
We are hoping that the sheep will keep things under control once I get the weeds knocked out.  This year, I started spraying in and around our house first and then moved out to the surrounding property(was going to finish spraying today, but it rained.  So good thing I sprayed around the house first)  Of course, I needed to get the Mule behind the house and it won’t fit through a couple of the gates or go there due to the new fences I installed. I had to drive it sideways through the creek and got stuck a couple of times before I could get through.  Gonna have to think about a couple of planks to get across the dry creek bed.  The banks are pretty steep.
I haven’t heard back from the insurance gal or the custom wood cutter.  I keep looking at the bridge thinking that is definitely the next project.  I am even going to wire in two outlets, one at each end of the bridge, for Christmas lights.
I also had the pleasure of trying to mow the lawn.  Sarah is responsible for mowing the lawn.  Last year she talked me into getting one of those old rotary manual push mowers.  Cool in theory, no noise, no gas, mulch the cut grass right back into the lawn, the perfect mower.  Not so much.  They are much lighter now than they used to be, so they jump around more.  Your lawn needs to be perfectly flat, ours has bumps and divots and holes all over the place.  The lawn needs to be bone dry, it is Spring, whose lawn is dry now?  You need fine bluegrass, not course bunch grass.  There was a 15×20 foot section that Sarah couldn’t get through.  I got half of that mowed down and was going to finish it off today.  It rained.   So no, lawn care today.  Off to work on the stairs and a little kitchen floor work so we can get our sideboard back into the kitchen.  It is stashed in a room collecting dust.  I need to cut some shims so it go  back against our new wall in the kitchen.  The kitchen floor is a long ways off at this point.

A while back I posted that Steve wanted to register a brand. What he really wanted was something cool to put on stationery and return address stamps, and labels if we ever decide to use our own egg cartons. The design restrictions on brands did not suit his taste, and enough people finally looked at him oddly when he said, “But we’re not going to brand anything,” that he decided maybe we could just come up with something we liked. So, here is the first draft. The colors are not set, and I’m not particularly happy with that aspect yet, but I kind of like the interlocking nature of the letters. As always, though, I’d love to have comments and suggestions.

See anything? Neither did I. So, I moved closer and looked down into the stack and saw this:

Yes, that is a cat curled up inside the plastic wrapping on the stack of snow tires. If you look very very closely, you can see a very newborn kitten in there with her. At the time, they were suspended in a kind of hammock made by the bag around the top tire, but I was afraid they’d manage to work their way down through the stack and end up trapped. So, we loaded her and her kittens into a crate with an old towel and moved them out to the wood shed.

On the chicken front, while I was looking for the kittens, I noticed a few eggs over by one wall, kind of under some junk that Steve had tossed over there. We’ve had issues with the doors for a while, so I didn’t think too much of it, other than to make a note to have Sarah toss them out for the cats and chickens. But, as I was turning to leave after relocating the cats, I noticed a nice little pile in the corner. When all was said and done there were 15 eggs stashed in the old house. Steve was rather incensed when I told him (he’s at work this weekend). He may very well have to add more nest boxes to the coop. For now, we’re keeping the old house shut up, and checking the woodshed every day. By the way, we’re averaging 4-6 eggs out there each day. *grin*

I collected 24 eggs today!  A new record.  I did go out and see if the chickens had tried the old laying spot I blocked off.  NO eggs, but there were 3 eggs in the woodshed.  I am thinking about just putting a box out there.  My baby chickens are growing fast, pretty quick I am going to have to let them out of their enclosure to find their own way.  It is always a large fight.  Everyone has to get a spot in the pecking order.  It takes a few weeks for things to settle out.  The nice thing is they live together already, separated by wire, but still used to each other and the sounds they make.  It makes it easier to integrate them.  I talked to the insurance lady today.  She is trying to get a rider attached to our home owner’s policy to cover the livestock.  Not sure if it is gonna work, otherwise we have to convert to a farm and it is gonna cost a few hundred bucks more.  Nothing is ever easy.  The funny thing is she didn’t like the number of chickens I have.  I have 54 chickens now.  I explained that some were on their way out the door and 24 were still babies.  So that is still pending.

It rained while I was working yesterday.  I had plans to mow the lawn, but the grass was too wet, of course the grass is ankle high now and getting longer every day.  I tried mowing the lawn with the sheep last year and it didn’t work out so well.  The sheep liked my decorative bushes and plants, especially the roses.  The grass just kept growing and 6 sheep in a yard can drop a lot of poop in a few days.  This was a sad fact to learn, I had high aspirations of never having to mow a lawn again.  So today, I was headed to the barn to do more digging (my personal workout program) which means I had to cross our front bridge.  I have become fixated on the bridge.  If I can get those beams for cheap (relative term) then I can redo the front bridge for around $1200.  A fabulous price (free labor of course) but one for which I was going to hold off on doing until next year.   I mean, come on the barn is just screaming my name!!!!  I priced  some 16 foot boards, 12 inches wide and 1 inch thick at the custom cutter’s for $0.70/ft ($11.20 a board).  I would need two of them, as they are overlapped on the barn.  I would need to side about 60 feet, for a total cost of $1344 (crap, way too much money).  So it looks like I will be using the back wall of the current grain silo as the new outside wall.  Will still need some lumber.  Here is my distraction, the front bridge…

Yes, it really is as bad as it looks.  Actually, you cannot touch the rails as they fall off with any pressure.  Pluse there are a few boards that are rotten on the floor and give when you step on them.  I am amazed it doesn’t just fall apart.  It was a lot better in the fall and just seems to get worse every day. The custom cutter has not called me back about the beams yet.  As we live in the country (slowville) it will be at least next week before i find out, maybe the week after when I go to pick up my maple I am having cut into lumber.
So I did make it out to the barn again.  It is very painful.  I am sure that I am going to have to drag a hose and sprinkler up into the barn and put a few thousand gallons of water onto the sheep shit so it can be removed.  I am hoping to triple or quadruple the weight of the sheep shit with water.  That way I can really get a workout!!  The trouble is the dried sheep shit is hard as a rock,  I am only getting a few inches with each swing of the pick ax.  Not good progress at all.  I need at least 8-10 inches with each pick ax swing.  I started using a wide grain shovel today.  It worked great.  I broke the shit loose with the pick ax and regular shovel and used the grain shovel to get a big pile.  Probably, 4-5 times what I could do with the regular shovel.  I did finally get an entire barn width cleaned out about 8 feet deep into the barn now.
You can see the three different floor heights in the picture and dead center there is a small thing sticking out of the floor, that is a rusted off metal fence post in the wooden barn floor.  I will keep plugging away at it.  When it dries out I will crawl under the barn and take some pictures. Before I get to do anything on the barn I am going to shore up the beams and make sure things are stable underneath.

I worked over the weekend.  Two extra shifts, it is my woodworking tool fund $.  Need the cash for the table saw now, unfortunately, I may have found something more pressing to spend the $ on.

Here is a picture of the barn floor.  I have made a little more progress since this was taken, but not much.  I keep getting distracted.  I really need to get the upstairs floor completed so I can get outside and get some outside work done!!!  Outside work beckons, weeds are growing, birds are singing and frogs are croaking, this is not the time to be trapped inside the house working.

My parents had another maple tree cut down at one of their rentals.  So Sarah and I went over last night and pulled the trunk out to the front driveway using the smaller branches as rollers.  It took us over two hours and it was painful.  I told Sarah at least she was learning a practical application of rollers, chains, levers, fulcrums and practical pulling with a motorized vehicle.  She told me that the she understood the theory and didn’t really need any practical application.  First 15 minutes she voiced that concern and tried to get out of helping.  It didn’t work.  So today I went over and winched the trunk into the trailer with a come along.  It was not easy and it was the hottest day of the year to boot.  As I was pulling into the custom cutter (they convert the logs into rough cut lumber at $65/hr for labor, great way to get primo wood)  I saw some very large pressure treated beams perfect for building a new front bridge.  So I expressed interest in purchasing said beams, this is going to push the barn back even further, which sucks.  I might end up redoing the bridge instead.

I did mention that chickens are stupid didn’t I?  I was looking out the kitchen window this morning while making coffee and noticed that one of the chickens looked stuck.  So I watched for another five minutes and sure enough, the stupid chicken tried to go between the slats and got stuck.  The chicken could not get free.  I had to go out and lift and turn the chicken sideways to get her free of the fence.  She was squawking and complaining the whole time I was getting her out of a jam.  Go figure.

Also, I had to dig the chain saw out of the wood shed this morning.  I noticed an egg, then I found two more then a hole pile of them!  Of course we had no idea someone was laying over there.  It was behind a door that was leaning against a wall.  This evening I went out and collected 22 eggs, I tossed them all against a tree stump and the cats and chickens had a feast.  I had to wrap a tarp around the hog wire panel I was using as a gate so hopefully the hens cannot get over there and lay any more eggs.  At this rate, I may need to add a couple more nest boxes to the chicken coop.