Month: March 2018

Thank goodness my paying job starts again tomorrow!

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I finally managed to do something I had not done yet and get the tractor high centered. This doesn’t seem like a big deal at first but I was going downhill and pushing a huge rock so I was not paying attention to the rocks in front of me. I ended up getting both back tires off of the ground! I had to use the bucket to push me back and four wheel drive to let the front tires push us off the rock. The mistress yet again came through for me.

I really wanted to get the last two rock cribs filled up with rocks today. Surprisingly, I did not wake up with my back feeling like I had been kicked repeatedly. My butt felt like i had hiked for 25 miles and was sore all over, so i must have been lifting right. I was attempting to maintain perfect posture while lifting. I started around 0900 and only took a light coat and light hat. Yesterday, I started out with too many clothes and had to keep taking them off. I just decided that to stay warm I could work faster.

My goal for the day was to clear the rocks from one side of the new fence line so I can drive the pickup down the fence row to work on it. This proved to be harder than I anticipated. The rock cribs hold a lot of rocks but the hillside is littered with them. I hardly made a dent. There are a couple of patches where I got all the rocks. Looking up on the hillside you really cannot tell where I picked rocks. I stopped for a lunch of Gatorade, granola bars and hot coffee from the back of the mistress. Some people wonder why I work so hard at home. The above picture is why, it was an absolute beautiful day, no wind, not too hot, sun was shining and spring is coming. I sat there and drank a cup of hot coffee from a thermos I had in my tractor canvas bag. It was an amazing cup of coffee.

I also got the road cleared of rocks almost to the top of the hill and graded out a spot for a six foot gate to be installed next to the vehicle gate. This way we can open the small gate for animal only access.

I now need 35 T-posts, 35 wooden stays, four railroad ties and two horizontal supports for H braces. The real question will be if I can drill four holes with the tractor. If I cannot do that then I need to build two more rock cribs!!Ready for double gates

Rock cribs contain rocks

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I realize that this may seem like an obvious statement but have you really thought about it? I had lots of time today to contemplate this reality. The panel would normally cost $24 and the post around $14. Then after filling a couple of rock cribs I can say it takes three hours to fill one! Three hours of knocking rocks out of the ground with the tractor and then hand loading them into the bucket and dumping them into the circle with the mistresses help. She is as hard worker and really needs a bath. After said bath I need to take a hammer and beat out some of the dents and spray a little green paint over her rusty spots. She deserves to be pampered a little every once in a while. I only had one close call today. I had managed to get this humongous rock into the bucket then felt it necessary to throw in more rocks until the bucket was full. I backed down the hill to the rock crib and then lifted the bucket high in the air as I approached the metal circle. Just as I was attempting to tip the bucket forward the tractor went onto three tires and tired to tip over. I managed to keep the three tires on the ground but could not empty the bucket. I finally managed to back up enough to dump the bucket out onto the ground. I had to make three loads with the tractor to get it all into the rock crib. I am now only grabbing one rock when it fills half the bucket. It’s just too hard to control the tractor with that much weight on one side of the bucket. This is exactly why I keep the roll bar up on the tractor and wear a seat belt.

I had Annmarie do the math, there is 84 cubic feet in each rock crib. That is a lot of rocks! A whole lot of rocks. I am hoping to get the last 1.75 cribs filled. Once that is done then I can go put the hole post auger onto the mistress and see if she can drill two holes up on the very top of the hill for the upper gate. If I can get both those holes in I can install two railroad ties and build a H brace. Once the H brace is in I can run fence the entire length of the hillside. This will then let me install the upper and lower 12 foot gates. This will then just leave a ten foot open section on the bottom of the fence near the house. I will need to add another 4 foot circle and fill one more rock crib. If I can get the cribs filled and the H brace built tomorrow then I will be on schedule with the work. I need 35 T posts and 34 wooden stays. There is one more spot I am not sure I can drive in a T post.

Stop the bull

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Friday was the day to start back up outside. Yes, I still have painting to do inside the house but we still have baby chicks in the dining room and Annmarie doesn’t want me poisoning them. So that leaves chores outside. I considered working on the bull enclosure in the barn lot. I need to drill a bunch of holes in the dirt if I can. The trouble with this is the Bull is still causing me troubles by trying to get to the isolated heifers. So the fence up the back hillside has become a priority. I will run a fence from just behind the house up the hill to the rock crib you can see in the below picture. This is going to be brutal as the the entire hillside is one big rock pile with a solid rock bluff in the middle. Before I could make it to the back hillside with the tractor I decided to try and level off the land behind the barn. It is still too muddy, but while I was back there I decided to dig down both old paths that got worn down. This will make it easier to get to the barn when its muddy out. I did notice that my board keeping the dirt ramp in place is starting to break. I am going to have to tear it out and put in a couple of railroad ties soon. I need about another 35 railroad ties. Unfortunately, they don’t give those things away. I have been watching facebook classifieds and Craigslist but have not scored yet. I found one place recently but the poles were used in a vineyard. Those are usually only 3 inches in diameter and I need at least 6 inch.

I spent almost seven hours dragging the old road to clear it of rocks and create a wide spot for a gate. I am thinking about installing a 12 foot gate, another 4 foot diameter rock crib and a 6 foot human gate near the house. I will put another 12 foot gate on top of the hill. I also drug a path down the hillside and tried to clear out all the rocks in the way. I managed to get all the rocks cleaned out of a small four feet strip.

Once I had the fence path cleared and I attempted to create a few level spots for the wire cages I went and got some old cow panels. I was able to reuse the ones I had just gotten from the same place I purchased the culverts. I drug five panels up onto the hillside behind the tractor. I then cut off just the end vertical piece. This allows me to kinda roll it up like a piece of playdoh. The problem with this is it doesn’t want to go into this shape. I also have to put a lot of effort and body weight into the process to get the metal to form a circle so I can then bend the horizontal ends around the opposite vertical creating a ring. This ring then gets a wooden post nailed in it and filled with rocks. Once it is full of rocks it is virtually indestructible. I was bending the third one when I made a mistake. I had kinked it in half and was trying to get it to form a circle. It just was not going so I jumped on it and ended up rolling up onto it and down the hill. Did I mention I was doing this on a steep hillside? Luckily, I did not go over the entire top and get thrown over the top and onto my back. Instead, at the zenith I went off the right side and came down onto the ground on my hands and knees. I did mention the entire hillside is covered in rocks? It hurt my knee a lot, I hollered and rolled around as the song Tainted Love played. It hurt something fierce. I finally managed to get it to a dull roar and just laid out on the hillside after finding a rock free location. I almost went to sleep but I was afraid that Annmarie or my mother in law would spot me and think I was injured and call the ambulance. So I gave up on the dream of a nice pleasant nap and got up and finished two more wire circles.

It’s still winter

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It snowed again!! Mother Nature has decided that winter is not quite over yet. This week has seen the snow and mud come back. The only real problem with this is we are running low on high quality hay. We have 7 tons of grass hay that is on the lower side, it has been sitting outside all winter in the weather. I had to give the sheep two bales, the upper prime pasture cows two bales, the alpaca got the bale I accidentally broke open with the tractor and the other cows only got one bale as they still had lots. I was barely able to move the bales due to the mud and snow. I don’t mind the snow when it freezes the ground solid but that did not happen this time.

We were thinking about lowering the fences over the back creek but we have not had a spring yet and that creek is straight winter runoff. It is pretty mild right now and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of snow in the mountains that is going to last very long. We have surface water every where so we are currently not short on ground water. The wheat looks very nice.

The animals all know to complain to “Mom” when they think they are starving. Annmarie “Mom” called me this week to say the sheep were desperate and needed food. I have been pushing big bales out to the old lamb shed for them and they can snack all day long. She fed them some alfalfa from the barn. The problem with this is we don’t have much alfalfa left stored in the barn. We do still have a stash of 100# bales in the machine shop. So I have been feeding around 150# of that a night. After two nights the animals are leaving food behind. I don’t think they were starving. Every animal we have knows this and they all bug her for food and she in turn bugs me until I feed them. Sometimes the animals have a valid complaint and need food, but most of the time that is not the case, they are just looking for a handout.

Gotta get out of the house

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The little tractor that could! I have a culvert on the bucket and pulling a small set of discs for the upper field. The dogs are giving the cows the stink eye after moving them away from the gate. This way I don’t have to worry about them making a break for it to get back to the bull. It’s a two way street, both parties would go to the other if they could figure out how to get out of their respective enclosures.

The culvert is for the upper spring, this way we can drive over to the back half without having to go all the way around. I have three more culverts left and need to install two more in the lower bottoms so I can easily get the tractor in and out of those fields even when it is fairly wet. Driving through the irrigation ditch when all the surrounding dirt is muddy is a good way to get the tractor stuck in the ditch.

The moving water in the upper prime pasture is half way through the trees now and starting to cut a ditch in amongst the trees. Its pretty slow going and I don’t know that it will make it to the fence. I can really tell in the front creek that there is a lot more water coming out of the spring than we have had in the past.

This is the upper prime squared field before I did anything to it. I had burned it off and it had a disc drug through parts of it once by someone else. My real goal is to just knock everything down into the dirt so that it can start composting and breaking down. We will then keep it down and sprayed with roundup so that it has some forced idleness this year and plant it in the fall. I had only taken my outer coat shell and it was just not enough to keep the wind at bay. I had to zip it all the way up and put the hood on to stop the wind on Saturday. I am getting stir crazy in the house and I cannot paint because of the baby chicks.

One of the things I noticed dragging the disc set around was that the back part of the disc was not digging in enough. It needed some weight. I backed the discs up and changed the angle on them so that helped but the soil is still very wet and I had a hard time getting any traction with the tractor. I had to make the discs easier to pull a couple of times until I got the right amount of earth movement and tractor traction. I was glad when my alarm went off to go feed the animals as I was cold and ready to be done.

Today I went out early in the morning after a freeze last night. The real problem with this is I added some weight to the discs today. I knew I had some old tractor weights kicking around the farm. Every time I have found one on the farm I have tossed it into the machine shed or in a pile over by the grain bins. I found eight 50# solid metal weights and tossed them into the bucket. Once I got to the discs I ran a chain through the weights and chained them to the disk over the second set. There was a welded piece of steel there already as it looked like someone had been piling up rocks for weight before. This added weight caused me to have to adjust the disc angle a couple of more times as they were now digging into the ground better. I failed to take into account that when the ground thaws it becomes super slick on top! I had a couple of times where I thought I was going to have to unchain the disc set just to get the tractor unstuck but I managed to get it out every time. I got almost the entire field done and only found one 30×40 yard patch that still has standing water. I need to mark this area and the couple of spring heads that are visible. I think I can dig trenches and connect this waterway up to the spring ditch that is already running. If nothing else, I may have to create a small pond to corral all the water. I will try some ditches first.

It was a beautiful day today and it only hailed on me once. I remembered an extra layer and a neck warmer and had to take the neck warmer off it was so pleasant.

The tractor is the perfect time to just contemplate life as you go around in circles. The ground is so rough that I over tighten the seat belt so it holds me in place and I don’t get thrown from the tractor. I also eat the pickle flavor sunflower seeds. They are the best, except the seeds are too small unless you get the Biggies!

I had plans on getting a overall picture and hiked up to the top of the bluff, looked out over my work and went to take a picture and my phone died.

The written word of my awesome job will have to suffice as testament to my hard work!