Month: June 2020

Spa Day

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Slim came out today to help groom the alpaca.  We sorted animals last time so it was alpaca shearing day.  Annmarie tells me we should just arrange to have it done with someone else local we know who has a custom shear outfit come do their animals.  I need to see about getting our fiber processed and then decide what we are going to do but for now, we do our own.

We had to move the shear table around, run power cords out to the barn and get all the tools ready before we caught any animals.  We then rounded them all up and put them behind the barn.  I caught the first one and we started in.  First, you put the halter on, then you stand them up next to the shear table and then swing the table down and hold the alpaca on it so it is now laying on the table.  Tie both respective legs together and stretch the animal out on the table.  Tie its head to the corner eyelet.  Now shave half the body.  This year we only kept the saddle portion of the hair. Once you have all but the lower feet and head shaved you untie two feet and shave them.  Next you use the hoof trimmer scissors to cut away the curved toenails.  Try not to cut the foot or get the quick on the toenail.  So far I have not made a single alpaca bleed this year. Now do the other feet, shave then cut toenails. Tie every body part back up and let the head loose and remove the halter, shave the head and now its time to rock and roll!  One person holds the head, the other one takes the hard rubber dog chew toy and gets it into the alpaca mouth and holds it in place so I can cut out the fighting teeth.  This all has to be done so that I don’t cut the tongue or lips with the finger saw.  Once that is done then I have to take the Dremel tool and grind down the front teeth so they are even and match up with the top hard palate.  It smells and its not fun.

Once the animal has had its full spa treatment we untie all legs and let the head go and I spin and rotate the animal off of the table.  It works pretty slick and we don’t have to try and lift the table and slide them off off of it.  We tried that and they are not very graceful.

The alpaca are the ultimate passive aggressive animal.  We managed to get 6 of 8 sheared today and only one did not do the belly flop and refuse to stand up.  As you can see above they just lay down and we had to lift them up, shove your knee under their belly and then flip the table to a horizontal position.

4C3F97F4-9F99-4DF0-ABFA-ED7EA6687F97

 

We had an audience for most of the day.  A new barn swallow who we are pretty sure is not ready for the great outdoors.

We had to stop when the power went out.  We later learned that the wind blowing knocked over  a tree which in turn killed the power to a large area for a couple of hours.

 

We had lucky number 7 alpaca already on the table strung up and ready to go.  We did his toes since he was there and then let him go.  We will get the last two next week hopefully.

As soon as we let the first four out they ran over to lay down and scratch their backs on the grass and weeds.  Slim and I emptied the pickup bed and removed the gravel so we can take the pickup and trailer to an auction in the morning.

Annmarie went out and cut herbs from the garden and wrapped them all up.  I hung them up on thee breeze porch to dry.  As soon as the upstairs bathroom is done I will clean up the breeze porch again.

Annmarie missed another rock chuck out in the ram pasture.  I ran upstairs but when she started to fling lead it ran out of my field of view.  I may have to put out some targets in the field and up on the hill so I can do some practice shots from the bedroom window.

076E5B1E-B047-4F3E-B153-EB7472D69C55

 

 

 

 

 

Scaring away rock chucks

Steve HardinLeave a comment

69187CE1-1103-4676-A8DF-A57CB9C7417D

Mr Professional came out to the house and picked up bales of hay from the orchard and drove the trailer over to the barn.  He has been working on another project in town that Annmarie asked him to do so his time on the farm has been limited.

On Thursday, Annmarie spotted TWO rock chucks down in the ram pasture and went out the front door with the 22 rifle.  She flung lead at them and they got away.  I saw this all from the living room window.  Without a carcass she gets no kill credit.  She even admitted she missed.

Friday morning, Annmarie’s spotted another two rock chucks and went outside and started flinging lead again.  Again, they both got away.  I was not home at the time but she told me about it.

I had gone out to barn to move the hay inside off of the trailer.  It was a mere 98 degrees F and I did bring some water.  There were 60 bales to go in from the orchard haying (1.25 ton) and someone had to do it.  I got them all in the barn and stacked.  I needed the trailer cleared off so I could go and see if the metal scrapyard had any panels or culvert for me.  I found some amazing panels but the owner was taking them home and I did find a piece of 4’ culvert hidden in the back corner inside a piece of 6’ culvert. I will come back in a few weeks after I gets some more haying done and have them pull it out and cut it down to 16’ long.  I decided to go with a longer culvert.  The gate is 16’ wide and that would allow any size truck to cross.  I am going to use Rasta blocks and install a concrete wall on both sides of the culvert so it can withstand the water cresting it if needed.  On a plus side, I did not pickup any scrap metal and they gave me a sold recommendation for a portable welder.  I will be buying a Miller Multimatic 200 and using flux core wire.  I have been shopping around looking at prices but it looks like $2200 is the price I am going to have to pay. This is less than the allotted $3k I had set aside for this needed purchase.  It will even work off of my generator and will do 110/220v power supply.  This was a major tip and I am grateful for it.  I will be converting my old small pickup bed trailer to a welding trailer and mounting the cutting torch and welder and generator on it all so I can just hook up and go!

I was dragging after unloading the hay in the heat, tired, did not feel good, so after my shower I am upstairs dressing and Annmarie started shooting again at rock chucks!  At her opportunity rate I am going to have to increase my accuracy to offset it.  She shot at two more rock chucks.  I am thinking its the same two she always shoots at.  She now has to sneak out the back door as they will run away if you use the front door.  Friday morning I had removed the screen from our bedroom closet window so I could get a shot off if needed.  It doesn’t show the whole ram pasture but I can see  the hillside.  I spotted a rock chuck running up the hill and got off two shots.  We both missed.  My plan is to now just use the upstairs window when I want to shoot at the rock-chucks.

9403BCE2-360B-4805-88B3-BA8671ADE5EE

This is my view from the upstairs bedroom closet!  I have a decent field of fire if they run for the upper rock pile.
9663191C-6164-4BEC-845B-021DEF5BC3FC

 

 

The needed but dreaded sorting of animals

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It had to come, the animals all needed to be worked and sorted but it is always a painful task.  Making matters worse is the fact that we decided to work the sheep and the cows in the same day and to complicate it even further the barn lot flood damage has not been repaired.  Annmarie went down stream with Mouse to push the cows up to the house.  They were doing great, one of the cows then the herd tried to bolt around and Mouse headed them off and got them turned around.  Five minutes later one of the cows decided she was a greyhound and took off, Mouse was unable to get ahead of her, he was able to catch up to her but ran alongside her and could not get her to turn.  This caused all of the cows to break and Slim and I and Zeke had to go down to the school house to help bring the cows back up.  This event seemed to crush Mouse’s ego and he then became a terror towards the cows and would not listen.  He was determined to get a few licks and bites in before we quit working the cattle.  Despite a couple of warnings he persisted in ignoring us until it was pointed out to him that he was not the boss by me.  He kept ignoring Annmarie, which is unusual as he prefers to work for her and not me.  It took us an hour to get the cows up into the corral.  The bull and boys were just on the other side of the gate.  We needed to pour insecticide over the cows and to tag and band Cupid who is another boy.  The really screwy part is that we thought there were two calves that needed to be addressed.  Nope, one of the calves managed to rip its ear tag out.  I had to grab its ear and find the hole to make sure.  We sorted the cows and took our original green tag cow and three more heifers off of the main herd then let the bull, the steers and our little bull in with the the rest of the cows.  The little bull is only six months old and the cows are in heat so by the time he is ready to breed them they will all be pregnant.  We are going to eat him this winter.  Cupid doesn’t have the true white heart on his forehead like Valentine does.  I took more pictures of Valentine while he was in the corral.

 

I am going to have to work on the corral next year.  When I built it I had talked about installing thread all bars between the railroad ties in the chute.  I decided that it would stop me from walking down the corral on top which I like to do.  The cows have spread the chute far enough apart that my two internal gates are no longer latching and we had to chain the chute exit to stop them from pushing out.  I may just use cable and bolts with an inline tightener and some thread locking compound so it doesn’t come loose easily.  I will shrink the chute back up another three inches.  I won’t lay boards over the chute as it would form a tunnel that would cause the animals some consternation.  The four separated cows will go up onto the Upper Prime field.  They have lots of food and fresh water.  This will get them two fences away from the bull.  The old cow will just become hamburger and stew meat.  Annmarie and Donna have both been victims of this attacking cow and they will be very happy when she is gone.

 

Slim was helping us with the cows and then the sheep.  The sheep were a lot harder.  First, we did not know how many we had, I assumed we had about 105 and Annmarie thought we had 120, in reality we had 112.  Getting to the number 112, that took us sorting the sheep five different times and four people counting.  On the plus side, both Annmarie and I had the count right the first time but Slim and Mr Professional had different numbers so we kept counting until  the numbers stabilized and matched.  It’s hard to sell what you cannot quantify.  I realize this sounds easy but we spent almost two and a half hours sorting sheep.  We thinned the herd again hard this year.  It was time to do another heavy cull, we do this about every 5-7 years.  The first time we sorted off breeding ewes we had 48!  Our ram has a hurt foot and is kinda fat, he needs fewer females so we sorted ewes until we had 34 ewes and 1 ram.  This herd went into the upper prime pasture with the cull heifer cows.  We have 77 sheep to sell, 28 of them are cull ewes and we are keeping 9 lambs for us and for local customers.   We will put them into the orchard after I finish getting the hay put up.  The rest of the cows went down into the lower bottom, winter feed field. It has peas growing in it but the thistles and cheat grass are still present in significant quantity.  It will not be hay this year but the peas are good for the soil and good for the cows so it is a win regardless.

Slim and I then went onto fixing creek crossings to keep the sheep in their allotted space. Mr Professional went to go bale the hay in the orchard while the Future NASCAR driver worked on getting lawn beat down with a weed eater.  It is out of control and our mower needs more work.  The flooding caused some severe erosion in Stewart creek.  The picture on the right shows the ripples in the stream bed, every one of those ripple edges is part of a volcanic solid rock shelf, those were not visible prior to the flooding.  It just tore the earth away until it hit something solid.  We tried to move the stump out of the creek but its too heavy.  We cut branches off and once the creek dries out I will get in there with the chain saw and cut it up.  We needed the branches moved so we could drop the panels back down into the creek.  A new cable was installed across the top of the fence from rock crib to rock crib.

We then went down and tore out the panels and fencing from down by the Mother-in-law’s house.  I built a new fence alongside the spring in the orchard so this small fifty foot section was no longer needed.  We took down all the fence and salvaged the panels crossing the spring to use down below at the creek crossing.  The stream widened the bank by at least four feet down by our other crossing so we needed a couple more panels to bridge the gap.  I have also started to install my horse shoe latches at the gates.  Once we had that done it was time to call it quits as it was almost 1700.

Slim beat me to the house as Annmarie, I and Mr Professional were discussing a weed and trying to determine what it was so she called it quitting time and headed out.  She did send me a text but I had her take a picture of the lower creek crossing as my phone was dead.  LOL.  The plan is for her to come out and help shear alpaca next week.  .

 

 

 

Flood damage repair still

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The chickens are enjoying the weather and all of this rain.  We have moved the compost dumping area down the fence line about 15 feet in an effort to get the chickens to work down the weeds.  I have been trying to recycle 50# of dried rice used to dry out electrical equipment into chicken food.  I use the rice cooker and give them 8-16 cups of cooked rice a day.  I have been at it for two weeks and have half the rice gone maybe.  Even the chickens are getting tired of rice at every meal, they will run over eat a little bit then run away.  They do forage on the rice all day and eat it eventually but if that were cat food I was tossing out they would eat it until it was gone every time. 04E110F3-9383-4A26-A4BD-A1649619DB3B

My spare parts for the haying equipment came this week also.  Unfortunately, they did not have all the parts I asked for but I took what they sent me.  It tends to take about 3-4 weeks to get parts from the company so I went through and looked at the parts I have already broken and the parts that may break and have started a list.  The company did a great job of labeling each set of bolts and nuts so I know exactly what they are.  I have them separated out into containers with sharpy labels on the outside.  My goal is to get another 2 metal cabinets and use two of them for parts only.  I want to dedicate half the cabinet to each piece of hay equipment so it is easy to find and won’t get lost since I have to have so many parts on hand.

I am having trouble with my front left tire that fell off.  I was getting ready to go to the upper field with the arena groomer when I noticed that the same tire had two lug nut bolts missing.  Luckily, the wheel had not fallen off again.  I had picked up six bolts from the tractor store and put two back in and tightened down everything. I am going to have to figure out why this is happening.  The new tractor seat came in, it is thicker than the old but I need some kind of shock absorber on it now so the ride is smoother.  more internet shopping time is needed.  The first seat lasted seven years and the tractor spent more time out in the sun than under cover.  Since we have gotten the machine shed cleaned out the side by side and the tractor are parked inside away from the sun whenever they are not in use.

Mr Professional and the Future NASCAR driver have been working on the cross fence in the barn lot.  All three of us went up there and got it finalized.  I still need to get into the spring path and dig out some more mud but it was so bad that I kept getting stuck in the tractor.  I made a deeper pathway that is only about 1 foot wide and will let it dry out for few weeks before I go back at from the sides with the tractor.  I want to build up the embankment on the northern side so when the water comes rushing down it will get pushed back and over the embankment.  We still need to cut the final cow panel to fit to the bottom of the gully but not until I reshape the gully to accept more water.  So we just used the bent one from the flood and will address it later.

The ram started to favor his front left leg four days ago but would not let us touch it, we could get close enough to pet him but not pin him.   He is also over 200 pounds and all muscle with some fat and is not going to let me just pin him to look at his foot.  We ended up just moving all the boys from Alcatraz to behind the barn into a nice dry lot and watered them in the corral. This got the ram closer to our chute were we could pin him in place.  We did this in the evening and then let them hang out all night by the next morning the ram was already putting weight on the leg and looked dramatically better.  There was just too much moisture in Alcatraz.  I spent a couple of hours with the box blade and manure forks and cleaned up Alcatraz.  I now have two piles of mud, straw, hay and poop that will need to be moved out and mixed in the new barn floor contents when the barn gets cleaned out.  I really need a manure spreader but they are expensive.  I need a good used one, which leads to the I need a welder discussion as stuff keeps breaking and I need to be able to repair it.

It took me about 10 hours between two days to get the upper prime squared field all cleaned up.  I used the manure forks to pick up the large piles and used the arena groomer to pick up the low grass and spread out the mud.  The grass is trying to grow back but cannot get through the mat of mud and grass left by the flood.  I had to go over each section repeatedly as the groomer would fill up with grass fast.  I made two big piles out in the middle of the field and took everything close to the water over to my berm I am constructing alongside the spring.  The berm is going to be 2-3 feet high.  The water here only got about 18-24” deep so I think it will be enough to keep the water going to where I sort of want it.  This should lead to only about 1/3 of the field getting flooded and none of the next field being flooded.  Don’t get me wrong, I still installed flood break points in the cross fences just in case it does jump my berm.  I don’t want to have to come back and redo all this fence again. The built in weak points will keep the whole fence from getting flushed down or pushed over.

The manure forks have been another amazing purchase!  If I knew how handy they would be I would have done it years ago.  The best part is they only cost $250!  I have used them extensively to help clean up the flood debris and am actually looking forward to how they work when I clean out the barn.  I may be able to just drive in scoop out some stuff and drive out with it instead of trying to push it all out one of the two doors and then pick it up with the tractor.  If the rain ever stops the barn will get cleaned out.

263F5B06-6E3E-419C-AA96-90311875FF43

Flood damaged pasture replaced

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Today was the day, in eight hours we got the entire orchard fence torn out, leveled off and reinstalled!  Now it did take three of us to do it but Mr Professional spent the first three hours spraying thistles while the Future NASCAR Driver and myself did actual manual labor and tore out the fence.
4C51EFAB-77A4-4F6E-B074-BE627AA5F581

Mr Future NASCAR Driver and myself first had to clean up all of the flood debris.  My contribution was driving the tractor as we used it as a wheelbarrow.  We did have to skid out a couple of logs with the tractor and we had to pull the bridge from the barn lot away from the fence!  It managed to travel about 100 yards through three fence creek crossings before catching on the fourth fence line.  It is still intact, I am going to create concrete footings for it and just drop it back in place in the barn lot!  Once we had all the fence down and all the debris on the burn pile I used the tractor to tear up the ground and create a nice even slope.  There were a couple of high spots and one spot where we lowered the ground level almost 12”.  I used all that dirt to fill in the very large hole in the ground from the flooding.  I was able to build back two feet of dirt line.  When I combined the new dirt with moving the fence forward about 10” the new fence went right in.

Future NASCAR Driver and myself hand dug three railroad tie holes and Mr Professional came over and did the fourth.  We created two H braces on the left of the new breakaway section and one to the right.  The center 16’ section is suspended by a 1/4” cable between the H braces, it is clipped at the bottom with a flimsy clip that will only hold about 300# of material.  I then took another 16’ panel and laid it under the breakaway and had to bend a 10” section upward at 90 degrees to cover the U shaped bottom.  That section was clipped with heavy duty clips to the breakaway section then about 1500# of rocks piled onto the panel laying on the ground.  When the water hits the upright side it will create a dam and the water will push the bottom out and wash away the rocks allowing the panel to lift up and allow the water and materials to pass through the fence with minimal to no damage to the fence.  This is my hope and wish and dream.

As we were cleaning up and trying to get three rigs back out to the machine shed I asked the Future NASCAR Driver to move the pickup.  He doesn’t drive.  So I gave him the low down on the tractor.  He was not super comfortable with it but I figured he could get the 4’ wide tractor over the 10’ culvert.  Mr Professional had him drive the side by side as there is only a gas peddle and a brake pedal and he still had to holler at him to only use one foot and touch one pedal at a time.

We started the burn pile on our way out of the field and moved the bridge to behind the barn.

We did attempt to put the sickle mower on the tractor but I had bent the three point hitch adjustable bar earlier last week or the week before and did not have a replacement on hand.  We managed to get to D and B store 2 minutes before they closed.  I got the part and will be mowing hay first thing in the morning.  We are going to work on the far barn lot fence.  Once it is done we will be able to sort the cows in Alcatraz and let the bull out with the female cows, let the ram out with the sheep after we sort off the cull ewes and female lambs and let the main sheep herd down with the cows.  I won’t be much help this weekend as I will be covering night shifts at work. I will try and help out when I can in between sleeping.
0D40E2B0-2AA4-4A89-A8B0-88D6E93EA8BF