Month: August 2020

Forever Friday

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I have been fortunate enough to be able to take a few weeks off of work and regain my sanity. I am going to use my new favorite term “Forever Friday” to celebrate my autonomy (while still collecting a paycheck!). I spent Friday starting to clean out the barn. Those clamp on manure forks I got for the tractor to clean up the flood damage are coming in incredibly handy to actually clean up manure! The forks will go into the manure and allow me to pick it up with the bucket. The best part is they clamp on and off so when I start to get a muddy floor that really needs a straight bucket to scoop up, I just dump the forks for a 2-4 bucket loads then put them back on. This keeps me from having to drive around in the mud. I spent five hours cleaning up the barn so far. It usually takes about 40 hours to empty and about 30 more hours to move the manure piles away from the barn. Now I am able to scoop and drive directly out to the manure compost pile. My hope is to let the pile compost for one year then put it in the new manure spreader and get it on the fields. The current problem with that is I have a frozen shaft on the manure spreader. I have tried multiple lubricants on it with no success. I am going to heat it up with a torch next and see if I can get it break loose. I am hoping to only spend 40 hours total on the barn this year and to minimize the amount of hand work that has to be done.

Yesterday, I started getting hay in for the winter. I purchased six ton for the sheep and horses. I pooled my resources with a friend and we made two trips. The first load came to my house and we loaded it into the barn and got it all ready! The seller sent their son with us to help unload and it was glorious. We spent all day getting our four loads. I made sure and put bales in the back of the pickup to add some weight so the pickup would not get jerked around by the trailer. This worked very well and I had no trailer swerving on either load. I just need to get the large bales now. I will do that after I get the barn dug out. After the barn clean out and hay pickup I will be fixing the barn lot fence and bridge. I am keeping my list short and focusing on a couple of things only to ensure I can get them all done on my time off.

Annmarie has been working on getting our alpaca fleece fiber cleaned out. She has discovered two pieces of equipment she would like to make this an easier prospect. The bingo cage like apparatus is my favorite so far. I will be building this in the near future. I am just trying to figure out where to store it when its not in use. We are going to send the fiber out to a mill to be converted into yarn for us.

Lucky find

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Mr Professional had a major score this week, we was working on a different project and spotted a pile of solid concrete blocks and bricks for sale in Pendleton.  He messaged me as I am always on the lookout for a great deal and you never know when you might need a large load of brick and blocks.  We got the whole thing for $250, about 20,000 lbs of block and brick!  It took us two loads with the pickup and trailer and a paltry seven hours to load both loads and unload the first load.  At midnight when we got home we had already moved 30k pounds of block and I was done, I was not going to move any more block.  Two more attempts got all the brick and block neatly stacked at our house and ready for a project.  I am going to use some of the block to make a concrete waterway in the barn lot.  I will use the blocks to line the bottom of the spring where it goes between the cinder block stairs so the animals will have access to clean running water and no weeds will build up where they drink.  I am also thinking about a brick archway leading to our house out by the cars.  This will let me put in a custom gate and anchor it to the brick pillar which will be filled with concrete and rebar.  This is a future plan and is way behind many others that need to happen first.
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I have spent the last two Sundays picking blackberries.  You can tell that some of our plants are in with the animals as they clean up the bushes.  This works well for me as there is not a lot of bending over to pick blackberries.  The first Sunday I was able to get 2 gallons off of the first bush.  Today I had to pick 3 quarts on the first bush and go up and pick the other five on two other bushes.  We have enough for 12 pies and I froze some in little snack packs for Annmarie to use in her breakfast smoothie, raw egg, fresh fruit, frozen fruit, Greek vanilla yogurt.

Annmarie has started to clean up our alpaca fiber.  She is picking the organic matter, weeds, out of the fleece so we can send it off for processing.  It will cost us $25/lb to have it processed into yarn.  She is shaking the dirt out and pulling out the hair mats.  She is not the only one who appreciates the alpaca fiber.  Gizmo thinks it is quite soft and has been trying to steal parts of it to use in making up his bed.  He sleeps inside a deep hole in the yard that Mouse dug and he managed to steal some scraps and drag them into his hole.  Here he just plopped down on the fiber to be cleaned.  We are packaging it in large vacuum bags so we can get the bulk down and try and only ship it as weight.  The fleece takes up a large amount of space even though it is not very heavy.  So far we have not had to use the vacuum on the bags yet but I am hoping to get 4-6 fleeces into each bag.  I would like to send 20# boxes.  We will see how it goes, as it takes her about three hours for each fleece and we have about 20-23 to process.  She has done four in the last week after she made the skirting table.

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I tried to go up to the old barley field that I cut last week and rake it for hay.  No go, I spent almost two hours trying to rake it to get a pile I could run the baler over and only ended up with two rows.  It is not worth the effort and I just quit.  We will go up and kill the entire field so it can be turned over and cleaned up and replanted this fall.  I want to replant field number 4 also and part of 3.  I need to go buy grass seed soon as everyone always runs out by late fall.

I did get all new tires for the flatbed trailer and will be picking up hay.  I also got two new tires for the horse trailer as the spare was flat and another one blew up with the trailer parked on one of our 105 degree days.  I was going to get the new tractor rim changed over but it turns out they sold me a 15” rim and I needed a 12” rim so I will be taking that back.  The tire shop also managed to get a oil change done on the pickup at the same time!

Back at it!

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The part came from Italy for the sickle bar mower.  Mr Professional spent most of the day on Thursday tearing it apart and I had to order more tools.  I did not have a spanner wrench.  I also did not have a large metric open end wrench over 18mm.  Since I was already ordering tools I ordered another water fire extinguisher and a new pickup tube for the water extinguisher we have and two metal tank holders.  I will mount one on the tractor and one on the side by side so we have water in case of a fire.

Friday we spent the morning pressing in new bearings and reassembling the sickle bar.  Once on, we readied the tractor for mowing.  I will mow the upper field on Saturday.  I think I can get a couple of ton out of it even after all of the flooding.

Annmarie made a Dutch baby for breakfast!  I like lemon, powdered sugar and real maple syrup on mine.  After breakfast, I grabbed my full coffee cup, full thermos and quart of water and headed out to the tractor.  I started to mow as soon as I got up in the field but I had forgotten how long it takes.  The field is seven acres and the tractor will only mow 1 acre/hr, that is a lot of circles.  I started to fall asleep while going down the rows, I am sure the neighbors thought I was drunk.  My lines were all off.  I started to subdivide the field into smaller pieces so it would feel  like I was making progress.  The hawks were amazing.  I tried to get a picture of them but I am not sure I succeeded.

After seven hours I was wishing I had two more thermos of coffee.  The doe and her twin fawns kept running around the fields.  I drove back by the blackberries to see if they were ready.  Turns out the first batch of berries are ready to pick.  I have a friend who offered to trade huckleberries for blackberries, not a 1:1.

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I will turn the hay in a few days and bale it in the morning.  It makes nicer bales when you do it first thing in the morning.  These will go in the barn.  I have 6 ton of small bales to pickup and I have 40 ton of large bales still to pickup.  I need to do that this month.

 

 

Farm 1 Predators 0

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Thursday morning as I was putting on my shoes to go to work I heard Annmarie hollering from the upstairs bedroom.  Now I did have my hearing aids in but when I am downstairs and she is upstairs in the master bedroom, technology cannot overcome the should differences.  I managed to hear “coyote” and “ram pasture”.  It’s all I needed, she identified the threat and gave its location.  I ran to the front door sans shoes as they had not made it on my feet yet and grabbed for a gun, I had to move the 22LR to grab the .243.  I ran out into the front yard, I need to spray some thistles out of the front yard, and spotted the coyote low on the back hillside and fired a shot and hit it.  I took aim again and missed and then the gun clicked on empty.  I only had two rounds in it.  So I ran back inside and ran upstairs to the bedroom, threw open the closet window and grabbed the 17HMR, no angle and the tree was in the way so I had to run back downstairs and out into the front lawn, two more shots and I was out again!  I need to work on keeping the rifles loaded.  The coyote was laying up against the fence working on dying.  I went in, loaded up on ammo and walked out and finished off the coyote.  Annmarie said it was right behind the house where I feed the chickens compost.  It would have had one of my chickens in another 15 minutes.  When I went back inside the house I realized that the .243 has an ammo butt stock holder!  I had ten more rounds!!  I am so used to the 17 HMR and 22LR it never even occurred to  me to look.  I guess I will have to use the .243 more often.

Mr Professional came out to work on the sickle bar mower and tear it apart to replace the broken rocker arm.  He found the carcass after following my directions explicitly.  He tried to find it just by looking in the general area but it blended in too well.  It’s now on the boneyard pile.

Friday we put the sickle bar mower back together with the new parts and it doesn’t make any noise!!  It runs fairly quietly, a big change from the broken sound.  I will mow field #1 on Saturday.  It’s the last field we still have to hay.  I may get 2-3 tons, we will know by the end of the week.  606ECD18-0850-4179-A5BB-ED551584EFEA

 

 

Tragedy

Steve Hardin2 Comments

Well last Sunday I decided that I needed to mow the upper field #2.  Since Mr. Professional is helping me we have devised a simple way to talk about the various fields. We start from the upper bottom pasture and number them in ascending order 1-4.  Then you have the “pea field” down by mother in laws house then you have lower pasture down by schoolhouse.  This forgets about the 1 acre piece closer to mother-in-law’s house and across the creek.  We don’t talk about that field specifically so it just gets tossed into the schoolhouse field.

I had sprayed #2 field a couple of weeks earlier but it is so thick and tall it needs to be knocked down then sprayed 2 weeks later to kill the thistles.  I drove up there in the tractor and remembered to add on a crescent wrench so I could fix the broken gate.

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After fixing the gate, there was some internal dialogue about fixing the gate on my way out of the field, but you never know what is going to happen so I opted to just fix the gate first thing as a safer move.  I think the bolt just came loose and it fell down, I don’t believe it was anything nefarious.

I started mowing on the left hand side of the field first.  It’s the smaller side and I would get to see results sooner.  The pecker poles are amazing!  I knew exactly where the water was and was able to not get the tractor stuck.  As I continued to go around in circles I kept spotting the baby deer.  There were four different deer all had spots and they were about dog sized and running all over the place.  The pheasants are also plentiful this year.  I jumped four juvenile roosters that had their colors but no tail feathers at all.  Since it was almost a 100 F outside I had raised the mower deck about 14 inches off of the ground.  The weeds are incredibly thick and I did not want the mower to get overheated.  My goal is simply to knock them down so that when I drive over the area with the side by side the spray gets evenly distributed.  You could see where some swaths of field had great spray coverage and others were limited by the height of the weeds and spray dispersement.

I was taking a break after the first section was done when Richard pulled out and asked me if I was ok.  He is the one who pulled the tractor out of the mud for me.  He thought I had gotten stuck again as I was parked near where I was buried before.  I chuckled and thanked him for checking on me but no, I was taking a break as the field is very rough and furrowed from the flooding and the tractor is beating me up.  It really works your lower back muscles.

There are hawks everywhere!  We have at least 6-8 living all over the farm.  It is pretty amazing.  I am sure that at least two of them are juveniles as our nesting pair is back but we may now have two pair of nesting hawks.  They used to only be on the upper end of the property but are now the full length of the place.

I started in on the second half and about halfway through tragedy struck!!  The weeds are tall and you cannot see the ground.  I do pay attention as I don’t want to hit rocks and need to stay on the completed line so I can get finished in a timely manner.  I came around in a shorter square pattern, I get tired of doing the entire field and tend to break them up into pieces.  It looks like I am getting done quicker.  I came back around and saw a 1-2 day old fawn on the ground dying.  I had run over it with my actual tractor wheel.  If I had mowed over it the fawn would have been just fine as the mower is set high, but alas of the four foot wide swath my tractor makes only a 2.5 foot tire free zone.  This did cause me angst for the rest of the day.  The fawn never tried to get up or run away and it was so much younger than all the other babies I had been watching run all over the fields.

After mowing I spent another hour digging more ditches.  I managed to not get stuck this time.  There is still water coming out of the ground and forming a small running spring.  This water does not leave the field it ends up running down about half way and getting reabsorbed.   I finished the field and went back and cleaned off the tractor.  A couple of days later I had come to terms with the mowing tragedy.  I took a finished photo below.

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