Month: September 2020

Forever Friday 39/45

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Sunday morning it dawned on me that I had a pull behind furrow for the tractor and was not utilizing it! Thank you Penny for convincing me to buy it when I had no need for it. I have had it a few years and not used it but once or twice. I hooked it up to the tractor and drug the ditch the entire length three times and it tore it up great! All I need to do now is go up there with the box blade on and I can finish getting the ditch cleaned out. I suspect it will take me another 8 hours to get it all cleaned up. I saw our friendly kestrel again. It must have a nest or be living right in the area. While I was digging the ditch I got the overhead tractor lights caught in the branches of a tree. After a few hours of digging my large light fell off the tractor and was hanging by its cord. I drove home and called it a night. I needed to fix the lights anyways.

Today I opted to get the disc set up and running. I had seen it up between the wheat fields. It took me abut 20 minutes to get the drag behind rakes off of the disc. There is so much organic matter I knew they would just clog up and I would have to stop every five minutes to empty it out. It took me a another 15 minutes to get it working correctly. I circled the little patch of ground between the wheat fields then took disc up to the seven acre field and went around its border three times. This way if I want to burn it in a month I can. The real reason to use the disc was to tear up the area I want to drag with the box blade. I want to lower the water laden area in field two another one foot and take that dirt and build up the surrounding area. I need to fix all the wash boarding that occurred from the running water throughout the field. I went over it in every direction for about 90 minutes and was able to get a fairly good loosening of soil. Using the teeth on the box blade now I should be able to drag this and move a bunch of dirt. I am running out of time! I only have half a day tomorrow then we go to the coast. I am going to work on tightening the momma/baby fence tomorrow. I can hard wire in the gate for now as I won’t need it to operate correctly until the spring. After I get the gate wired shut and the other fence tightened I just have the one spring crossing to harden. Luckily if they get under that fence they just get trapped in the second flower area and there are no flowers in there. So as soon as I get the fence tightened it should hold animals and we will be ready for winter. Next week after I get done working I will ready the barn and make the last rock jack. I may need to blow out the drip lines also. Winter is coming.

Monday morning I fixed the lights on the tractor. I had a smaller light that I installed looking forward. The light is about 75% smaller than the one I knocked off. I realized that you don’t need much light looking forward, more looking backwards where the equipment is pulling behind the tractor. I had so much light power I was sucking the battery dry. So less light is better for multiple reasons. Today I cut a piece of pipe to use as conduit so that branches could not grab the loose wires. I will need to try it out in the dark and see how it works still.

Forever Friday 37/45

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I opted to move no rocks as I did not sleep well, my shoulders are constantly aching and all of my muscles are twitching so bad they are keeping me awake. I ended up in the spare room so I did not keep Annmarie awake also. I vowed no rock picking on Saturday and I am going to stick with it. I do realize that a large portion of this this is my own fault by not doing some more baseline exercise. I need to think about that and consider the fact that I am not getting younger! I do believe there is an inherent amount of wisdom gained by getting older, mine comes mostly from past mistakes.

I ended up using the arena groomer to smooth out the area around the machine shed and grain bins. I want to replant them in grass again. We need to get on top of the weeds and this is helping. I then switched over to the box blade so I could go up and look at the flood damage in the 7 acre field (#1). The field is incredibly rough from all the water rivulets that were created from the flooding. I want to focus on the old irrigation ditch. All of the fields used to be flood irrigated. I am looking at cleaning out the ditches and setting them up again used for this purpose. I started at the near end and worked for four hours. I was able to get about 20% completed. My goal is to get this completed this week, we will see if I have the time.

I got to see a kestrel hawk come in and fly about 20 feet away. The wind was perfect and the hawk was just suspended in air and just twitching its wings to stay in one spot. I am thinking about using more of those 16’ posts in the ground for the predator birds to use as perches around the outside of our fields. More mice and voles getting eaten is a good thing. On the way home I stopped at this buried piece of metal and attempted to dig it out. I thought it was a piece of equipment. It looks like it was five anchors for something. The ground is so hard I cannot get it out with my tractor and will have to wait until spring and tackle it again. Hidden things in the weedS are bad for the farm equipment, especially the mower. My coffee cup does not appreciate getting covered in dirt, but I tell it that as long as it contains the elixir of life I will always love it.

As we were settling down to dinner I let the dogs inside. Mouse starting talking because he wanted dinner. He talks at us when its food time, it is not a bark, more like a whine/controlled vocalization. We told him no as we had dinner on the table and he was going to have to wait. He kept pacing so Annmarie told him to lay down in the hall. He came into the kitchen, flopped down on his side and then voiced his protest at not getting dinner! We made him wait until our dinner was over then all the dogs got to eat. He definitely had an opinion and was able to express it quite eloquently.

Forever Friday 36/45

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Yesterday is proving that I may need a slight break from hard manual labor. I managed to get one rock crib filled and the other about 1/3 of the way done before I gave up on the rock cribs. My back is screaming at me after I move about two ton of rock now. I only have 2/3 of a rock crib left to fill and one rock jack to construct. The nice thing about the rock crib is there is a pile of rocks right next to where I am making it so I can just reach over and fill it without having to move every rock twice. The completed rock rib is on the right side of the picture and the partially full one is on the left side of the picture. I also turned on the sprinkler at dark plus it rained 3/100” last night!

I picked out the largest rocks from my current pile and brought about five loads up onto the back hillside behind the barn. The sheep are constantly knocking the dirt down the hillside and I wanted to be able to create a level spot so I can see if I can get some grass to grow up here in the spring. I arranged the rocks so they were stable and then dumped gravel over the top and scooped and spread gravel until it filled all the cracks and crevices. Once this gets some rain I will work on removing the gravel from the rocks so I get a better rock outline. I won’t do that until late spring of next year. I want everything to settle into place.

Since I was not going to move more rocks, I worked on leveling the strip of dirt behind the machine shed with the box blade then switched to the arena groomer to tear up the surface dirt of the field around the grain bins. I want to be able to plant grass again in this area and see if it will take hold better this year. The weeds are virtually nonexistent this year compared to last year. Once I get the fencing done I will be moving onto grass seed planting. I am going to do tractor work tomorrow.

Animal Names

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Honestly, all the credit here goes to Mr Professional as I have never bothered to name the animals. “Hey Stupid” is my go to name. If you say it nicely they respond and you only have to remember one name. Unfortunately, now that we are trying to process our alpaca fiber we need to have the animals named and keep track of the quality of their fiber. To do this effectively we need names, so instead of me just making them up I asked Mr Professional to attach all his names to them. He has been calling them by their names all year long. Here they are:

He has also named our Bull “Thor” and the Ram is “Titus”. We have no idea how old the alpaca are as we have had them for five years without any background information. We know some of them look old.

Forever Friday 35/45

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Only 9 days left as I did all of this work yesterday! We are actually going to go to the coast for some actual rest and relaxation so I have fewer days than that to work on the farm. I need to be ready for Winter and its getting close to being finished and close to being winter!

I keep trying to get more organized. This is probably my single biggest hurdle. I will be making labels for my tool drawers next so I can finish organizing the new tool box and storage area in the machine shop. I am going to have Annmarie engrave labels on metal and get magnets for them so I can move them around if needed because I will not be happy with the first version. I also spent an hour and cleaned up all of the fencing buckets, tossed out the trash and got everything organized into grouped bins. I think I need to make a couple of shelves above this area to put tools onto, that project can happen later after everything else is done. I did take the drain hose and elevate it. It doesn’t weigh very much but it takes up a lot of space. I have this for around the barn but did not have time to get it into the ground. I used the old rope and pulley that used to hold up the fuel nozzle from outside the machine shed.

I had the pickup and trailer in the ram pasture but it was hard to drive in through the new gate as I am not going to get the flooded out culvert cleaned up and replaced. The angle of approach needed to be adjusted to make coming around the old chicken coop easier. This option had been discussed and since it rained 12/100” last night I thought moving some dirt was perfect. The moisture did not go down far but it did help some. I have a pile of dirt that I have been slowly lowering and I just lowered it enough to create a drivable dirt path. My little tractor can do this but it takes a lot of time with a 1/3 cubic yard bucket and a four foot wide box blade.

I got two more rock cribs finished and full of rocks. I am so ready for work where I do not have to move a few thousand pounds of rock a day. My limit alone is about 10,000 lbs of rock a day, which is only two cribs as I have to move the rock twice. After that I am ready to move onto a different job. So I ended up grading the animal access to the spring. It had three old post holes that needed cleaned up as we widened the water access and made it more into a funnel shape. I also dug out the water area to widen it and harden the far bank. My waterproof muck boots have gotten a serious workout this year.

I ended up watering the new plants with a bucket and collected eggs. For some reasons the chickens are slacking off as I only got seven eggs yesterday. I am unsure why, I am thinking it is time to cull all three roosters and the ancient hen who can only crab walk. The chickens don’t lay well when I disturb the normal patterns but since they are not laying anyway I might as well do it now.