Month: January 2022

Winter Routine, not!

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I went out Sunday morning to do the barn chores and found the horse in the old milking enclosure. Mind you, the day before Sarah and I had lowered the panel to prevent the horse from getting in as she had done the day before. I have no idea how she got in, she must have gotten down on her knees and army crawled in! She was a little perturbed about being trapped and as I was working on getting the panel down she kept coming up to push on it. I had to shoo her away as I needed to reef on the panel to get it out and did not want to smack her in the nose with the panel. She might take offense at that.

We fed the sheep, who are being picky eaters. We have some wonderful green hay and some not very good hay. I am feeding it out 50/50 right now and the sheep are not eating the lousy hay, which tells me that they are wasting the good hay by only looking for the choicest morsels. So the 50/50 will continue as the good hay needs to stretch out. I have a new plan for haying in the spring and I am simply not going to let the hay get as dry. I have a moisture tester and used it last year. But I am baling the round bales fairly loosely, and the bales are drying out after they are baled. I am going to experiment with the bales and if necessary the first weeks worth of bales will be stored outside and not stacked super tight and used first in the winter!

I had noticed that someone was cribbing our new ram enclosure. I suspected the horse but it was fairly low and could have been the sheep. After catching the horse in the old milking area I am convinced it is the fat horse trying to get to more hay. I used a tie down to make the hole smaller so even if she keeps cribbing she cannot get into the ram area. This summer we will build it up and make the exterior match the barn.

Since it is the new year I continued on my annual cleaning and organizing trend. I stopped the stairway fan, vacuumed it off and then wiped it down.
When I was doing the same to our large stained glass light I found a solid layer of dust on it and two of the six lightbulbs were burnt out. I ended up having to wipe the whole thing down and vacuum down the walls to remove dust laden cobwebs. I am forever grateful I had enough foresight to cut the access holes into the bathroom walls to allow easy access to the stairway ceiling. The stairway is a lot brighter now!

Cold day

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We have officially had our coldest night of 2021 last night! It got down to -6.7 F per our thermometer last night. I waited for it to warm up before going outside to do morning chores – it was 8 F. This doesn’t sound much warmer but it really is a lot warmer than negative numbers. I dressed up in four different layers. I will admit the two stockings on my head was overkill and did make it a little too warm when I was out in the barn feeding. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. I was even able to find a couple of places that still had undisturbed snow to take some pictures. We still have six ewes that need to give birth and they are not having lambs any time soon. It is crazy how much the old ram spread out his affection. We have been lambing for over four months now. The old ram comes over and visits us when we go into the barn lot. He wants scritches and some more food, fortunately for us he is teaching the new ram that we are the source of all that is good. I have been able to pet on the new ram several times and I have not even fed him any grain yet.

The cows up above and down below all got some supplemental hay bales tossed out today. They can root through the bales and pick out the grain heads and use the straw as filler. I will feed them supplemental hay again tomorrow. This just stretches the large bales that we are feeding. When I went down to feed the lower cows the alpaca had pushed them away from the feeder and the cows were down by the schoolhouse wandering around. I drove the tractor in circles to flatten the snow to create a spot to toss out the bales. The cows came running when they heard the tractor!

I told Annmarie I would start in on some of the winter projects. One of which is to make frames for the upstairs bathroom closet. But before I could do that I needed to clean off the shelves. This led to a very large give away pile and the joy of space bags being realized. The space bags made short work of all the extra blankets and pillows. I found three more Pendleton wool blankets buried and we had even taken them to the dry cleaners at one point as they all were still in their bags with tags. Annmarie is going to order the heavy duty magnets and I will make the frames and install the magnets on the cabinet faces and the frames. We are then going to cover the frames with fabric. There will be three frames for each side so you will only need to remove one frame to access what you want. Once I get the bathroom door back on there will be no room for cabinet doors. The magnetic frames is a great space saver for this tight spot.