Month: September 2023

Round-Up Week

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It’s been a while since I blogged. I blame it on the Pendleton Round-Up. All the locals say time stops and all projects go on hold while it occurs and the reality really does reflect the saying. I have been picking fruit non stop every few days and Annmarie has been drying it, canning it or freezing it. We managed to get the 50 lambs sold before the coyotes ate any more! A person from the west side of the state came over and got all 50, he was gone 20 minutes after arrival. We had them all ready to go. Honestly, this is the best way to sell lambs, all at once. We got a fair price $100 for all over 60# and $80 for all 40-59#.

The apprentice came out for a few hours a couple of days and weeded the hillside again and went in and cleaned up the lavender patch. The patch looks great, I just need to trim it all for the winter and we will be ready for next year. We have about five plants that have taken off on their own and need to be replanted. She is about ready to go off and learn to be a farrier at the end of the month. We will have to tear out our garden soon as the temperature has started to dip down to 45F at night. We have prunes drying in dehydrator now as soon as they are done we will dry the last of the spices before winter.

I had another project for my mother that I was able to get completed before it froze. I said I would be able to do it at the beginning of summer and managed to get it done with a lot of help from a lot of other people. My mother and sister did a great job. Now I can start working on the back bridge foundations.

The quail are everywhere! You literally cannot walk around anywhere on the farm without running into a covey or if you sit still you can hear them calling from all over. They are so used to people that as long as you are 30’ away they will just ignore you. This bodes well for a healthy population going into winter. We also have two covey of Hungarian partridges. We usually only have one on the farm. We also have a bunny rabbit living along the driveway again.

When I leave for work and the moon and stars are out I always try and take a picture with my phone. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. I keep trying.

Predators 11/ Farm 1

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Sunday morning we went out to do more fencing. The Apprentice just keeps coming back for more, which is a good thing. On the way out to field #1 we passed two dead lambs! Both kills occurred in field #4 near the barn lot, one near the old well and one near the dry creek bed. The one near the well was about 2/3 eaten and the other one was barely touched. After some righteous anger outbursts, now there are only 50 lambs to sell, we continued on to field #1 to fence. I did text the person who was supposed to come buy lambs on Monday. They eventually texted back and had some issues of their own and will not be able to come get lambs until Saturday. So we need to keep all 50 alive for one more week.

When we were installing the H braces we used a rolling measuring wheel to mark out 315’ approximately as each roll of woven wire is 330’. The plan was to be able to tighten one roll of wire at a time. A single roll weighs 185# so tying more than one together and trying to get it tight is brutal. It’s hard enough trying to get 185# of wire to stand upright using a hand tightener. I made sure and brought along a four foot section of pipe to use as a cheater bar when the tightener got too hard for me to tighten by hand. This allowed me to get another 6-12 inches of tightening.

On Saturday the black walnut tree was fine (see pictures from previous post) and then this morning the thing had split in half! It looks like there was a natural wishbone and the amount of walnuts caused the tree to just split in half. We are going to let it see if it can live by spending half its time on the ground. Who knows, maybe it will survive and do well. The turkeys roost in the tree also so maybe we should blame them instead of the huge number of walnuts.

We fixed the H brace and then tightened the fence to it. Once that was done then all of the T post clips had to be installed. I showed the Apprentice how to do this but it takes quite a bit of practice to be fast at it. I am doing about 2/3 of the fence. But I have had a lot of practice! We then did the wooden stays. This really makes the fence look good and it keeps the animals from pressing down on the smooth wire. We then rolled out another roll of fencing and got it up! Due to to curved nature of this fence we had to go on the outside of the railroad tie H braces in two spots. We clipped and stayed that section and then rolled out another 330’ of fence and called it a day. We are both getting very tired and sore.

I opted to do coyote patrol that evening and night. We don’t own a spotlight yet (it’s on order 300k candle power). But the moon was supposed to be out and I lined the pickup headlights to cover the area and used a powerful flashlight. I stayed out there from 1800-0000, 6 hours and never saw a single predator. Honestly, this is the most stupid problem ever. I am looking into a thermal scope and a flat shooting rifle. What we really need is a drone with a thermal camera on it that can be auto launched, flown over the farm then allow it to auto land back at it’s starting point. This way I would know whether to go out and deal with the predators. I am also looking into some thermal binoculars. The thermal binoculars and the spotlight with a good scope might just be enough. I have done the math, a protection dog costs about $1600 a year by the time you count for food and vet costs. This is a cost that continues year to year. A rifle and binocular cost is a one time event.

Fencing field #1 again

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Saturday was dedicated to more fencing. The goal is to get enough fence up around field #1 to let the animals into it. So the Apprentice and I loaded up the pickup and Kubota and headed out to get some actual fence installed. We rolled out the first 55 feet of fence, stretched it, put the T post clips on and then needed to install the wooden stays. I let the Apprentice use the DeWalt fence stapler and after she pulled the trigger a couple of times she said “that has some kick” and did not really want to staple anything with it. So when she held the first wooden stay and I ran the stapler she complained of pain and stinging from the stapler (it hurts). So she found a large old wooden fence post and she leaned that against the wooden stay then put her body weight onto the wooden buffer and had no more problems. She rolled out 330’ of woven wire along side the T posts and when we got to the next H brace we realized that it had not been completed. There was no X of tightened smooth wire in place. We left the smooth wire at the house because we thought we had done all of the X’s.

This necessitated a change in tasks so we went to installing T posts with the tractor. We did pretty good until we got near the end and then we started to bend the posts into a U shape. We fixed this by clearing the grass debris away from the post insertion site and I used a pounding technique with the bucket instead of a steady downward pressure. This got all of the T posts into the ground.

I decided to call it a day and we headed out of field #1, but when we got to the gate I realized that not having a direct gate into the field from the wheat field side is just horrible. It makes for this long convoluted route to get into field #1. So I stopped, had the Apprentice go grab one of the unused gates and three railroad ties to bring back, it took a couple of trips and some finagling on her part but she got all of the stuff to the needed spot. I took the John Deere tractor and tried to drill three large 12” holes into the gate opening I had fenced off. I managed it eventually but each hole took 10-15 minutes to drill out. I also realized that the hydraulic fluid leak is worse than I had guessed as the auger got stuck down into the hole with the 150# weight I had on the auger. I added three old tractor weights to the top arch and it makes the auger work even when the ground is hard. So I had to remove said weights to get the auger to come out of the hole. On a plus note, at least we dug out the main batch of holes with the six inch auger first. This saved us a bunch of time. So now the holes are dug and we just need to clean them out, set some posts, put in some wire X supports and then hang a gate. I was so glad to be done for the day.

Lambs for sale

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The Apprentice has been incredibly game for whatever comes her way. So on Friday we were ready to sort lambs and I wanted to weigh them. We have never weighed our sheep before. We bought the slings and scale several years ago with the intention of doing it occasionally but in all reality it was not necessary. I had posted an ad for the lambs on Craigslist and someone was interested but they wanted to know how many of the lambs were slaughter weight. Well we are keeping seven of the big lambs for our local customers. We have six sold but due to the current coyote problems we are having I through it prudent to keep an extra on hand.

Due to us keeping seven and me stating they weighed anywhere from 35-85# I figured we better have some weights. We grabbed a short section of chain from the fence (I keep all of the short sections I find all over the farm next to the outhouse trash enclosure). The new scale and slings were in the tack room. The one sling is for newborn lambs and the other for everyone else up to 200#. We hung the scale up in the momma/baby area. This way if the lamb got loose we could easily catch it again. The only bad part of this plan is you have to get the sheep into the harness on the ground then lift them up onto the hooks of the scale. So this means lifting every single lamb after you have already caught them and drug them over to the scale.

We got all 59 lambs into the barn and pushed down to the far end so they can feed into the chute and then we can count and sort them. I manned the sorting gate and chute. The Apprentice was at the end of the chute and had to catch them as I pushed them out and drag them over to the momma/baby area. Keep in mind she weighs 115# and is 5’4” and has never wrangled sheep before. It went pretty well actually.

She determined that horns on sheep are unnecessary. I like to use them as handles but the ones with little nubbins kept managing to head but her or dig their horns into her biceps. She got tossed around a few times and losses control of the lamb. We just pushed them into the momma/baby area and then caught them again. We had one crazy female, who weighed 112# that just head butted right into my left side and tried to knock me down. We finally snagged her and got her into the scale. If she was not already going away that behavior would have earned a ticket to cull city! One time she held on but got tossed all over the barn while managing barely to stay on her feet and keep ahold of the very large lamb. On one occasion while getting the lamb into the harness she got jerked toward the side and I had to catch her to keep her from hitting her head. After that I held the sheep and she put the harness on. We finished with all 59, with 52 weighed. We did not weigh the seven we were keeping. It was getting pretty long as that took us about four hours to do fifty sheep. So about 5 minutes per sheep.

We then let the 52 go out into the upper end fields and moved the keeper seven over to the lower pastures to go into our main herd of ewes and two rams. We only kept whethers so this is possible.

Once that was done we needed to take the pile of discarded and not valuable alpaca fiber that was still in the milking area of the barn over into the lavender patch. We are using the fiber as a weed suppressant, ground cloth. It works pretty good for that but it takes a lot of fiber to do that. Luckily, we have a lot. We drug it through the corral and front yard and then went to toss it over the fence. This is when the Apprentice announced she “cannot move my arms” when we went to lift the fiber over the fence. It was a 12 x10’ tarp full of fiber.

We worked on clearing the front hillside of puncture vine. It’s so hard to get rid of so we are taking it out and bagging it all to go to the dump. We don’t want any of it on the property. Once we had the bag full the apprentice could not lift it so she brought the trash can into the yard and managed to get the bag into it on her own. We called it a day after that.

I am getting too old to go all day, I hurt by the end of the day. Annmarie tells me I should be conditioning my body in the off summer season but I am not sure that will help my joints, my achy knees, elbows and shoulders! So instead I just keep moving and keep doing stuff despite the pain.

Barn is now ready for the winter

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The Apprentice came out for a couple of partial days early in the week and got the frost free faucet holes filled in. She stated that she is constantly hurting all of the time due to the laborious nature of the work she is doing on the farm. I stated that it was merely training for her apprenticeship at the end of September. Plus, she keeps returning and working every time I ask. This is a win/win situation for both of us.

I have some extra time off of work so I am playing catch up before winter starts. I have several projects that are on hold, the old house freezer room, the back bridge, bee hive storage room and moving the old lamb shed over near the machine shed. Instead I am working on the barn. It needed to be set back up so we can use it. So on Thursday I cleaned up the house some, then picked two more gallons of thornless blackberries and then the Apprentice came out to do some more work.

We gathered some tools and drug them out to the barn. We needed to install more hooks for the buckets. It’s so much nicer to be able to find a bucket when you need it, so we installed another ten hooks. We installed bungee cords on all of the doors so they auto close now so the sheep cannot get into any area that we forget to use the latch on. We installed the sorting chute and even put some hinge joints into the chute so when we start using the chute panels to block off portions of the barn it will be easier to move the panels. I think we need another six metal pins as there are only two left unused. The door into the momma/baby is always out of commission early as it get stuck open due to the level of the bedding rising quickly. So we raised it another three inches. It cannot go any higher or the lambs will fall under it when they lay next to it. They all lay next to something that will potentially allow them to fall under it. The extra bungees were all placed in the bungee hanging spot and all of the bucket straps were placed on the wall in their appropriate storage spot. We added three more rails in the momma/baby area to hang feeders from. We added two more eyelets for the creep gate so the area under the stairs can be converted to a baby feed fattening area.

The big thing was to put metal support hangers under all of the cross braces holding up the bedding. One of the boards had split and another was cracking. We had to force the broken one back together and install the hanger. Now that they all have a hanger we don’t have to worry about the space above the feeders crashing down onto the unsuspecting sheep dining below. We just need to toss out some straw bales but literally you just toss them down and the sheep will tear them up and spread them around themselves.