Month: December 2025

Winter is here sorta

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Every year I transplant a bunch of houseplants as gifts for the staff at work. I have taken over the breeze porch as my indoor garden area. I share the space with the dog kennels which actually works well for me as I have covered the roofs of all of the kennels with plywood to make more space to put out plants! I have been cloning my basic plants for a few years so I have decided to branch out and start to grow a more diverse selection. To that end I have started to buy seeds online and have been trying to get them started. I am using a heat mat and now I have a grow light and I am still having trouble. I bought some mini greenhouse and that has netted me two plants. So far I have managed to grow four plants from seed. The tallest plants are three inches and fairly spindly. The smallest one is the size of a pea. This is a problem for me as I have taken it on as a challenge. I am up there every couple of days now nurturing them. I usually just water 1-2 times a week under normal circumstances. The wife got me a new DeWalt shelf system for Christmas, the kind of present where I ordered it and it arrives after Christmas. So I will now have two four foot wide by four feet tall three high shelf system on each side of the door. This is good as my other shelf has 50% of it covered in planting paraphernalia. I may need a four foot wide grow light for the new one but I am going to hold off and see what I can do with my little grow light.

I have almost 15 plants started for the next year. I am trying some plants that require a frequent amount of water to grow. I am putting water absorbing crystals into the soil in an attempt to get the plant to have a continuous source of water and not my normal up and down watering quantity. I also got a better quality soil and have been mixing my own batches for the type of plant I am growing. My goal is to have 35 plants ready to go in a year. I have freed a variety of Jade plant that I have had for years and just recently discovered that it was a Jade plant. So now I will be trying to get it to grow another foot tall in the next couple of years. I don’t actually know what I am doing, I just keep trying different things until something works.

Our daughter and paramour got us the perfect farm gift for Christmas, they got us a cast iron boot scraper! I put it out in the yard near the back gate so we can scrape our boots off before we go into the gravel area of the back garden. So far we have not had a chance to use it as it is now freezing most of the time but its potential usefulness cannot be diminished by its lack of participation. We have great hopes for the future.

The cows are now needing fed about every ten days. The second feeder we brought home from the neighbors is a little small for a full big bale to drop in. Mr Rainman broke open a big bale last time and forked it into the feeder with the tractor. I decided to one up man ship him and opted to try and get the bale into the feeder from the top. The problem is the bale is at the top weight capacity of the Kubota tractor. I got the bale directly next to the feeder head on and then dropped the three point box of horseshoes onto the ground then I started to make the front end lift of the tractor to bounce. Every time the weight bounced upwards I got the bale a few inches higher. I kept doing this until I was level with the top of the feeder and was able to dump it inside the old feeder. I had three of the tractor tires on the ground by the time I dumped the bale. If the bale had weighed another 20# I don’t believe I could have done it for fear of tipping the tractor forward. I made sure to take a picture so that prowess with the little Kubota could be immortalized.

Annmarie had me go out and swap out bee food. We are feeding concentrated sugar syrup to supplement the honey. We would like to harvest a bunch of honey in the spring. It was warm enough for the bees to move around and even fly out of the hive box. They are still pretty dang calm when it is this cold outside.

The table saw is now covered on the old house back porch and is ready to ride out the winter weather. I have covered the grain cracker on the end of the porch with the same tarp. I still need to crack more grain. I have been saying this for the last six weeks but Monday night I used up the very last bit of cracked grain and will need to fill the feeders in a couple of days, my procrastination days are about to end.

I have been looking at various spray on insulation foams for the inside of the old house. I am only going to spray it on two walls in the old house for my craft room. What I really need to do is find an old external door with intact seals and a frame to install inside and on the back door. I don’t want to spend a fortune on doors and I need two to finish this space. But I am not installing door or windows until I lift the room up a couple more inches on the outer wall.

Bathroom day 51

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I have been informed that there are a mere 24 days left until company arrives for the wedding! This does sorta put things in perspective. It is only day 51 of the remodel, even though it is week 45. At this rate I will be able to stay ahead of the weeks passed by the number of days worked on the project! Not a great accomplishment but it is something. I have been working on the dreaded Sheetrock. Again, there are just a few things that I don’t care for and Sheetrock work is one of them. I tried something different this time. I was super careful to scrape really well with the next size up drywall scraper/knife. When I was close to finishing I did a wet sand. I had never tried it before, it did leave some slight grooves from softening things up too much it was super easy to repair once it all dried up.

I shot texture on the wall this morning and the main section looks good. It will be ready for primer tomorrow. I will have to dig around in the closets to see if we have any leftover paint. I still need to put some more texture on the wall opposite the closet. I ran out of texture in the can.

I have been working on getting the inside trim dialed in this weekend. I had to tear custom width oak for the top and bottom of the cabinet. I spent almost 90 minutes just sanding those pieces then dry fitting them. This required multiple trips to the saw to get the length right. I installed the top two and the bottom side one. The front needs a nail gun but I only have the air finish nailers and I want to wait to set that up until I have all of the trim pieces cut and dry fitted.

I put a couple of 2×2 at the top of the door to work as spacers so I can nail the trim to them. The trim needed to be lower to cover the hanger hardware. My goal is to hide everything. I am working in pine on the inside of the door as that is what I used on the walls. The outside will be done in the same trim as all the rest of the interior. I was at the hardware store for over 30 minutes just digging through pine boards to find some I could use as trim, too many knots, cracks, chips on edges on a large portion of the boards. I needed one board 8” wide and 7’ tall. I ended up buying a 12 foot section of 1×10” and cut the middle out of it to get a clean piece. Gingerman kept going out in the morning with me to help me tear them down then he went off to do his own chores. It is hard to tear a board down by yourself and make it straight. If I owned some expensive stuff I could do that but my $100 table saw requires two people to carry it into the yard and two to guide the board through the saw.

I have all of the boards ripped and now they need sanded. But I spent about four hours this weekend sanding and wanted to make some progress on the oak cabinet trim before working on the door opening. I have three more oak cross pieces to sand, cut, fit and install. Once that is done then we can talk about how large and how many doors I will need to cut.

I spent almost two hours today trying to find the striker plate for the sliding door. I even went so far as to clean up the old house, cleaned up the mud room and even took all the tools and junk piled up in the laundry room but I did not find that striker plate! I am sure I put it somewhere “safe” I just cannot remember where. Hopefully, I can find it in the next week. It can wait as it only means the bathroom door cannot be locked. On a plus side I did find all the cabinet hinges, knobs and magnetic closures! I would have had to hunt those down eventually. I kept finding needed stuff, I even found the instructions for installing the striker plate, one would think I would have found the actual item.

Auction wins

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Blame Gingerman, he sent me a link to a local farm auction out of Hermiston and I needed a lot of stuff they had. It turns out that I did not need it as bad as other local people because I went from spending almost $6500 to only $1500 in the last thirty minutes of the auction! He had told me that everyone waits until the last minute to bid and he was not wrong. I really had my heart set on a mini-excavator! It was brand new with only 0.3 hours on it. Knew it would cost about $6k, I quit bidding after $3k and it sold for $3.5k. If I had kept bidding I suspect the price would have kept increasing.

I ended up with two, eight foot tall orchard ladders, two old round water troughs that cannot hold water, one new small tall water trough, a couple of hundred feet of brand new lay flat hose with irrigation fittings already on them and two self contained gates. The hose was the most expensive thing in the pile. We are going to cut the bottom out of the two large round troughs and use them in the garden area. The larger one is going to be solely for the growing of asparagus! We want the bottom cut out so the plants can dig down into the ground if they want. I am not sure what we are putting in the other one. The small one will go in with our backyard garden collection. It will get something edible planted in it. The two gates were necessary to get the barn lot set up correctly. The cows and sheep always go down to the spring area and hole up and refuse to come out. It is painful to get them through the gate. We have talked about a fence across the mouth of that area for years. So I installed two gates, both six feet on either end of the opening and made a large removable wire gate. So the entire middle of the fence can be moved for vehicle access. We can also just put the horse over there when we are sorting and she won’t be able to “help”. I spent Saturday morning getting the fence installed and the gates adjusted. The Gingerman helped me put a temporary repair on the back hillside gate so that it is a solid fence. This way the alpaca cannot get out and the sheep can wander around on the lower part of the hill and not sneak out. They would have found the hole, guaranteed.

We then had to drive over to Hermiston and take down the temporary fence we have to install on the decorative fence so the sheep will actually stay in the pasture. It’s Redbrand woven four foot fencing and a full roll weighs about 220#. It is hard to load safely in the back of the pickup alone, at least for me. It took us about 20 minutes and we will save the two precut sections for next year again. We attach it with zip ties so they can just be cut to remove it.

I had to feed the sheep as they had eaten everything in the barn and they are still a little jumpy. So I spent about 20 minutes sitting on a bale of hay talking to them. We always talk to them when we are out in the barn. It helps get them accustomed to humans and more specifically to us. In a month they will only associate us with food and all will be right. They get so pushy that we have to push them out of the barn, shut the door, feed then open the door so they can rush in and beat their neighbor to the good stuff. By Christmas we will be locking them up every night which means someone has to go out first thing in the morning and check for lambs and let them out of the barn.

We ate our Sunchokes for the first time this weekend. It is easy to see why they are a potato substitute. I added them to a stew with meat, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, yellow potatoes and sunchokes. It tasted very good. We will try a different version next time we eat them.

Sheep roundup

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I had every intention of waiting to go get the sheep until this weekend when the Gingerman could help me but I got an offer I could not refuse on Sunday. The gentleman who had arranged for us to take our sheep over to Hermiston offered to come help me load up the sheep on Monday and then we could load up all of the animals going to the auction in his trailer and he would take them to the auction the very next day. They could spend the night at his house in a pen before going to auction. I had so many sheep for sale with all of the cull ewes that I was going to have to make two trips because they would not all fit into my trailer.

I went into work very early so I could leave, drive home, change clothes, load up all of the aluminum panels into the back of the old pickup and hitch up the stock trailer to drive to Hermiston. I beat him there and was able to gather the lambs and cull ewes into the main field from the neighbors. I got there just after noon. This is important because the sun goes down around 1630. The plan was simple to begin with, just put the panels together to create a wide chute and as the sheep go into it just pull the panel side around them into a circle so that they can be forced into the large stock trailer. It took about 2.5 hours to get those 77 sheep into the trailer! It was so painful. We bent two panels and tore the hinges off of one of those two. I need to look at the slatted steel short panels. The sheep just push when there are almost 80 and they can create a lot of force.

They just would not go into the trailer then when they did they clogged up the first eight feet only and then you had to get into the back of the trailer and battle them to get them to scoot forward. My poor hat took a lot of abuse as I was using it as a prompt to get the sheep to move forward. It sort of worked for this but not well. Three time we had to crawl up into the trailer and literally force them forward an inch at a time! It was brutally tiring. We decided early on that the eaters that were going home with me could just be pulled from the trailer after they were loaded! There was no way we were going to get them sorted out in the field.

We now needed to get the ewes from a neighboring field. The plan was to open the gate, in the middle of the fence, and chase them out into the driveway. We would then push them down to the temporary corral we had made, close it up and then drive them into our trailer. This sounds reasonable until or unless you have ever worked hair sheep with a dog. The pregnant sheep are not cooperative, how not, they would charge the dog! They just did not give a shit and would not do it. They got chased around for almost an hour before we finally got them out into the driveway and it was fairly easy to push them down to the corral. The ewes are a lot more likely to load up into the trailer easily. They know it is not necessarily and evil place. Once they were in our trailer we snagged seven eaters from Wil’s trailer and drug them over to ours.

I took the picture after I got home in the dark! I was able to back up to the chute and then open the gates. I expected the sheep to just run out but of course they did not do that. They could not see so they were not going to leave the trailer. I guess I could have just left the trailer backed up to the chute and they would have left eventually. I did not do that, instead I crawled into the stock trailer and started to toss sheep at the ramp to get them to go out into the barn lot. It took my about ten minutes to get them unloaded and all of the gates shut. The barn was ready so all I had to do was get them into the barn lot.

He ended up taking 70 animals to the sale for us on Tuesday. The cull ewes sold for $110/ea, the female lambs $120/ea and the whethers $140/ea. By the time we paid all of the fees we made almost $8k on the auction animals. I will be using some of that money to replace the panels we broke and to explore getting some steel ones to use for sorting purposes. All in all it was well worth the long day!

Still doing Fall catchup

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Last weekend Mr Rainman came out to help for the weekend. The plan was to knock out the Lavender and get it all trimmed and weeded so it was all ready for spring. Fortunately or unfortunately, however you view it Saturday was a burn day! We have been trying to burn the pile for the last two months but we keep missing the burn days. So we got the pile of cardboard from the old house, the mud room and the pickup and then proceeded to light the pile on fire. It took off straight away so we decided to go down the driveway and start pitchforking the tumbleweeds over the fence and stuff them in the back of the pickup to be tossed on the burn pile. My Mother-in-law came out and said she had a bunch of stuff for the burn pile so we piled that on then noticed that the apple tree broken branch had been cut out by one of the nephews so we piled that onto the burn pile and kept one branch to start the new burn pile behind the grain bins out of sight of both houses.

We kept forking weeds over the fence until the wind was blowing so hard that we had to hold them on the fire with a pitchfork so they didn’t just blow away before they could catch on fire. We were losing weeds and figured that it was a waste of time to just keep going.

Annmarie has been cutting stuff out of cow hide for the progeny’s wedding on the laser. It smells like charred leather so I offered to hang them out in the old house. This way they can air out and start to smell good. It worked amazingly well! Nothing the smell of dirt and old wood cannot fix.

My car battery died because I left the dome light on. I let it sit around for a week before I put the ancient charger on it. Mind you when I put the charger on it you could turn the key and get the radio and dash lights. After 12 hours on the charger the battery was totally dead, nothing worked. I tossed the ancient broken charger into the trash can. Mr Rainman offered to come out during the week and install a new battery. I had been driving the gas guzzling pickup for over a week and had already filled the tank twice. I looked at the battery compartment and was dreading the attempt to install it. He had it changed out in no time and it works like a champ again.

The bathroom deadline is approaching quickly so I have been working on getting it completed. We shimmed out the wall on the inside of the door so it is ready for trim. The entire inside of the bathroom is ready for trim. I need to get the Sheetrock repairs completed so that I can put primer on the wall and get it painted. There is a lot of height difference in some places so I am going to have to build it out with the mud to make it look right. I am not the best sheetrock person but I can muddle through.

On Sunday it was supposed to rain so after feeding the cows and getting the barn ready for the momma sheep we went out to the lavender patch to trim it up. We had intentions of keeping nice individual plants. In places it is growing into a single row and we are going to let it. While Mr Rainman cut the lavender I worked on pulling weeds next to the yard and in the next walkway. The weeds were the worst in those two rows. In the spring after we spray the grass we are going to have to use some kind of growth inhibitor to keep the grass from invading again. We even spotted a few honey bees on the lavender despite the wind blowing pretty hard.