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.
Stewart Creek Somethings 