Author: Steve Hardin

There was to be no new fencing this year…

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Annmarie told me this year I was not to fence.  I had a lot to do and after spending most of last year doing nothing but fencing I needed to focus on other things this year.  Now I do not disagree with this but we really did need some more fencing…

Barb Morehead took this terrific photo of our little beautiful calf, and kindly shared it us.  He is named Valentine for the heart he wears on his forehead.  We were really hoping he would be a she.  He will still be good eating.

We have been slowly working on getting our berry/lavender grow area ready.  Unfortunately, this necessitated building a fence around the space to keep the herbivores away from our food.  The pine trees got cut down several years ago and I sprayed the area with Roundup a week ago.  This plant attack has done nothing but point out where all the thistles are located.  I have been slowly killing the thistles with a shovel.  I cannot use any other kind of herbicide or I will kill anything I plant in the ground.  I also tried to order ground cloth so we can plant our lavender through it but could not get any online that was not horribly expensive.  I still spent almost $400 on cloth and thought I had gotten a good deal.  I had to drive to the Tricities to pickup our bathroom vanity so I bought all the ground cloth that Home Depot had available.  The only reason they still had it was it was in a box high above and no one had bothered to check there yet.

A Pallet of stained brown tire chips was delivered on Thursday in one single great big bag weighing 1100#.  I need to finish killing the thistles then weed eat everything down to the ground then put the ground cloth down.  I have had a couple of boys working on the fence.  Since they were going to do most of the work I decided that we needed to fence in the orchard also.  Our orchard area is fenced in already but I wanted to just put up an interior fence around the fruit trees so that we can take all the skirts around the tree down.  I want to keep a 2’ tall cow panel ring around the trees only.  This will keep any animals from rubbing on the tree or eating the bark at the base of the tree.  This will also double the number of rings I have available for more trees.  There are seven young fruit trees so we can plant seven more trees.  I picked up two at Home Depot Thursday, Hardy Kiwi trees.  The fruit only gets to the size of a Kumquat but it is supposed to taste like a kiwi and it looks like a kiwi.  I bought two as they are small!  The plants are about 2 inches tall and its a single stick.  We will see in 3-4 weeks if they were alive or not.  We also bought some coconut fiber mats to go around the trees to keep the weeds down.

While we were working on the fence today the alpaca kept trying to sneak in through the gate.  I had to exit the gate to get wooden fence stays and they tried to bum rush the open gate.  They are very curious animals and will seek out new experiences.  One of them stood by the fence and made super weird noises today.  A noise even I had not heard before.  They won’t move if they are laying in the road either.  They will win a game of chicken every time, even into death.  The delivery guys are scared they are going to cream one, I am kinda surprised they have not hit one yet.

Today we got the orchard fence completed.  It looks good and even our border collies cannot get out of it.  I can move the border collies to the orchard and let the sheep into our yard to mow now!  If you try and keep the collies inside the house all day so the sheep can eat the front yard they make you crazy.  Zeke keeps ring the bell  hanging from the front door.  You have to remove the bell or he will just keep randomly ringing it and laying in front of the door waiting for you to let him out.  Mouse will come lick your hand repeatedly until you let him outside.  It is a tossup as to which Border Collie is more annoying in their attempt to get what they want.

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I also found out that we have a red fox living on the property.  It has been spotted twice this week and I am sure I am down at least two more chickens.  I thought it was a raccoon and tonight when I was putting the sheep into the ram pasture I found a dead chicken head on the hillside.  I am told it has a den over by the fencing supplies storage area.  I will have to take a look for myself this weekend.

Bathroom is Taking Shape

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I have been tinkering in the upstairs bathroom all week.  I sneak up for 30-120 minutes to try and get some more work done.  I managed to get the right side of the backsplash sided and needed the mirror installed to start working my way up the wall.  I took the mirror apart and scrubbed the wooden base in the kitchen sink with a lot of Dawn dish soap and a nonscratchy pad.  It was filthy.   I had to just put a temporary board in at the top to keep the mirror in place.  I pigeon toe nailed the wood above the tiles.  I wanted to cut off the curves and make it a 90 degree angle.  This would have made cutting the side piece much easier.  I was vetoed.  So I have attempted to cut all the angles and getting the tongue and groove to match at the same time.  I was pretty dang close the first time, but Annmarie cut me some paper angles to make the curve part easier. I have not attempted my second try.  I had broken my jigsaw (at least 15 years old, cheap and made of plastic) on the first attempt so figured I needed to replace it if my second attempt was going to work out.

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I took Thursday and made arrangements to drive over to the Tricities and pick up our completed vanity top.  They had our vanity, the top (they made it) and our sink, this was to ensure that they got all the parts matched.  It was sitting up against the wall in their office and the person that helped me carry it to the car was sad to see it go!  He said it was their display piece and showed off what they could really do.  I happen to agree with him and he said it was a pleasure to work on as it looked very nice and the cabinet was well built and would take the weight of the granite slab without any problems. All of those are included in the reasons why we wanted to use this old washstand that was in the house when we moved in.

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I had to cut out the right side of the drawer so the plumbing can all go on the right half.  The problem with this is we still wanted the drawer to work.   So I built a box and reinforced it and cut out the part where the plumbing is going to go.  The picture on the left is from underneath the cabinet looking up at the bottom of the drawer.  This was before I cut the holes in the top for the water supply and sink drain. I used old Zinc flat head screws that have been on the farm for forever to put all the pieces together.

Today I started drilling holes for all the plumbing.  The water supply side (small hole) needs more wood cutout from underneath.  There is another 3/4” piece of wood along the back of the cabinet and I need to move it back 3/4” from the hole so that the faucet can be clamped down to the top.  Two boards and a piece of granite make the hole too deep for the faucet per the instructions I found online.  The plumber has the actual faucet and will bring it, the toilet and all the plumbing parts to complete it once we get the walls installed and oiled.

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I will need to hit this with some Murphy’s wood soap before I take it upstairs so it starts out clean.  I am really looking forward to having a second toilet in the house and especially one that you do not have to go downstairs in the middle of the night to use!

 

No Real Work

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Today was the day to get the rock garden finished.  I just needed to run to work in the morning and then get to it.  As I was pulling into the driveway, Mr Experience was pulling into the feeding field to clean it up and drag the arena groomer around it.  I spotted a brown spot in the field.  Annmarie and my mother in law had already convinced me there was another calf to drag into the barn and tag/band.  So I thought this calf was that one and I was going to get lucky.  Nope, it was a brand new calf who was skinny and hungry and weak.  I carried it down near the schoolhouse and we tried to get the cows to run to it.  Nope, they ran the other way, I ended up walking halfway over the farm to get them to find the calf.  I then sat on the hillside for 45 minutes watching to see if anyone would feed the calf.  I had no cell phone and no hat so I just laid back on the ground and watched through slit eyes.  No one fed the calf.  I finally went and got the calf after Annmarie came down to check on us both.  We carried it back to the house, I made Annmarie carry it for a while after it peed on me.  She wanted to stick it in my car as it was down by mother in law’s house.  I said no and carried the calf to our house.

Now there is a new problem, there is no pen for the calf, we don’t have a bottle for a calf, and we don’t have colostrum supplement.  So I opted to stay with the calf in the front yard to make sure the dogs left it alone.  I managed to take a nap in the sun in the front yard with the calf.  Again, I had not bothered to put on a hat.  My bald head is going to pay for this mistake.  Annmarie fed the calf, it promptly went back to sleep while I set up a sleeping area for it.  The calf is just a newborn baby and it thinks we are the good guys. I need to work on getting the calf sold ASAP.  Gizmo has already decided he must protect it from everyone and is sneaking into the pen and sleeping with it!  He is so annoying sometimes.  I managed to sell the calf to a coworker for the price of the supplies this evening!

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The little tractor broke on Saturday.  The hydraulic cylinder that turns the front left tire (brake side of foot controls) broke.  It is seven years old and it is starting to tell me about the things that are worn out.

 

 

Their is an upper triangle of land almost an acre that we started to get disced up today.  We will finish tomorrow and it will be ready to plant peas in.  The feeder field is ready for peas also.  I want to use the peas to offset the weeds.

I managed to dig a hole under the rock wall to run the front sprinkler underneath and get my rock garden watered.  I was going to stick the sprinkler in the upper corner to spray everything but I was missing a fitting.  Annmarie told me to just add on more pipe and put it in the middle so it would water everything.  I took her advice and it now works perfectly.

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Annmarie was still buying supplies when I went in to eat lunch.  I found some pickles from 8/2019, some sprite from last year and for breakfast I had jam from 2016.  Nothing killed me and I almost have the entire refrigerator cleaned out.   Annmarie tells me I have blisters on top of my head from a horrible sunburn I obtained by falling asleep with the calf.  We both needed the nap!!

More gardens

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I have been getting help on the farm from Mr Experience.  We are trying to get the fields ready and planted for spring barley and its getting late.  I am not sure if we are going to make it but we only have about one week left or it will never fly.  I spent Thursday working on the bathroom a little and playing catch up.

We made a trade last fall some electric netting fence for some fruit, flower and herb starts.  Well the fence was handed out in the fall and I kinda knew the starts were coming but had managed to delay them a couple of weeks.  They showed up Friday morning.  I had already started on the area, got different help to rough in the fence and posts and I had raked the entire area by hand to make it very pretty!  Now I had a bunch of plants that needed to go in the ground.  This is a blessing and a curse, as I only have a couple of days to get them all in the ground.  One cannot simply just start digging holes as there are a bunch of berry plants and other various edibles.  So I made measurements and Annmarie and I kinda laid it out.  I painted marks on the ground and started digging.  I spent all day Friday and managed to get the cane raspberries, blackberries, bush raspberries, clove currants, and Nanking cherries planted and watered in the orchard garden.  We planned for 40 feet of blackberries and raspberries but only planted 10 feet of blackberries and 15 feet of raspberries.  We plotted out the Lavender area in the orchard garden and have 80 of those plants to pickup soon.  I ordered plant cover cloth, drip system parts and 28 cubic feet of colored rubber recycled tire chips and those should be here the first week of May.  Once I have all the supplies here we will lay it all out and start cutting holes for the plants.  The garden fence priority is moving up the work list quickly.  I just kicked all the animals out of th orchard so no one would eat our new plants.

I had just enough time in the rain to go over to the rock garden and kill all the thistles and stinging nettle before dark.  I was tired and needed a shower, I have gotten so used to the stinging nettle it does not bother me much anymore.  We still had 4 acres to disk in the upper field but it had rained and I was afraid that the little tractor would not be handle the moisture. So I called and borrowed a tractor from a friend.
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The plants perked right up with some soil and a lot of water!  Always nice to see them come back after getting stressed in the move.

This plan went together pretty smoothly on paper.  Annmarie is going to plot them out on the computer so we can remember all the different plant names.  There is no way I am going to remember them without some type of reminder.

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Saturday morning she tried to draft out the plan on a computer and my measurements were not quite up to the mark.  I did some ball parking on the numbers and that made the electronic version a lot harder to put together.  I vowed to do better with the rock garden and brought a couple of pieces of paper out with me to jam into my pocket and ensure I measured everything.  Did I mention that it started to rain?  The soil on one half is mostly clay and I had to hand water everything from the spring?  It was not very pleasant getting everything into the ground.  This time I planted six Seaberry trees with two more male trees, three more clove currant bushes, two autumn olives, two Josta berry bushes, a honeysuckle plant two Artemis, two Agastache purple haze, four sunflower (perennial), five echinacea, a five foot section of Iris tubers and a few odds and ends that I did not write down but did plant in amongst the rocks and down by the water.   I took lots of measurements this time!!  It still did not quite work out on the computer as expected. But it’s close enough!!

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Once Annmarie gets the plans all spiffy and neat on the computer I will post that.  I have some wild flower seed I need to spread out amongst the rocks also but I need to get the sprinkler working first before I plant them.

Feverish farming

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It’s spring time and we are still trying to clean up from last year.  This is the field I tried to burn last fall and just could not get the fire to drive through the weeds.  It got mowed down and I wanted to plant right through the weeds but there is too much biomass on the ground.  So we ended up pushing up piles of weeds by skimming the ground with the tractor bucket.  Once those piles were made they were so dry you could light them with a lighter and nothing else.  Two days of burning has cleared off a lot of weeds. The wind has been kind enough to blow and making the fire spread as needed.

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I bought spring barley on Friday and want to get it in the ground this week.  It is supposed to rain on Wednesday and I would like to have the seed in the ground by then.  I have a small 1/2 acre plot that we saved for peas.  We sprayed every field but that one so that the 2-4-D won’t affect the peas.

I have another set of helpers out and set them to hardening the spring bank.  I only finished one side last fall.  Now both sides are blocked in and it should stop the dirt bank from falling into the spring.  We also lined the bottom of the spring with gravel in that area.  The sheep would know this if they would quit trying to jump over the water.  This did require the teenage helper to redo the wall three times to get it where it needed to be.

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I have been working on my sheep calling abilities.  I have managed to post a couple of successful videos to Instagram.  The key to success is in choosing the right time to call them.  They are used to coming in at night for food and to be locked up in the barn area.  I have had zero luck trying to call them down off the hillside midday.  But if they can hear me in the evening they will come running.

We sold three more lambs off this weekend to someone who is going to raise them all summer long.  We sent our old brown ewe and her 3 month baby over with the lambs so they could try and hand tame the lambs.  Our old ewe will come to anyone who she thinks has food.  We also do not want her getting bred when we release the ram into the main herd.  90E31C90-FECF-4C46-B18B-0822D40F0E68I spent last night on the tractor for 4 hours driving around in circles pulling a disc trying to get the flooded out field from last year ready for spring barley crop.  The ground was full of ruts from the back creek flooding the field and making rivulets.  I hope I got most of them smoothed out.  We are hoping to get the seed in the ground tonight as it is supposed to rain 0.1-0.25” tomorrow and the hope is the seed will all be in the ground by then.  One must have goals in life.