Author: Steve Hardin

Mower still broken

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Our mower is still broken and the lawn needs to be mowed again. This is a conundrum that can be solved but it does have a few drawbacks. Its messy, the sheep do not know how to limit droppings to only one part of the yard. This then makes golden tasting nuggets that the dogs love to eat which in turn makes them vomit randomly or get the runs themselves. Now the indigestion is sort of random but it is a chance you take with sheep mowers. Now on the plus side, you just have to open the gate and lawn gets mowed! I do have to clean off the walkway when they are done.

Sheep mowing our yard again! I need to do this for several evenings until the sheep have gotten it short enough. They do have a tendency to eat my fledgling trumpet vines. I think I am going to have to put up a temporary fence next year to get the vines some growth.

They also tear up my temporary fence gate. The post is broken off at the ground and i have four boards and some temporary scrap metal holding the dogs in. It cannot take 80 sheep trying to go through a small opening all at the same time. Annmarie tells me this is a sign that I need to get this 100 feet of fence rebuilt. It’s on the list for this year.

While I was putting tools away from the pickup I noticed that my old chicken coop fence was still up. I need to start getting the gravel moved over for the skinning post and the fence is in the way. I have been meaning to rip it out all summer long and have not gotten to it. So I took 15 minutes and ripped it out of the ground and away. I need to move gravel over here in the next two weeks. I am looking forward to not standing in mud while we are washing and skinning animals. I may even attach a sink to the end of my stainless steel table and set up a faucet that I can hook a water hose into! There are two old cast iron and porcelain sinks over by the old house that I have been saving for just this purpose. It looks al lot better with it gone. When I was driving the tractor through the barn lot I noticed that our front stream is starting to wind down. It is still running but in a week or so I expect it to stop. Our spring on the other hand shows no signs of slowing down but it won’t be fed with surface water from above soon.

I did order new blades to shear the alpaca and I ordered a spacer so that I will be leaving them about 3/4 inch of fur. This should stop the cuts and its going to get cold soon. This will be happening in the next 1-2 weeks.

On the bad news side, the raccoons look like they are now coming up to our house. I had a chicken die of old age and I had placed her body outside the coop on the roof of dust box enclosure about 3 feet off the ground. It disappeared! I will be moving the live trap up to our house this weekend and setting it with marshmallows.

New spraying rig

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Annmarie and I have been discussing the need for a vehicle that can assist us with spraying weeds. In my dreams this vehicle is autonomous, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. We talked about getting another tractor but honestly could not justify the cost. We started looking at online auctions for a side by side in the last six weeks. We were starting to pick a model type and looking at run hours and price points. We knew we did not want a new one and we needed an actual utility vehicle so we could mount the sprayer in the back. Annmarie wanted one sooner rather than later but I wanted to pay cash and according to the auctions we were gonna have to pay around $6-8k and then pay shipping, most of them had around 1000 run hours and may not have a title.

My mother-in-law, Donna, called Annmarie to say there was a UTV for sale at the coffee shop. I called on it and it was every thing we were looking for in a UTV. It had four wheel drive, 500# load bed limit, tilt bed, and ended up only having 352 run hours on it and it was a 2006, that means it has only had 27 hours a year put on it. It looked brand new! It happens to have a custom stereo with speakers mounted in the overhead and doors! I have yet to check out the sound system in action. Most importantly it has two cup holders so I can have double the amount of coffee! We paid $4900 cash and now have it stored under cover in the machine shop. We are not leaving the keys in it. Annmarie wants me to get the broken lawn mower fixed. It will start but after about 10 minutes it just cuts out and will not start. I need to get some work done on the chainsaw also but to get it to town I need to clean out the pickup. This is an ongoing source of contention at our house as Annmarie thinks you should be able to hop in the pickup at any time and drive to town. This option is always available for one person if you don’t mind the mess and tools. Plus, you cannot lock the doors as we have no key for the doors anymore after I lost it last year. I agreed to clean up from the fencing and rental work done today. I only need to move two buckets and sweep out the back and I will be done. I still need to empty tools out of the cab tomorrow but it will be usable as a people vehicle very soon. As a farm truck it is fabulous! A few years ago while we were at an auction I bid on a STOP sign. Annmarie asked me why we needed it and I told her that I would find a use for it eventually and for $5 it was a great price. I was emptying the pickup fence supplies and spotted the sign, it is now mounted on the outside of the machine shop between the UTV and our tractor and all our new hay equipment. A perfect reminder for everyone and a cool way to repurpose an old sign.

One more field fenced in sorta

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On Friday Hoss and I went up to the swamp field and worked on getting the creek side fence installed. I was hoping to get it all done on Friday, but my back was bothering me so I took medications and kept working. We ran out of woven wire! I even called the metal scrap yard but they only had one roll. We happen to be using some 48″ woven Red Brand fencing so it did not require any smooth wire on top. We quit around 1400 and I ended up going into town and picked up a single roll of woven wire and two utility panels. I keep calling them cow panels but when I go to purchase them I have to remember to call them a utility panel or they cannot find it in the computer.

I was unable to get up and go out and work on Saturday due to my back pain. An ice pick and napalm had nothing on it. Hoss finished getting the fence up, hung two gates and blocked off a four foot section. He is done for the summer as I have run out of money! The fence still needs a couple of days of work as I need to install all of the T-post clips in it. He put enough in it to hold up the fence. The sheep are now roaming all three fields and can hopefully tear up the far field. I don’t think they can knock it all down but they can hopefully thin it out.

Last night we got a call from Annmarie’s mother that the raccoons were out enforce on her front porch. So Annmarie grabbed the 22 rifle and I grabbed the trusty Walther P22 pistol. I have not gotten a laser for the new Ruger Mark IV yet. I gimped around the house until I found second flashlight and we walked down to the house. There were five raccoons on the front porch! The real problem is you cannot shoot any so we had to go up to the side of the house so we could shoot sideways and not hit anything. I shot at a couple of the large ones as they darted off and sent Annmarie around the back of the house so see if she could finish them off. This is where the story gets fuzzy. She claims that I do not get to count the raccoons as dead unless there is a body. The raccoons did get hit, but they do not die easily. I ended up with one dead and hit at least 2 more maybe three. She keeps telling me that I need more practice and in that I agree. It is a lot harder to hit a moving target in the dark than it is in the day. So I am going to have to put about a 1000 rounds through my new Ruger pistol. It has a five inch barrel instead of a two inch barrel. Its time to let the Walther retire and move up in the accuracy department. I need a laser and a holster but Annmarie reminded me I can use my vest with built in holster until I get a new one. I also need at least one more clip as I almost ran out rounds last night. Five predators is a lot of moving targets to be trying to kill in the dark. I need more rounds. So according to Annmarie I only killed one raccoon as that is number of bodies I tossed onto the bone pile.

While I was digging around in the bushes for my victims (they ran away) the cows came running over to the fence and started to holler. They get fed apples almost every day so they think all humans should feed them. I spent 20 minutes picking up and tossing them apples from the yard. I noticed two calves that still need ear tags and one needs banding. We have a brand new calf but that cow was not getting any where near the fence. She had a brand new calf nursing on her. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl from that far away.

Beautiful Eastern Oregon evening

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Annmarie and I went up to the upper pasture this week to bring in the sheep and the sun was just setting. The farther we got away from the house the more Mother Nature showed her colors. There are times that the dry climate makes for a beautiful setting. It just depends on whether you equate beauty with green. I don’t think that any more, not after being back for 12 years. The sheep pretty much put themselves in every night now. They come down to the barn without us using the dogs to chase them back. The horses on the other hand don’t want to come back to the barn lot. Luckily, the food quality is not good enough to make the horses get fat. The sheep are putting on weight with it and so are the steers so its good enough. No one on the farm gets lush green grass year around. We have been making it a point to leave the dead tree snags sticking up in the air. The owls and hawks love hanging in them and then swooping down to kill mice and small rodents. Anything that kills rodents should be supported, because we have lots of them!

I am going to put in for some vacation this fall so I can replant these upper fields and hopefully get some grass growing in the spring and not all weeds. I did manage to get two overhead tractor lights to mount on my rollbar. One to look forward and one to look backwards so I can run the tractor at night. I think I am going to need this to get all the grass planted and again in the spring when I start doing hay again. I had to stop several times this spring due to a lack of light, this should fix it.

I have been looking at Metric tools but I cannot find a metric only set. I keep looking at 200-400 piece sets that are combination of English and Metric. I do not need the English at all but I am not having any luck getting separate kits. If I by another set I will have three full English sets and one Metric, this does seem odd to me as I only need the Metric. Unfortunately, the sets are cheaper as a combo than when buying individual pieces. I still need to move the last large tool box over to the machine shed. Plus, I need a large trash can in the machine shed. Just tossing stuff into a corner is not going to work long term.

My father had two electric hoists in the garage. One was sufficient for what he needed so the other one was taken down. It hangs from an I beam that is 6 feet long and can move back and forth. I am going to mount it in the machine shed after I build some support beams for it. I need to be able to lift heavy objects without hurting myself.

The chain winch is still frozen and not moving. Someone gave me a suggestion to soak it in oil or diesel. I have a lot of fouled diesel on the place I just need a metal container large enough to hold the hoist and let me fill it with fuel. I can dunk it and let it sit for a few months, hopefully this will allow it to be broken free.

Machine shed ready

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Friday we spent the day figuring out how to get all of the hay equipment put back together and into the machine shed. We have an old chain lift that is now hanging and oiled with 200# of tractor weights hanging from it in hopes that it will break loose. I beat on the pin a few times with a hammer but could get no movement out of the lift either up or down. I spray WD40 on it every couple of weeks. It would be nice to have something that could move a thousand pounds without any difficulty. We did manage to get all the equipment mostly put back together. The mower is missing a slender nut on a pivotal bolt. I kept doing a parts search and writing down the id labels so I can place an order for spare parts. I have 15 items I want replacements on hand so it can be fixed immediately. I had gone to my parent’s house and picked up my father’s toolbox. He was a machinist when he was alive so I thought he would have a full set of metric tools. I was wrong, he had a lot of tools and micrometers and dial calipers and inside calipers and then a ton of English tools of all sizes but not a single metric tool in the entire chest! I will be moving my large tool box out of the old house into the machine shed. The plan is to get all of the English tools into the large box and convert my father’s into a metric only box. Annmarie had me order black anodized aluminum business cards and we are going to use the laser engraver to make parts drawer labels for both toolboxes. I will epoxy the labels onto the tool boxes so I can quickly find the needed tools. We were able to get all three pieces of hay equipment and the sprayer lined up in one bay. The end bay is for the tractor to stay out of the weather and a pallet sized area is needed for the cultivator/seeder to live. We had to use the pallet and screw down some wooden supports for the reciprocating mower. It was a little tippy with the blade in the upright stored position. We even placed them in the order they would be needed in the spring! Hoss made a holder for the extra netting to be stored. I opted to keep it in the box to minimize the dirt collection. We did get the baler together and moved but I still cannot figure out how to install the new roll of netting. It is not intuitive at all. I will have to call and get instructions on how to use both pieces of equipment, the rake is very easy compared to everything else. My dad’s toolbox is brown and the small upper part is bolted to the lower part forming one unit. I wanted to put them on a pallet so they did not sink into the gravel. I really need to get some more ear muffs to install near the anvil. Its kinda loud when you start beating on metal. I also need a trash can in here as I have a pile of trash on the floor currently.

Afterwards, I fired up the pressure washer from mom’s and started in on the fence. I figured I could do the whole fence with one tank of gas. Nope, I will need 3-4 tanks of fuel to get the entire fence cleaned off. Annmarie tells me that I am going to end up scraping some of the fence by hand as the pressure washer is only getting about 80% of the loose paint. We are going to use the same paint but this one only lasted 4 years from the first time I painted it. I am going with better preparation the time around will make the paint job last longer. I just slapped paint over it the first time after installing it. I had to move the cars after I blew paint, dirt and water onto them. Annmarie wanted to know what the finger streaks on her car were from. I figured if I did not get the wet paint off of her car it would dry and stick semipermanently. I did not want that to happen!