Author: Steve Hardin

Too much fruit

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Labor Day weekend was spent getting ready for the next thing whatever it is. Annmarie wants me to get the Dodge pickup cleaned out and the Ford diesel up and going. I bought two new batteries for the Ford and the Gingerman got them in and the pickup started. He has spent a few days tinkering with it and it is running pretty smooth. It just needs a couple of quarts of power steering fluid. Plus, he found a brand new tire weight on the ground so it will need to go back in and have the tires rebalanced. I was able to unload the sand out of the Dodge. I needed space to fit a piece of plywood and there wasn’t any with the sand still riding around in the truck bed. I needed to get the replacement throttle cable ordered for the compactor so that we can spread the sand out and pound it in place. I left the sand in the bags so that the cats would not use the gazebo as a personal toilet.

I was able to snag some shelves at a reasonable price and got them installed on the shop wall. I am going to move all my various anchor bolts into one section so I know what I have and can find it when needed. The left side is plumbing and air line brass parts they came with the organizer. Slowly but surely we are getting organized. It is much easier to find things when they are in their place.

I spent one single day doing nothing but picking fruit. I picked 24 cups of tame blackberries then about 8# of plums and then nectarines. The bad part about picking the fruit is when you pick that much you have to do something with it. Our large upright freezer is stuffed full of frozen fruit. I truly believe we have enough to get through the next year. Irregardless of that the fruit trees just keep producing. I have taken boxes of plums and nectarines to work for the produce table in an effort to give it away. So far it disappears fast enough that it doesn’t go bad. I kept track of how many blackberries I have picked in the last six weeks, 21.5 gallons! That is a personal best. Annmarie has made jam and syrup that we have canned. So we have canning supplies all over the house as we process fruit. Making your own food does take time.

Catch up weekend

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We keep trying to get ahead but it seems like the chores are winning. I am sure they are piling up faster than we can get them completed. My helper is busy and I have been doing a lot more general keep up so I have not made any movement on any project. We have been processing fruit nonstop. The tall upright freezer is full of six types of fruit. Annmarie has canned plum syrup and jam. We want to make apricot butter and maybe some pear butter also. We are still having to pick tame blackberries every four days and are getting at least 20 cups every time. I am waiting till the season is over to tally up the amount of blackberries that were harvested this year, it is a lot! We are still seeing a lot of bunny rabbits!

We are going to be moving our sheep back over to Hermiston the first week of October. They will be able to hang out for two months eating green grass and then come back just in time to start having lambs. We will take the lambs and cull ewes to sale as soon as they come off the green grass. They will have the most weight and best conditioning then. I have no idea what the sale price will be. I heard this week that feeder calves (500-600#) sold at the LaGrande auction for $4.25/# live weight! That is a crazy high price. We already have all seven of our yearlings sold for $4.25/# hanging weight and are going to stick with that price. Beef prices are going to leap up in the next 3-4 months.

We have started to process our nectarines. I did not think there were very many on the tree. There is probably 100#. I have been selectively picking them half a box at a time. Taking just the ripe ones off the tree. The golden plums are starting to come on and there is a solid 100-200# on the tree and the Italian plums have at least 100#. We have started to just pick fruit and take it into the hospital. There is a communal produce table where you can donate garden produce to other staff, free shopping. It is quite nice and most stuff disappears in 1-2 days so it does not go to waste.

I spent a day weed eating the yard and garden. The Gingerman helped me string wire up into the top gap in the side gate so the Border Collie could not jump through it. It seems to be working so we will be letting the sheep onto the front hillside to knock it down. It is starting to get out of control.

We did manage to get a single piece of oak plywood down on the saw horses and the saw rest assembled. I need to get a new blade for the skilsaw before I cut the cabinet pieces. I need to get that cabinet done.

I did take a couple of hours and cut all of the dead branches out of the nectarine tree. I will be cutting all of the fruit trees this winter. They need shortened, thinned and shaped. It cannot wait any longer.

I really need to get the sand and bricks installed in the gazebo but I have to repair the throttle cable on the compactor again. The thing vibrates and cuts the sheath. Once that is done the greenhouse is next. It is all a work in progress. The parts came this week to fix the little John Deere tractor so that will need to be done this weekend so I can dig out the barn.

On top of all of that and our daughter just had her first baby today and we are now grandparents. So we have been moving things around and setting up an area for the baby as the kids come down and see us almost every weekend. Both the baby and mother are doing well.

Within the next month I will need to hay again! I will be cutting a neighbor’s field that he was been watering since the first cutting. It is going to be a loaded fall season.

Cows for the revenge

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Sunday became the day the Gingerman and I would tag and band calves. I went out and started picking our tame blackberries. They are getting picked about every four days now and we just had a hot spell which they loved. Gingerman came out and helped me finish up, we picked two half flats full of blackberries. I have a running total of how many blackberries we have collected to date, when the season is over I will add it all up, it’s a lot!

The Gingerman had brought his four wheeler over and I took the tractor out to herd the cows into the barn lot. We locked the horse up with some food in the lamb shed so she would be content. If we keep her out she wants to help and in reality she is no help at all. We got the cows pushed down fairly easily. I did notice that the spring in field #3 is dried up. There is no water coming out of the ground in the middle of the field. There is a small spring in the corner that is still running but that one has always ran since we have been here. I did notice that the golden plum tree actually has plums! I checked them today and they have about another week before they are ready. We will give some seeds to the Gingerman and hopefully he can propagate some new trees from seed. The plum tree is probably at least 80 years old. The plums are quite sweet when they are ripe. Our Italian Plum tree has antoher 1-2 weeks before they are ready and there is at least another week on the nectarines. Those are the last of our fruit trees that will need to be harvested. We are quickly running out of freezer space for the fruit. We have an entire standup freezer stuffed full of fruit and there may be just enough room for the nectarines. We will need to take out the tomatoes and process them to make that open space.

We got the cows all pushed into the corral and after sorting off two cows I latched the gate loosely and one of the brown cows pushed it open. Now we had contaminated our keeper group and were going to have to run everyone back through the chute and sort them again. Right after that happened I looked up and the Gingerman was standing fairly awkward. One of the brown cows had bum rushed him and ran into his knee directly or kicked his sorting board and that clubbed him into his right knee. He limped for the rest of the cow fiasco and is currently laying down on the couch with his extremity elevated and an ice pack applied.

We ear tagged the girl first, it went fairly smoothly. The next one was the smaller boy calf. He did not cooperate. We managed to get him banded (both testicles were verified present) and tagged without getting any cow poop on us. I consider this a significant win. Unfortunately, we saved the largest calf for last.

On our way to the ground we both managed to get covered in cow poop. It went downhill from there. The calf had virtually no scrotum. There was only room for one testicle. So we had to just keep trying to get the band on and both testicles pushed through. It took about ten minutes to get both testicles contained.

I mowed weeds with the Kubota because the parts for the John Deere bucket have not arrived. I mowed until the tractor heated up then came back to the shop and cleaned out the dust and weed debris. I also killed all of the puncture vine that was growing in the driveway. I had already sprayed and killed one wave. All in all it was productive despite the weather.

I was gonna tag and band

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The plan for Saturday morning was to tag and band the calves. The Gingerman was going to help me but Mother Nature interceded by dropping 4/10” of rain. I did not want to wrestle the calves in the mud, that sounded like a disaster in the making. Instead I made pancakes for breakfast, fresh blackberry compote and leftover prime rib bites for breakfast. I have been able to get two new lockable pistol storage areas setup. Annmarie is determined that I have all the firearms secure by the time the grand baby is born.

Instead of working the animals I went into the old house and worked on my man cave room! Two of the walls already have insulation and outlets installed. The outside wall and the separating wall to the front room need to be insulated. I think I have some extra insulation up in the attic area that can be brought down to go into the walls. I am trying to keep the costs way down for this room. I am going to use a tarp to cover the entire ceiling. This will keep the dust from falling through the boards and down onto whomever is below. I will caulk the outside cracks to limit the amount of water that gets into the wall. I was able to get about 80% of the boards ripped off the wall. I wanted them off before going under the house and jacking up the middle of the house. The outside door sags by almost an inch and the inside door needs to be widened but it also has a heck of a slant. I want to get that slant out by jacking up the house instead of just squaring the door frame in a crooked opening.

I have an entire unit of 8”x 8’ one inch boards. I will be using them on the walls. I want to do the uncovered walls first and hopefully I can do all four walls so they match. Otherwise, I will just leave the other two walls with the old shiplap. I may even use a cloth tarp for the walls. I did find the light I wanted, it has a built in fan so I can hopefully keep it cool in the summer. I already ordered a metal cabinet for my reloading supplies. I need to find all of them and get them into one location. My plan is to setup one wall/corner as a reloading area and to set up the opposite corner as a jewelry working station. I will put in a small torch and an exhaust fan plus a brick area to do some soldering. I will keep the reloading supplies inside a metal cabinet so the small open flame will not be an issue.

I just need a new/used outside door and internal air tight door. I am going to try and salvage the old window. I will need to make a couple of work benches but I have quite a bit of leftover plywood scraps and some bent/warped cheap 2×4 that once cut down they will be straight enough. I think I want to install the worktops as free floating so there are no legs on them. This will make it easier to set up the presses without worrying if a stool will fit underneath it. I like to work on the corner of the bench. I will have to put some overhead shelves up also. I will just put clear plastic lidded bins up on those. That way I can easily see what is in them. I figure I can create a brass section, shotgun casings, wads, and abrasive types sections on the shelves. I am still trying to figure out where I stashed the reloader. I think it’s in the attic but it may take me a week of tearing apart every storage area to find it. I had not reloaded anything in decades and I had forgotten that a pound of powder only gets you about 100-200 rifle rounds depending on the caliber.

The only bad part about demolition is you have to get all of the demo out of the area and get the area all cleaned up before you can begin to build it back up. That is my least favorite part of any project.

Tractor Mechanic I am not

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I had big plans for the weekend but my helper wanted to take some time off. So I decided to mow some of the weeds around the place. The Gingerman had put the new large bale fork moving tool on his tractor and had moved the bales out. There was one bale that fell apart and I needed to go in and get all of the little leftover grass out of the machine shed so the new hay could go into it. I was going to use the little John Deere but then I remembered that we have been having a difficult time with the bucket controls. They don’t want to let you go up and down. This happened a couple of years ago and a good cleaning and some lube fixed it all up. Mind you the handle has been getting more and more slack in it every year.

This seemed like an easy fix so I started in on it first thing in the morning on Friday. Two hours later I have managed to tear into the area by removing every single obstacle in the way. I then found a missing pin, replaced it and then got the thing all cleaned and lubed. I was able to move the pins without any trouble directly at the site. I did not think about turning on the tractor and testing it before I put all of the parts back. Instead, I put the entire thing back together, climbed up onto the tractor, started it and proceeded to get zero movement out of the bucket. What little movement was present before I “fixed it” IS GONE, now nothing is happening when you attempt to move the bucket controls. There is a lot of slack in the upper assembly and the tractor is 15 years old. I have to keep telling myself that so I can stay positive while breaking out the minimalist mechanic skills.

I was able to put the manure forks onto the Kubota and clean out the machine shed. Gingerman loaded in 24 large bales and we figured at a minimum we could make the space hold 44 but probably with careful arrangement we could fit 50. We do not need 50 but being able to stack them five high really makes the space usable. It does make it a little more challenging to climb up to the top and push them down. You can use your legs and push them off of the stack with some effort. I cannot reach that high with my little Kubota.

I need the little John Deere tractor to be working so that I can dig out the barn. We have had all the animals locked out of it for the last couple of months so the floor is nice and dry. It makes it a lot easier to move with the tractor. Parts of the floor will still be juicy when I dig it out but not the entire thing.