Author: Steve Hardin

It’s still winter

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It snowed again!! Mother Nature has decided that winter is not quite over yet. This week has seen the snow and mud come back. The only real problem with this is we are running low on high quality hay. We have 7 tons of grass hay that is on the lower side, it has been sitting outside all winter in the weather. I had to give the sheep two bales, the upper prime pasture cows two bales, the alpaca got the bale I accidentally broke open with the tractor and the other cows only got one bale as they still had lots. I was barely able to move the bales due to the mud and snow. I don’t mind the snow when it freezes the ground solid but that did not happen this time.

We were thinking about lowering the fences over the back creek but we have not had a spring yet and that creek is straight winter runoff. It is pretty mild right now and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of snow in the mountains that is going to last very long. We have surface water every where so we are currently not short on ground water. The wheat looks very nice.

The animals all know to complain to “Mom” when they think they are starving. Annmarie “Mom” called me this week to say the sheep were desperate and needed food. I have been pushing big bales out to the old lamb shed for them and they can snack all day long. She fed them some alfalfa from the barn. The problem with this is we don’t have much alfalfa left stored in the barn. We do still have a stash of 100# bales in the machine shop. So I have been feeding around 150# of that a night. After two nights the animals are leaving food behind. I don’t think they were starving. Every animal we have knows this and they all bug her for food and she in turn bugs me until I feed them. Sometimes the animals have a valid complaint and need food, but most of the time that is not the case, they are just looking for a handout.

Gotta get out of the house

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The little tractor that could! I have a culvert on the bucket and pulling a small set of discs for the upper field. The dogs are giving the cows the stink eye after moving them away from the gate. This way I don’t have to worry about them making a break for it to get back to the bull. It’s a two way street, both parties would go to the other if they could figure out how to get out of their respective enclosures.

The culvert is for the upper spring, this way we can drive over to the back half without having to go all the way around. I have three more culverts left and need to install two more in the lower bottoms so I can easily get the tractor in and out of those fields even when it is fairly wet. Driving through the irrigation ditch when all the surrounding dirt is muddy is a good way to get the tractor stuck in the ditch.

The moving water in the upper prime pasture is half way through the trees now and starting to cut a ditch in amongst the trees. Its pretty slow going and I don’t know that it will make it to the fence. I can really tell in the front creek that there is a lot more water coming out of the spring than we have had in the past.

This is the upper prime squared field before I did anything to it. I had burned it off and it had a disc drug through parts of it once by someone else. My real goal is to just knock everything down into the dirt so that it can start composting and breaking down. We will then keep it down and sprayed with roundup so that it has some forced idleness this year and plant it in the fall. I had only taken my outer coat shell and it was just not enough to keep the wind at bay. I had to zip it all the way up and put the hood on to stop the wind on Saturday. I am getting stir crazy in the house and I cannot paint because of the baby chicks.

One of the things I noticed dragging the disc set around was that the back part of the disc was not digging in enough. It needed some weight. I backed the discs up and changed the angle on them so that helped but the soil is still very wet and I had a hard time getting any traction with the tractor. I had to make the discs easier to pull a couple of times until I got the right amount of earth movement and tractor traction. I was glad when my alarm went off to go feed the animals as I was cold and ready to be done.

Today I went out early in the morning after a freeze last night. The real problem with this is I added some weight to the discs today. I knew I had some old tractor weights kicking around the farm. Every time I have found one on the farm I have tossed it into the machine shed or in a pile over by the grain bins. I found eight 50# solid metal weights and tossed them into the bucket. Once I got to the discs I ran a chain through the weights and chained them to the disk over the second set. There was a welded piece of steel there already as it looked like someone had been piling up rocks for weight before. This added weight caused me to have to adjust the disc angle a couple of more times as they were now digging into the ground better. I failed to take into account that when the ground thaws it becomes super slick on top! I had a couple of times where I thought I was going to have to unchain the disc set just to get the tractor unstuck but I managed to get it out every time. I got almost the entire field done and only found one 30×40 yard patch that still has standing water. I need to mark this area and the couple of spring heads that are visible. I think I can dig trenches and connect this waterway up to the spring ditch that is already running. If nothing else, I may have to create a small pond to corral all the water. I will try some ditches first.

It was a beautiful day today and it only hailed on me once. I remembered an extra layer and a neck warmer and had to take the neck warmer off it was so pleasant.

The tractor is the perfect time to just contemplate life as you go around in circles. The ground is so rough that I over tighten the seat belt so it holds me in place and I don’t get thrown from the tractor. I also eat the pickle flavor sunflower seeds. They are the best, except the seeds are too small unless you get the Biggies!

I had plans on getting a overall picture and hiked up to the top of the bluff, looked out over my work and went to take a picture and my phone died.

The written word of my awesome job will have to suffice as testament to my hard work!

Chicks are here

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Annmarie and I were commiserating about our lackluster effort by our chickens on Thursday night. We came to the conclusion that we were going to have to start pullets instead of trying to buy adults. Pullets take a minimum of six months before they start laying. It was decided that sooner rather than later was good timing.

She called me on Friday morning to say that she had purchased 18 Easter Eggers! The local feed and supply store had just gotten them in and she snapped up half the easter egger pullets. They let her pick her 18 and she paid for them so they held them all day for her. I knew the brooder needed to be bleached out but figured I would have time after I got off work. I got off late and was bleaching the brooder, lid, waterer and feeder when she got home. I had pine shavings down in the root cellar so I figured all was good. I dried it all off and filled up the brooder with pine shavings from the root cellar. Cedar shavings are bad for chickens. I placed all this in the library downstairs and somehow managed to do it without Annmarie noticing then went out to do chores. She smelled the brooder and said it smelled like chemicals. I told her I used bleach only and it should be gone by now. It was then that Annmarie asked me if I was still storing herbicides in the root cellar and how long had the pine shavings been down there? After killing off most of my chicks one year by using varethane inside the house at the same time they were present we are more cognizant of chemicals. So I had to throw out the bedding and used a cardboard box and newspaper to get us through the night until I could go back to the store and get fresh bedding.

This also put the kabash on any painting dreams I had. I tell myself that I was going to tear it up and finish the entire house over this weekend but now we will never know because I was thwarted by baby chickens.

We like the easter eggers as they are very calm. They lay multicolored eggs and have been the best breed in longevity, laying habits and non broody.

It’s been a long week

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It was a long week, as Annmarie was out of town and I was alone. I had big plans of painting the entire house during that time. Those plans did not come to fruition. I had to do the morning chores and then come home and do the evening chores, go to work and get cows back into their respective “fenced areas”. Fenced should mean they cannot get out but it doesn’t really work that way. The bull needs another fence to keep him away from the creek crossing. I think I am going to run a fence up from the corner of our yard. We have a fence already up the hill slightly for the ram pasture enclosure. I just need to run it directly up to the top of the hill. The only real problem is the hill is solid rock! I will have to put in rock cribs the entire length of the fence. I may get 6-8 T posts in the ground if I am lucky. I really need a teenager to come over and help me when I do that fence. If you have two people on the fence driver sometimes you can drive them in when I cannot do it alone. It will have to be very wet ground also. Luckily, filling up the rock cribs will not be hard as they are readily available and close at hand.

The big score this week was the stock racks for the pickup. They actually work as is but we are going to look into having them painted. I got an amazing price and I will call the powder coat shop in Hermiston and see what they would charge to paint them. If it’s over $300 then I will be doing it myself with a grinder and a multitude of cans of spray paint. I am hoping its under the budget! We will be able to move any of the sheep we need in the pickup and not have to pull a trailer. I need the racks to look nice so that I can get them mounted to the pickup.

Winter decided to make a strong comeback. So now we are dealing with snow and mud. This makes moving the large bales very hard with my small tractor. I am looking forward to no more large bales. I am going to get the tire fixed on my beat up pickup bed trailer. This will let me store 20 bales of hay on the trailer and just hook onto it with the tractor and feed the cows out of the trailer. I can keep the trailer under cover in the machine shop and still feed 2k pounds of feed at a time. Zeke is making us crazy again. He has decided that he doesn’t appreciate the constraints of being fenced into the yard. Since we have taught him to go around, under or through fences as part of his herding jobs we have created a monster. He now knows that the front creek bank is a weak spot in our fence. He keeps digging into the bank and under the fence. I have added three separate panels to plug various holes. Nothing is working to keep him in. So now he is back on the overhead run. I am going to have to lay horizontal fencing down along the banks and wire it to the vertical pieces so that he cannot dig down within two feet of the creek bank. I suspect this may work. I cannot guarantee my hypothesis until I do the actual experiment.

Hormones are the male species greatest weakness

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Today was the day to crank out the hallway and another wall in the living room with new paint. The downfall to this is I need to put blue tape everywhere first. I was almost done with the taping when I got a call from my nephew stating that the bull was no longer in his area and was standing outside the separated heifers enclosure. This means he got out again! I know where the hole is, he has to be going under the fence at the creek crossing. The problem with this is I cannot lower the fence down into the water because the spring runoff has not happened yet. If I lower the fence then Mother Nature will rip it all down with a sudden deluge of runoff in the back creek. I grabbed the dogs and walked up the back hillside to the upper gate and opened it up. I was thinking we could drive the Bull back up the hill and inside his area. This did not work as he did drive to the corner but then crawled under the fence again. Ugh! I just remembered at 8:00pm that I forgot to close the stupid upper gate!! Now I gotta go trudge up there in the dark and check for the bull then close the gate! There are days that the farm life is more work and less play than others.

Stupid dogs chased the bull out quickly then when I used them to try and push him away from the creek opening they pushed him back through the opening! We had to start all over again. The second time through I decided I needed to make something that would allow the water to run past but would keep the Bull from getting back through. I thought about making a T-post fence by driving a T-post every 6 inches in an arc in front of the opening. This sounded a lot like work and no guarantee that it would keep him in. I was looking around thinking when I spotted three old wooden posts so I wired these onto the fence leaning in toward the Bull. I wanted something else so I walked over to the old chicken coop and started digging around. I found a piece of corrugated roofing. I used an old nail I found on the ground and a rock to punch two holes in it and I found a piece of rusted 1/8 inch wire to tie it in place over the boards. I am hoping all of this combined will keep the bull from crawling under the fence again and let the water flow by.

As I was sitting down to have a third cup of coffee I saw the bull going by the window. He was unable to get past my obstacle course. I had taken the time to use the Bull as a training tool for the dogs. I took some video but cannot upload it on the blog, our internet connection is too slow. I will post it to twitter in the morning. I got one clip of the bull calling for his women and one of the two border collies pushing him away from his women.

I did finish putting up all the blue tape in the hallway. No paint went onto the walls today. I had plans to finish the blog earlier but I spotted a deal on Facebook classifieds for some fencing material but I had to go pick it up asap. I hooked the trailer up in the snow and drove over and bought some T-posts, gates, smooth wire rolls, wooden posts and two sections of culvert. I brought a lot of cash but needed more. I wrote down all the information to mail a check and as soon as I got home I wrote the check and have it in a stamped envelope ready to go in the morning. There was even more snow down when I got home and unloaded the trailer.

As an added bonus I managed to purchase a stock rack for the pickup! I am going to pick it up tomorrow which is why I needed the trailer unloaded tonight. It only cost $200 but it does need a paint job! I just need to get some of that paint that you brush on and it converts the rust to a primer then I can just use spray cans to finish it off.

I did manage to draw up some plans for the back wall of our in ground greenhouse. I am loving the idea and can stack 3-4 high 50 gallon drums. I think it needs to be 20 feet x 10 feet minimum after doing some research. If you make them small the temperature tends to fluctuate too much. I would love to grow a lemon, orange and kiwi tree inside the greenhouse! Plus have tomatoes year round along with spinach and carrots and lettuce. The barrels will be filled with water and act as storage and heat sink. They will do double duty.