Five human gates and 25 T posts.

Yesterday was a busy day.  Mouse got to go on another car ride.  My mother found out about a friend of her selling gates, panels and fencing supplies.  It was a great deal!  I saved over 50% off on everything.  These are the things that I will need eventually but don’t currently have them allotted to any one location.  Now that I say that, one four foot gate needs to go down by the old apple tree in the orchard.  I have a gate opening all ready installed in the fence it just needs a gate.  A cut to fit panel is wired in place now.  I also want to install one in the back fence of the orchard so you can walk out onto the back hillside without having to climb the fence.  I picked up five small gates so that leaves three more for somewhere on the farm.  Luckily for me, even our tractor will go through a four foot gate.  I won’t be putting the people gates in places I need to actually get through with a tractor.  In the bottom pump pasture, (new name just created) I want to fence that off next year.  I think it is only 2-2.5 acres and I want to plant Sainfoin as a test feed crop.  Once established it comes back like alfalfa, but it is a legume so it will bind nitrogen into the soil.  I really need a manure spreader.  I could spread the straw and poop from the annual barn cleaning over the pastures.  It is on my list.  I need a decent used one at a fantastic price!  No pressure in finding that.  The bottom pump pasture will need a fence alongside the top of the creek bank.  I will need a tractor gate in it down by the culvert and a people gate at the end and maybe even the side closest to the creek.  So that is four small gates and one large gate used up already.  Another large gate needs to go into the school house pasture next to the old barley field.  There is already an opening with a cow panel wired in place.  I think this may be a 16 foot opening so I would have to move one rock crib to make an appropriate sized opening for a 12 foot gate.  I need to retighten and update that same section of fence next year so moving the far sided rock crib is not that big of deal.  Plus I want to add a new fence up the back hillside down by the upper prime far fence line.  That will need a 12 foot gate.  I also wanted to subdivide the back hillside one more time down by the apple tree, another 12 foot gate needed.  I also need to install a metal gate on the upper hillside to replace a long barb wire gate that is unwieldy and hard to operate.  That leaves me with one 2 foot gate left out of all the ones I just purchased!  I now have over 20 railroad ties.  I probably need at least another ten to do all that fencing.  I will have to keep working on acquiring more.  I have over half a mile of woven wire now stashed in my fencing supply area. 
Once home, I took mouse with me to the post office.  He tried to sneak out while I was shutting the door and caught his nose between the seat and door.  He yelped and didn’t want to face the door anymore.  We then played for a couple of hours until Annmarie came home.  I then went out and planted the upper prime field with a non irrigation pasture grass mix.  I went with the plastic whirly seed spreader.  I had to twirl the handle for three hours, but I figured I saved at least an hour of fighting with the old seeder in addition to the planting time.  It was worth it.  I was walking back and forth slow and methodical but that was taking forever.  I opened up the seeder one more notch and started to fast walk across the field to get good coverage.  I had to start removing clothing due to all the sweating from the workout.  It took me three hours to get the seed spread out.  I probably would have only used 8-12 pounds of seed if I had used the seeder.  I used about 35 pounds of seed doing it by hand.  The sun was going down so I will have to use the harrow on Tuesday. 
 

Five 12 foot gates and 15 railroad ties.



New worker added to family.

Well we did it, we have a new puppy!  Annmarie drove 7 hours each way to pick him up on Saturday, November 28, 2015.  He is a purebred Border collie from working parents.  The breeders were going to hold him back for themselves but had things come up.  They will only sell their dogs to working farms and say they can work both cattle and sheep.  The biggest thing is being able to differentiate between cattle and sheep, they are not herded the same.   He is silver in color, bright blue eyes and only eight weeks old.  We had been talking about waiting until spring but Annmarie has more time available now and hopefully Sarah will be home soon.  This will spread out the puppy duties to ease the burden.  They are so much work!  The first couple of days our dogs didn’t want much to do with him.  Now Zeke will play with him and not growl at him nonstop.  Zeke playing with him has helped ease the burden a lot.  Otherwise, he needed a human play toy incessantly.  We did the math and with Zeke being 5 years old and it taking us 2 years to really train the puppy well. We will need a new dog every 5-7 years.  I would like to wait until the old dog has died before getting a replacement.   His name is Mouse, its color appropriate.  I needed a name I could holler out easily.  No multiple syllable names were allowed in the choosing process.  No names that started with a S or Z were allowed either.  Oh and nothing that sounded like one of our commands.  I really wanted a single syllable name, hence the choice Mouse.   It was Annmarie’s idea to call him Mouse.  He gets to sleep with us for a couple of weeks until we are sure he can hold his pee through the night then we will crate train him.  The first three nights of the crate are the worse.  The nice thing is both other dogs are crate trained so it won’t seem so foreign to him. 
He is already showing an interest in the livestock.  He tries to chase the alpaca out of our yard and he loves watching the chickens through the fence.  He just needs to not get rolled by the sheep!  The plan is to just keep him near Zeke when we go out to the barn.  Zeke is generally avoided by the sheep and he will protect both of them.  Mouse is constantly trying to grab Zeke by a leg when they play. 


Sprout is not taking to the puppy.  Its interrupting his desires and needs.

Number four of ten.

Today was the day!  I was hoping this was going to be the last of the sheep killing for the year.  It won’t be but it was close.  One of my friends wanted 9 lambs and he comes to the house and we kill them and his dad cuts them up.  This is a lot more work for me but for Don, the nicest guy I know, I make exceptions.  I did tell him that we would need to kill our ram also.  As an added bonus he usually has to help me band and tag a few babies when we are sorting the sheep and today was no different.  I knew there was at least two babies without tags.  I had just ran them into the barn right before he arrived.  Zeke is proving just how smart a border collie can be today.  We went out to get the sheep and they were all the way down by the school house on the upper hillside.  So we walked down but the gate was at the top of the hill and the bottom of the hill and we were in the middle of the hill.  I was able to teach him how to climb up the rock jack and jump over the fence at the top.  It took some prompting but he did it!  First time ever for this trick.  I then just stood on the hill and hollered commands while he herded the sheep down below to the open gate and over to the barn.  His only mistake was letting one of the babies break ranks over by the barn and get trapped on the wrong side of the fence away from everyone else.  He had to go down and circle behind the baby and push it back to the herd.  Every once in a while he lets a couple squirt out from the edges.

We sorted the sheep using the fancy sheep chute and tagged and banded two new baby boys about three weeks old.  We sorted off fourteen boys and kept them in the barn then chased all the babies and mommys out of the barn.  This is where the killing doesn’t end.  We have an all white ewe from a Katahdin ram that mysteriously died of a wasting disease. She is literally wasting away, very skinny with bones sticking out.  No one else in the whole herd looks like her.  She looks just like her father did before we had to put him down.  I will put her down in the next week and just take her body up to the boneyard.  His death is what caused us to go pick up all our new rams from their homes.  It allows us to see how the animals are raised and what their herd looks like before we purchase a ram.  We are sticking to that rule with all new rams.  Our current ram came from a beautiful home and has thrown wonderful babies, but he now has granddaughters in the herd and his bloodline is making everyone jumpy and scared all the time.  So it was time for him to go away, and with those beautiful horns he was not going to a new home. 

We then resorted the fourteen boys and put ten of them into the chute for processing.  Don’s dad wanted to know how I killed them.  I said I had learned to kill them by slicing the carotid arteries with a fillet knife by stabbing them behind the trachea then turning the blade 90 degrees and hold the wound open so they bleed out without starving for air because the trachea is not cut.  I said someone had told me this is how the local Basque gentleman had taught him so I have been practicing it.  He said this is how a Kosher butcher would do it without the blessings.  I didn’t know that.  Don and I hung each lambs head out the barn window and I proceeded to bleed them out.  I did the first nine without missing.  Perfect every time. Unfortunately, I was saving the ram for last as he is the largest of the animals.  He was getting very nervous by the time we snatched the last three boys out of the chute.  He tried to jump out on the last animal.  So I told Don we had to get him as soon as we finished the ninth one so he didn’t jump out of the chute.  We got him into the small section of the chute and I tried to get in with him.  He kept trying to ram me with his very large horns.  It was not safe, then he tried to jump out by going over a gate and caught his back foot in the gate and broke his leg.  I had to go inside the house and get a 22 pistol and shoot him in the head inside the barn.  Next time the ram goes first and I will start taking the pistol out to the barn when I am killing so it is handy if needed.  He was a lot bigger than I had estimated.  He weighed over 150 pounds!  I have him hanging out on the skinning pole.  I will buy some suet tomorrow and then bone out his carcass.  We are going to grind him up and make mutton burger.
 

Our ram, soon to be mutton burger.

I make a great summer sausage that is even better with a strong flavored meat.  Its pretty good with plain hamburger but with a strong flavored meat it is divine.  Not sure why it is so much better with a strong flavored meat.  I just purchased a meat grinder for our Kitchen Aid and it came two days ago in the mail, all hail the great AMAZON! 

Mowing lawn one last time for the year.

I keep getting behind on my blog posts.  I do try and make them in a timely fashion but it can be hard to sit down and write when I am on a TV marathon of one show, currently the Game of Thrones.  I love binge watching seasons at a time.  On Monday, I mowed the lawn for the last time this year!  As always I went the easy way and let 50 sheep into the yard and had them mow it for me.  It is far more efficient plus they will get the hillside I cannot mow.  No fossil fuels were burned in the grooming process of our lawn.  See how green I can be?  Annmarie has another word for it, but any good redneck will tell you that sheep are the best lawnmowers ever. 
 

Upper prime pasture getting ready for grass seed.

I had just gotten started on discing the upper prime pasture so it can be replanted.  The sheep and horses had pretty much stripped it down to nothing so it was perfect to work.  There was too much dead grass in places and did make it kind of hard in places.  I had to clean out the harrow multiple times as it kept building up clumps of dead grass.  Tuesday was supposed to be kill sheep day but it was raining so Don and I decided to move that to Thursday and I spent all day on the tractor dragging the disc around then the harrow.  It was wet which meant the tractor had to stay in four wheel drive all day, but the ground was easy to work.  I got it all ready for grass seed.  I had Richard come out and I asked him to give me pointers on using the seeder.  I am still nervous and not sure if spending 2-3 hours working on it then it being too heavy for my little tractor is worth the effort.  I may still seed by hand then run over it with the harrow.  The good thing about it only being four acres.  If I had to do large areas I would have to use equipment.  I still do a lot of things the hard way!  I realize that they are not always the most efficient technique available.  We are supposed to get more rain this weekend and my week is booked up solid with other things so squeezing in the seeding is going to be hard and yet essential.  It may have to wait till Sunday.  I am running out of good weather and time, a killer combination to beat. 



Upper prime pasture ready for grass seed.

Who do you call when you need to open the barn first thing in the morning?  You call sasquatch!  No longer having a child at home has allowed certain clothing restrictions to loosen when it comes to errands first thing in the morning.  I can positively state that is not freezing outside yet. 

Sasquatch to the rescue.

Annmarie grabbed my cell phone and rushed upstairs to our bedroom to catch this elusive creature on a digital image.  May many more assists happen in the future. 

I am still trying to catch the chicken killer.  Yesterday, I placed an egg in the trap and thought it had gotten eaten but no it had just been moved.  Tonight I baited the trap with some squirrel food.  I know it is a raccoon.  I found footprints down by the front ditch in the soft dirt this morning.  Now that it knows there is chicken inside that wooden structure it will come back every night looking for a way inside.  I found a couple of rocks that had been rolled out of the way so a tunnel was open underneath the chicken coop.  The raccoons did this a couple of years ago also.  The war has begun and I am to finish it.