It has only been 45 days on the bathroom project over the course of 26 weeks now. Mind you I told the wife it would only take four weeks. I may have been a little off on my estimate. Normally, you can take my estimate and multiply by three and be spot on. That is not the case this time.
I only needed to install the sink plumbing and I would be done with all water in the bathroom. To do this I needed to change out the wall supply valves so they were 3/8” outlets. I figured this was going to be fairly easy as the nut and crush washer were going to stay on the copper pipe and I just needed to change out the valve body.
I should know better by now. I am cursed when it comes to plumbing. I changed out the first valve without incident. I then did the second valve, again fairly easy. I figured that I should check both valves before I hooked up the sink in case I had a slow leak around my swap. I went back to the main water shut off in the laundry room and opened it up. I got distracted by something and was in the kitchen when I thought I heard a weird noise coming from the bathroom. I went into the bathroom to a fountain. I had both valves pointed to the ceiling and the second valve I had not closed. I was spraying water all over the wall, the light and ceiling. Luckily, the floor slants towards the toilet so the water was just pooling on the floor. I had about 1/2” of water on the floor. It took me another hour to get the bathroom cleaned up and dried. I did not get electrocuted when I cleaned all of the water off of the light. Neither valve leaked once I actually shut the valve.
I hooked up the sink without any further incident. I even cut the Pex pipe and used the parts Delta sent me to get a seal on the Pex. I wanted to run the water but the drain was not yet installed. So I tried to install the drain from the parts I had on hand. Nope, it was not going to happen. Sixty dollars later and two trips to the local store and I had purchased enough parts to be able to plum the drain. I then did turn the water on and it did indeed work and drain perfectly. This entire endeavor took me a whole day. I just do not get along with plumbing, we are enemies.
Sunday we focused on getting the Rambler set up to grind grain. I walked him through it for about 20 minutes then cut him loose. We had two 55 gallon drums set by the grinder and we set it up next to the chicken coop so he could just carry the buckets into the back of the coop and dump them into drums. There is no way to move the full drums into the back of the coop so this has to be done a bucket at a time. He did pretty good but as soon as he was close to getting finished we brought over two more drums full of grain. He thought he was done and Mr Rainman and I told him there was more after this and he just needed to keep going. We ended up loading four more 55 gallon drums into the back of the chicken coop and we still need to fill 2.5 drums. I am sure once they are all full we will be able to go eight months.
I have an old grain bin that can be mounted outside the coop and a feed hole can be cut into the side of the building. It should hold about 800# and can be loaded from the outside. It needs a new bottom welded on it. I am thinking a piece of 3/32” sheet metal. I am sure the grain gate will need to be altered so it can be manipulated from inside the building. I may even move the gate to the bottom of a long chute so it can be placed inside the coop. I won’t really know until we have the bin moved over to the machine shed and we can take some measurements.
Once the Rambler was set we went to clean up the old house. Annmarie wants the porch cleared so we neatened it and removed the scrap wood. The inside still had tools and materials scattered about from the bathroom project. So we created a huge trash pile and started to put tools away. Tools went into the old house, the old chicken coop, the machine shed and the fencing shed. The Gingerman brought out some more concrete chunks and we dumped them next to the culvert in an attempt to harden the one edge from the flooding water. Hopefully, we will not see any more flooding! But since the weatherman has a hard time predicting the weather, who really knows if it will flood.
There is a little frog living in the root cellar! It is bouncing between the top three stairs. If it likes spiders then there is a lot of food down there. I had to clean out all of the cobwebs before I could go down the stairs. The entire stair area was full of cobwebs. It had been a while since I had been down there. I store all of the construction materials that are unique and we may need to repair in the future. I put some bathroom tiles and metal trim down in the root cellar.
The sheep have been hollering like they are dying. No one likes to get weaned. We had a hard time driving the tractor through the barn lot as the sheep on both sides kept trying to bum rush the gate every time it was opened. The babies had managed to crawl under the creek crossing so we went out and lowered the panels so they cannot get out.
After that we went out and cleaned up amount 75% of the machine shed. We had filled the trash can up already so there is a large pile in the machine shed. I will keep throwing some in every week until I make it vanish. There were parts bins and tools all over from when I was repairing all of the haying equipment. I also replaced the outlet on the wall. I had been too aggressive with a screwdriver the day before trying to reset the GFI trip, it does work again.
We then trimmed the trumpet vine away from the roof and the house siding. I am trying to get a runner onto the new section of trellis around our living room window. It is looking promising. I would like to get a few branches trained then I can kill all the other suckers coming out of the ground. We tossed all the cuttings over the fence for the sheep. They love to eat most plans and trumpet vine is no exception.
I spent the last half an hour with the Rambler. He had stopped grinding to think about a more efficient way to grind grain. So we were so efficient with my system that he could hardly keep up with the grinder unloading and loading and moving the ground material into the chicken coop. He was covered in flour and looked like a ghost. He had it out with the sheep early on as they kept sneaking up on him to stick their nose in and get some grain. Before he knew it he had 20 sheep pushing in and trying to get a mouthful of grain. By the time I came over in the afternoon there were no sheep around. They decided it was easier to find a meal elsewhere. We did end up dumping out one bag of grain that had too many rocks in it. The sheep do not care and will eat it in any fashion offered. I may take the sheep in to the auction. We know someone who took little ones in and got $120-140/each. I would gladly take that price. I need to look at my work calendar to decide when it will be feasible to take a Tuesday off to drive them over to the auction.
I did find out that the dead raccoon was on the fence and had not been moved out to the bone pile. So I had to use a shovel to scoop it up and toss it in the tractor bucket for its eternal resting trip.
Our plan in two weeks is to work the cows to tag and band the calves. There are still only three calves from our six cows. One of the cows was fairly young so it is not surprising she does not have a calf. We did have one of the cows slough a baby, it looked malformed and incomplete, so there is really only one slacker.
Mr Rainman came out on Saturday to help me out. He is only coming a few days a month now. So I had some things planned out so we could get as much done as possible. He brought a new helper out a young man who was excited to come out to the farm but has never really been exposed to farm life. He will be forever known as the Rambler. Great kid but is prone to large amounts of nonstop prose. We pulled the cracked grain 55 gallon drums out of the barn and took them around to the chicken coop. The Rambler had to move them a bucket at a time into the back of the chicken coop. The plan is to get about 2000# of cracked grain done up for the winter. We now have three 55 gallon drums and three metal trash cans out in the back of the chicken coop. I think I can fit at least two more 55 gallon drums, maybe three. That should get us at least six months, probably eight months.
The plan was to have the Rambler crack grain all day. I had to buy a new grain cracker for $200 as I could not just buy the mill half of the contraption. We have saved over $2k in feed so $200 is a great investment. I have sorted the rocks out of four drums worth of grain so the Rambler was going to be able to go nonstop for hours just grinding grain. Unfortunately, someone in Pilot Rock hit a telephone pole and knocked out the power. Before we figured that out I had brutalized the outlet in the machine shed and played with the feeder breakers. When the power came back on the outlet did not work. We will move the cracker and grain over to the chicken coop area so the Rambler can just crack it all in place.
So instead of doing that we went out and picked our rose plum tree. The thing was loaded and sagging down. It only broke one branch but I had about 8 2×4 branch supports in place to keep them from breaking. We picked about 150# of sweet tart plums. They are pretty good, but the tree next to it had these huge round blush plums but there were only about 20 on the entire tree, they were there last week and there were none this week. The yellow jackets have been eating them once they sugar up.
The tree growing in with the apricot tree that I thought was an apricot tree is a plum tree. I think they grafted the apricot tree onto the plum roots and the suckers that came up are actually plums. We were able to pick two plums from that tree and they were very good. This late fall we are going to butcher a lot of the trees to shape them and top them. We ran out of boxes and had to start using paper bags. We finally gave up and left about 15# to the yellow jackets. They were too hard to get to and we already had more than was needed by a long shot.
It is time to put the rams back in with the ewes so we can have lambs the end of December. But first, we had to rearrange the barn so we could sort in it and then we had to get the sheep up into the barn. This ended up causing us to use the dog to get them back into the ram pasture. She did great then we got them behind the barn and needed to push them inside. The dog was not a lot of help. She got too excited and did not listen, we had to put her back in the yard.
The Rambler had never worked animals and was surprised when we grabbed the sheep by the neck to sort them while inside the chute. He thought we were being mean. There was a long calm discussion about how this is how you sort them. He finally got it and ran the second chute gate while we sorted. We made two herds, keepers (ewes that need bred, 29 total) in one. The second one carried the cull ewes (16 total) and all the lambs (62 total, some will end up as replacements when we sort for market) They will hang out on the lower portion of the farm while the ewes hang out in the top portion. This will give the rams time to do their job. We found one chicken out in the barn with one little black chick. We found her nest in the barn and it looked like she had hatched out 10 chicks and only one was left. The chick was only 2-5 days old. We left her out with the chick. It was a 50% chance it would be a rooster so I just left it with her to see if she could keep it alive.
Our heat pump has been on the fritz off and on for the last three weeks. This is bad as it has been quite warm during that time and it is getting up to 80 F in the house. We keep it at a balmy 70 F year round inside the house. Our HVAC guy has been out a few times trying to figure it out. He messaged and said he would be out on Wednesday. Around noon he texts me the above picture of our border collie trapping a coop up on the fence post. I asked him to shoot it but he did not have a weapon on him. Our house is loaded with them so instructions were given where to find said tool. Before he could find one the housekeeper showed up and went out and dispatched the coon. It had jumped off the post and climbed up into the large tree before she got back out. This did not slow her down. Not only did she dispatch it she made sure to dispose of the body! It doesn’t get any better than that.
It turns out that we have a bulb valve that failed. I think that is what you call it. It’s basically a temperature valve that opens and closes with temperature. It is the same thing that went bad 2-3 years ago. This is not ideal but he did find a replacement for our 18 years old heat pump and we do not have to buy a new heat pump! It will hopefully be fixed in another week, the part has to be shipped in from somewhere a long ways away.
I have an air mattress all set up in the office so Annmarie can get some rest. The only real problem is neither of us can remember where the lit glass horse light control remote is located in the office. It is wired into the inset in the wall so you cannot just unplug it to turn it off. The trade off to sleep in a cool environment was worth the light changing colors all night.
I keep working on getting the star thistle sprayed in the CRP. It had not been controlled for a decade so it made some inroads. The wind and heat has been dictating when I can spray so it has been hit and miss to get it done but I managed to get in a solid three days last week. I can usually get 3-4 tanks done before the wind or the heat picks up enough that I can no longer spray. There are a lot of old coyote dens out in the CRP! It makes driving around on the tractor surprising. You can get lulled into a back and forth rhythm then WHAM, you hit a huge hole and the front tire has fallen in. It takes four wheel drive and going backwards to get out.
The miniature bunnies are all along the fence line. They are living in every single rock crib. This little furry creature thought that if it just held still I would not see it. I guess in its mind it worked as I just snapped a picture and kept on driving. Nothing harassed it so it was successful. We have one down along the driveway also. Annmarie and I were just commenting that we never see babies and we only ever see one at a time yet they keep multiplying.
When I got down to the house I tried to back into the machine shed. Unfortunately, the boom on the left had flopped down and I ran it right into the upright wooden pillar. This caused a bend on the back rigid bar. It was bent too much, when I let the boom down it was pointed forward at a 45 degree angle, no good. In typical farmer fashion I figured I could just straighten it out by hooking it on the same post but pulling with the tractor to straighten it out. Surprisingly, this took quite a bit of effort on the tractor’s part and all it did was break the hokey fix I had done a couple of years ago in the middle. So now I had two issues.
The answer at this point is to just take it apart and rebuild it. But this means relying on my welding skills. They are improving, but that first weld two years ago was so bad I had to screw two holes into the patch and put screws in them. I am getting much better and that was one of my very first repairs. It also held for two years! I went to Irish Iron (Packy’s) and got some square tubing, a small piece of square tubing to go inside both pieces to hold them in alignment when I welded them. I also picked up some channel iron for the gun rack on the Kubota tractor. I was there so I figured I would just get it all.
I had to take it all apart, busted one of the bolts in the process and then had to cut the swing safety ends off. They need to be welded onto the new piece. Since I was having to rebuild the thing anyways I decided to do some improvements to its design. I have a boom and a wand attached but the valve to switch is under the tank currently and it is a standard yard hose Y splitter. So I purchased two valves to weld onto the top of the bar to switch between the wand and boom. I also moved the boom left/right valves to an upright direction so I now have four valves mounted on the spray bar. It was surprisingly not bad once I got the wire feed speed adjusted. I had to slow it down from the Gingerman’s settings. I cannot weld at 200, I did fine at 175 speed. I have no clue what the value for the setting is, I just know the bigger the number the faster the wire comes out.
I go it all welded together and broke the ancient handle off of one of the old valves. I tried to weld it on, it took two attempts before I realized the valve stem is bronze. I will have to eventually replace that valve but for now it will work fine. I have learned to just grab some color of spray paint and cover up the bare metal when I am done. It helps control the rust. I was putting all of the tubing on with hose clamps and of course on the very last clamp the standard screwdriver slipped and dug a gouge out of my thumb. It would not stop bleeding so I whipped out the little first aid kit I have on the tractor. The requisite blood sacrifice for a farm project was given.
The fires have already started to burn all around us. It is a little early for fire season but our lack of rain is starting to show. It does make for a fantastic sunset!
Stewart Creek Somethings 