Farm

Mailbox upgrade

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Friday was my first day of vacation that I actually did not have to go into my paying job. I have been on PTO since Wednesday on paper, reality is not always the same. This allowed me to play catch up on some things.

I went hunting and managed to spot the little spike buck that has been in the wheat field every morning. I went by him and thought he was a doe. On the way back to the house I stopped one last time and looked at all the does and spotted the horns. My paper deer tag covered up the horns. He will be very good eating, I was able to pick him up and carry him to the cooler without any help. I would like to think that after moving ten ton of hay this last week that its pure muscle strength, but since I felt every bale I am not sure that is the correct answer. When we first moved here a neighbor made custom mailboxes for us out of old gears. The paint has started to flake off and show rust so we had decided that it was time to take them over to Hermiston and get them bead blasted and powder coated so they would last for another 20-30 years. Unfortunately, we still need our mail so I used a bunch of pallets to create a temporary holder. I plan on dropping these off in Hermiston next week.

Thursday we got the last six tons of hay into the machine shed. I only ended up with three blisters and only one of those tore open. I definitely don’t have farmer hands. I still take care to minimize the calluses on my hands so it doesn’t affect my paying job. I need those baby smooth hands for a reason.

I had a friend message me as we loaded the lasts two tons onto the trailer that she wanted to borrow my trailer. Great timing! I said come over ASAP as I need to unload the last two tons into the machine shed. They showed up 10 minutes after I finished unloading the last bale and closing the gate.

I picked up 4 sheets of plywood to lie on top of the hay so that main beam can be replaced. I will be laying it out this week and wrestling the beam up onto the hay. I will cut it on top of the hay. The beam weighs 165#, I asked when I picked it up. There are two other boards to replace also.

The alpaca think they are starving and have been hanging out and eating the alfalfa scraps. They are even ignoring the green grass for an opportunity to eat alfalfa leaves. They dig through and pick out just the leaves before eating anything else. We are taking bets on which color of alpaca is the next to be bullied to death. We did separate them for a couple of weeks, it is supposed to help as it throws off the group dynamics but it seems like they just fight more when they get back together.

It was a day of finding missing items. I had misplaced the Bluetooth speaker that normally lives in the bathroom. No music during the shower was killing me! I have been looking all over the place and spotted it yesterday when I was eyeing the dog tag maker. It was sitting on the corner of the maker blending in with the color. I will be moving the dog tag maker into our master bedroom this week hopefully. I just need to talk my nephews into helping move a 300# chunk of iron 30 feet. We are getting felt pads for the floor today.

I was out in the old house tossing the cardboard boxes from our beef onto the “to be burned” pile stored out of the weather when I looked over at my waders and spotted my good pocket knife hanging from the chest of the waders. This had been missing for six weeks. I still need to find my Sawzall though…

It rained!! First measurable rain in over 65 days. First good rain for over 90 days! I am now under the gun to get the grass hay planted. I will be working those fields one more time. We ordered a chest mounted seed spreader that will hold 20# of seed at a time from Amazon yesterday. I will be walking the field to seed it. If that works well we are going to start tearing up and reseeding all of the bottoms to increase our feed capacity. If I can get them good enough we may even hay a few of them in the spring.

I learned something new that I should have known on Thursday, sheep only have a gestation of 5 months not 6. This would explain many of my issues with predicting when the sheep are going to have babies! I have thought for the last 8 years that it was 6 months not 5.

Hay is the gift that keeps on giving

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After the dry summer and having to feed for 6 weeks we needed more hay. I found another 10 ton local and started to pick it up on Wednesday. This is not as easy as it sounds as we had to load it manually and unload it again by hand. The bales weigh 100# each on average and those heavy ones are twice as heavy as the rest. Luckily I had help from the Hay Man. He came over and unloaded with me. He stacked the stack higher with the old bales as they were lighter then we stacked the new ones into the machine shed. The stack is high enough now I can throw some plywood on top of it and fix the broken beam. I have the new beam now and it needs to go up this week so that it doesn’t warp.

Hay Man and I then went and looked at the upper fields and discussed the grass and hay plans. I had no idea that you needed to bales the hay with dew on the row. Plus you have to have the moisture content of the bale correct or they rot or catch on fire! This is going to further complicate things. I had to call a halt so that I did not die from moving the hay. We will do another four ton and then I will unload the last two ton myself. The days of being able to do ten ton in a single day are over. Now if the hay elevator worked we probably could have done 10 ton but it needs to be welded first. I have begun the welding class at the college but it is going to take all quarter for me to learn how to do it passably. I spent 2.5 hours last week one night and still could not do four simple welds. So now I am behind and need to play catchup.

My mother-in-law and wife conspired against me this week to get me to feed the cows again. I believe the cows are fine, I do know that there is zero green in the pasture below and it looks like they could be starving but its not winter yet. This is my go to line when we talk about feeding before it gets cold. I never win and end up feeding the animals but I feel like I should always voice my issue. It doesn’t change anything in the long run but I like to take a stance, even if it is futile. So I pushed down another large bale of grain hay. No one came running, not the cows or the sheep who were 100 feet away. They had already eaten down the first bale to nothing so they must not be starving. Most starving animals will mob me when I bring out hay or at least run over when they hear the tractor. Not this time, I did notice that the next day they are all camped out around the easy meal.

It was opening deer season this Saturday and I expected to spend my normal two hours hunting for a little buck. No joy at all, I have spent almost 7 hours this weekend and have not fired a single shot yet. There is a little tiny spike buck that keeps showing up in the wheat field but he is super spooked and when I get out of the vehicle he starts running away full out. I had a nice shot this morning but there was a doe standing directly on the other side of him so I had to wait for either one of them to move and then it was too late. Luckily, I have vacation this week, a nice happy accident, and I will work on getting some venison on the table later in the week. These hawks are all over the place and I managed to follow this one until I got a nice shot of it flying, not too shabby considering I was using my cell phone camera.

There are a lot of pheasants this year, but the odd part is they normally jump when you are wishing 50-75 yards of them so you can never get a shot off. This year they are holding tight and they are everywhere. We counted 25 in one morning but had 15 other times and that is without beating the bushes. Some pheasant hunters are going to be pleased.

Almost ready to plant

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I had to go buy another piece of equipment to work the fields. We now have an arena groomer. It has a harrow on the front, an adjustable bar to press down on the soil and a rolling compactor wheel of bars behind that. It is really helping compact and leveling the fields. I am almost done with the two middle fields totaling 14 acres. I should get them finished today. I was going to do it yesterday but got called away on a long EMS call and we had plans for dinner so instead I spent almost 2.5 hours attempting to clean out the craft room downstairs. I had stacked all kinds of stuff this winter when I did the floor then I used it as a painting area when I repainted the downstairs. I have only mounted three things on the wall since painting. We are going to thin out about 60% of the items we had up on the walls. Some of them we have had a long time and we had a bunch of wildlife prints that are going to go. Annmarie wants to keep one of them.

To make room for the items in the craft room I had to go up and empty the upstairs bathroom area. I tossed a lot more stuff into the trash. I now have managed to clean out a wall in the craft room. This will be the future home of the sewing table from our master bedroom. Once the sewing desk is moved downstairs I will clean that corner of our master bedroom and get help to move the dog tag stamper into our bedroom. I need to get it away from my plants on the breeze porch. The humidity is causing it to surface rust more than it was. I am still gaining ground on the dirt and rust but I don’t like losing progress. This will keep it away from the humidity and I will make a plastic tent for it with a desiccant container under it. I also found the glass shelves for one of our display cases! They have been missing for 11 years. I attempted to put said shelves into the cabinet but it has a skeleton key lock on it and I cannot find the key now! I tried all our ones stashed in the house and did not get a fit. I also bent a metal hanger and attempted to trip the lock with that. I was very unsuccessful, this does not bode well for my safecracking endeavor. We will now need to find the correct key, some days you just cannot win.

I now have two books on how to crack a safe and a suction cup microphone to attach to the safe. I hope I can hear the tumblers as I attempt to crack the four digit code. If not I have been researching oscilloscope apps for my phone that will display the sound as a waveform that I can watch. I still have a $200 reward for anyone who can crack the code without damaging the safe and they must give me the working code.

On Friday I managed to dispose of all the old chemicals that had been in the machine shop for a very long time. I loaded up about 50 gallons of liquids. I had about 12 gallons that were unknown and of those three gallons were in glass jugs. I double bagged and taped them all up and placed them in boxes and laid down plastic. Everything they wanted done to safely transport them to the pickup spot. I wanted to thank the Oregon Department of Transportation for sponsoring the disposal and paying for all agricultural disposals. I may have been able to use some but I have learned that keeping hazardous old stuff is not beneficial in the long run. I now just need to pull all three fuel tanks out of the machine shed, build some storage shelves and tear out the platform in the one bay and we will have a super usable space. I will drag the dirt floor with the tractor and get all the loose dust out and then backfill with gravel. I figure it will take me at least forty yards of 3/4 minus gravel to cover the floor. The gravel will help make it much cleaner.

The deer decided to come down near the house and eat some green grass. There is not very much green around our place. There are four deer in the picture. I just found out yesterday that deer season starts next weekend! I need to go buy my tag this week so I can spend the 2-3 hours hunting it will take me to shoot a little spike buck.

Lets blame Roundup

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It has been a whirlwind ten days on the farm. We are trying to get ready for Winter and there is lots to do still. Last week we had four cows killed at our house. Three we sold as live animals and we are going to eat the fourth. We got the bull with undescended testicles. I figured when he was little that I just could not find them to band and that as he got older they would descend, they never did. He was a bull, no question despite the shriveled up scrotum. Short of surgery there was no way I was going to correct that issue. We are going to have cube steak, steak, stew meat, hamburger and prime rib out of him. We still have a pig coming also next month in a trade, two sheep for a pig. Plus, I got a buck tag also and will be shooting a small buck off of the farm, there are no large bucks here. The small ones are way better eating.

On the cow front we just spotted another newborn calf yesterday. Usually, we don’t see them for a couple of weeks but this one looked less than 24 hours old. We will wait a couple of weeks before pushing them all into the corral so we can tag and band. Hopefully, we are only tagging as we have had all boys so far this year. I think there are a couple more still due. We will look when we run them into the corral.

Our sheep guy came on Wednesday of this week and picked up the last 15 lambs for sale, they weighed around 50# each and were very wild. The dogs had trouble moving them and the dogs have been thinking they know what is best lately. Mouse is going to have to go back on a lead rope until he can figure out right and left. He is now convinced that a straight line is the fastest way to get to the prey every time. This may be true but it doesn’t help herd them through a gate. He also runs in and cuts one sheep out of the herd immediately which scatters the herd every where. We are now throwing his ball in the house with left and right commands to get him used to them again. He is 2.5 years old and we always seem to have a teenager mentality at this age.

I managed to find another 10 ton of small bale alfalfa. We had to feed about 6 ton of feed this summer due to the sudden dry weather which caused all of our pasture to dry up and stay that way. Once the sheep started to get picked off we tried to keep them close to the house and this limited their pasture options. We have now let them have the entire bottom to roam and they seem to be doing well. We look for carcasses and have not spotted any.

We are trying to get the upper fields prepped for alfalfa. I got some advice this week and I can tell that I am not cut out to be a farmer. Here is how the advice went.

Me: I want to plant Roundup ready alfalfa, but its expensive so I only want to do it once.

Advice: Alfalfa has to be planted fairly shallow and it needs to have three leaves on it before the first frost or it dies.

Me: What if I just plant it now will it winter over?

Advice: How moist is the soil now?

Me: Its dry, dust now.

Advice: How loose is the soil?

Me: Its loose down at least 8 inches

Advice: You need to smooth out the surface and break up those dirt clots so you get good seed to soil contact. You should also try and compact the soil so you will get an even planting depth.

Me: What about freezing?

Advice: Look at the future weather forecast. You want to get the alfalfa in the ground, have it rained on and grow three leaves before you get a hard frost.

Me: So a killing frost were it has a solid freeze?

Advice: yes. Do you have a seeder?

Me: No, we sold them last year. They were old and I had no clue how to use them or fix them.

This continued on for about 15 minutes. There are days I really wish my Father in law was still around. I could have learned so much more instead of trial and error.

All of this convinced me that getting seed in the ground soon is necessary. To achieve this goal I took the tractor out and and hooked up an old drag I found in the barn made out of three old 2×12 boards bolted to a 18 inch piece of steel with two hooks on each side. I drug that around behind the tractor for five hours. This did help but now I have a smoother field with definite hills. I need a couple more pieces of equipment to smooth out the field and compact it down. I also had five hours to think about $3500 in alfalfa seed. I have come up with a new plan. I am going to still smooth and compact down the two fields I have been working on. I am going to rent a seeder for my tractor and plant pasture grass on those 14 acres this fall. I will make this my only priority until it is done. Then I am going to disc up the upper little 7 acre patch and leave it alone. In the spring I will spray it down a couple of times until I can get in the field and work it smooth. I will then rent a seeder and plant it in Roundup ready alfalfa. We probably won’t get a crop off it but it won’t die either. Then we can talk about putting one more field into alfalfa the following year. If the grass does well we may not plant another alfalfa field. This is safer and if I lose the grass over the winter it will be a lot less hit to the pocket book.

If anyone knows when we are going to get a nice soaking rain and when the killing frost is coming please let me know.

I also need to pickup the 10 ton of hay and get it loaded into the machine shop sometime also. All of this will be done by hand.

I also start evening welding classes in two weeks on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. These are very necessary as I have a 20 foot hay elevator that needs some welding repairs to make it functional. Not to mention the horseshoe fence I want to make. I am on the search for 3-5K horseshoes if anyone has any leads. I will pay better tonnage than the scrap metal places. Please keep the horseshoe fence on the down low, Annmarie is still not convinced it is a great idea. I keep telling her that she just cannot see my artistic vision. She was against the wheel fence out by the main cattle guard initially when I first wanted to do it.

Who is a bully?

Steve Hardin1 Comment

I had been watching the Asian pear tree fruit ripen.  The fruit was excellent last year and I had been looking forward to it this year.  Yesterday, when I went out to move the sprinkler I noticed the tree was covered in yellow jackets. The fruit was being eaten down to the core while hanging on the tree.  I did not want to share with the stinging predators so I stripped the entire tree.  The fruit is a little green but it is still pretty sweet.   I put a bunch of the fruit in the kitchen window to turn yellow.  Next year I am going to have to do something about the insects.  I will set out traps for the yellow jackets.  Our plum tree has some horrible leaf curl and all the fruit fell off, I would like some plums next year.  

When we were on vacation I brought home some new plants!  I got all the cactus starts planted and I hope they take. This plant is very cool, when it gets large it sheds little pieces of itself like worms coming out of the ground.  I will be happy with even a single plant.  I spent Monday morning repotting lots of plants.  I trimmed all my house plants and in general played on the breeze porch.  I even just sat in the rocking chair and listened to my book on tape for about an hour.  After lunch I spent about two hours working on the dog tag stamping machine.  I think I am going to have to move it from the breeze porch into our bedroom.  I have some new surface rust on it and I believe the water evaporating from the plants is increasing the humidity.  I am going to make a plastic cover for it and put some desiccant under it so it is as dry as possible.  I just need to get the sewing machine moved downstairs into the craft room then I can fit the dog tag machine in the corner of our bedroom.  What do you have in your bedroom?  I have a manly dog tag machine, 300# of cast iron steel, designed to cause permanent letters into a metal disc!  Doesn’t get much more manly than that, it will go well with the handmade quilt and cross stitch sampler on the wall. 

Yesterday evening Annmarie hollered at dinner time that the alpaca were picking on one of the other alpaca.  This is a daily problem, but she insisted it was way worse than normal.  I told her to let the border collies out of the yard to break up the fight.  The alpaca did not want to give up on the fight and just chased the dogs away.  We had to go out and the alpaca still did not want to give up the fight.  Annmarie had to literally chase the bullies away and keep after it as they kept coming back to get in more licks on the injured alpaca.  The weird part about this is we had them kill a black alpaca two years ago.  The three white alpaca kept after it until they finally killed it.  This time the victim was a white alpaca  When we went out there were four alpaca on top of it pinning it to the ground.  Once we got everyone off of it we determined it was still alive.  We tried to help it stand but it would not move and could hardly lift its head.  I ended up dragging it about 40 feet by its back legs until we got into the barn lot and through a gate.  It was moving a little more after the drag but still not very active.  Annmarie brought a bucket of water and set it right next to the injured animal.  I was hopeful that it would just rest up and be okay.  We had already decided to move it in with the sheep herd so it would have non alpaca companions.  This morning when I went to work it was standing up and was in the corral looking around, when I came home this evening it was dead.  I suspect it was a lactic acid buildup and just too much depression.  It lost the will to live.  So I had to load it up into the tractor bucket and take it up to the boneyard. This is why we have a boneyard.  Annmarie is not happy with the alpaca.  This is why people should castrate their alpaca prior to six months old.  Everyone thinks their boys will be fabulous studs but that is just not the case in most instances.  You end up with herds of testosterone laden males just itching for a fight.  

Here are the guilty parties who killed our alpaca.  They would not leave the gate were we separated off the injured party.  They were still there in the morning watching him through the gate and fencing.  Don’t be fooled by the cute faces, they are bullies and killers.   Continue reading →