Farm

Auction day

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I got called into work on Friday night and managed to get out before midnight. As I was sitting in my car contemplating driving home I decided to read the paper and spotted a college farm surplus auction the next day at the local community college. I convinced Annmarie we should go in the morning, I think she really just wanted to go back to sleep. My argument was that by the time I paid someone to help me build a bull corral we could have just bought most of the panels at the auction for cheap. My only real fail in this thought process was that other people would think the same thing. We transferred money over into the checking account and drove the pickup and trailer into the auction on the off chance we would score lots of stuff. Unfortunately a lot of people came for the same thing we did. This made the bidding for some of the gates and panels steep. We had to bail on several gates and panels as they just sold for too much. We did score on the metal T fence posts and ended up getting over a 100 at only $1/each. I usually pay $2/each at the junk yard. We ended up with 244 lineal feet of panels, three corner horse feeders, 100 + T posts and a heavy duty welding table and vice. I wanted to get the welding table repaired from the machine shop but for $25 I got a much heavier table and another vice, which is way cheaper than I would have paid to repair the old. Annmarie got me signed up for the evening welding class this fall at BMCC , two nights a week. I am really looking forward to it as I am going to build our custom metal railings and back yard fence. I will just buy the material and weld it together myself.

The only real trouble with this is we stood around on the hot pavement in the sun for over five hours then loaded heavy panels onto the trailer and realized that this would not be a one trip show. When we got home I had muscles help me unload and then we went to get the second load. It filled the trailer and the pickup again. This time when we got home we unloaded and built a section of fence for the bull corral out of panels. We built it over the rock bluff portion of the enclosure. This is going to work out very nice. I will still need to build several rock cribs but it will be much faster than trying to dig into the rock. I have 2000 lf of 2×6 tamarack to pick up from the wood mill and 800 bf of 1×12″x16′ for the barn siding. I plan on doin this on Friday.

Mr Experience kept on working on floor trim while we did the outside work. I had a coworker come out and borrow my disc set. It went onto my trailer with some difficulty but it got easier after Annmarie made me remove the 400# of iron weights from on top of the discs!

Annmarie and I had to go get our bull from the neighbors place. He keeps sneaking over there to say high to the heifers. Unbeknownst to us he has had already been over visiting three times before we found out. The neighbor had been pushing him back through the culvert to our side of the road.

He was at the top of the hill and would not budge for Annmarie. We were going to push him down to the road then across it and over through a gate and into our property. He had other plans, first of which was not moving for any human being. He was a despondent rejected bull and he was not going any where. I had to drive back and use both dogs to get him moving. He ran right for the panel that was covering the culvert from the opposite side. I ended up wading into the creek and lifting the panel. Annmarie swore he would not go by with me standing so close to the opening. Once he figured out I was opening the gate he went right around me. I had brought some tools and extra 1/4 inch cable to install across our side of the culvert and then weave it into the panel in an attempt to keep the bull on our side of the fence. This whole process took about an hour to get completed. The best part of this was when we held the barb wire apart and told Zeke to jump and he popped between the wires but Mouse did the same thing with some encouragement. This was a first for him and he loaded up into the back of the pickup by himself and stayed in the back of the pickup! All of these are great accomplishments for a working dog.

If you look closely you can see the wall for the bull enclosure going up. I will need to set at least 3 rock cribs in place to hold the fence in place.

I am going to keep having Mr Experience and muscles come out and work on trim. Muscles stacked some loose wood in the barn and greased the tractor and fixed my truck exhaust also. I took him up on his offer to fix things. I even ordered new blades for the mower and as soon as they arrive I will have him install them also.

Just a little trim…

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I was trying to get everything ready for my help that was coming on Thursday afternoon early in the week. I had done the trim on the air return and figured I better stain it ASAP. Unfortunately, I waited until the last minute and had to stain it Tuesday morning before work. Since Annmarie is gone there are fewer rules so as I am staining the return in my underwear, it was morning. I had made a slight spill around the top of the stain gallon can and went to hammer the lid on, oh my, the stain splattered everywhere! I got it all off of the floor and missed some on the wall which is going to cause some touch up to happen. This splash was noticed after the stain had already dried. My second attempt to close the lid on the stain involved dropping a cloth over it to catch the splashes and still pounding the lid on. It had more mess to offer but i refused to accept it.

I finished it but had to leave it in the house due to the weather. It was supposed to rain. I left the front and back doors open in the hope that a breeze would remove the smell. My cross breeze idea seemed to work wonders as the smell was almost gone by the time I got home. Annmarie did not care as she was sleeping off her Washington DC flight and time change.

The air return turned out very nice! Most people will hardly notice it now. I do believe this or its just a justification for putting in many long hours creating a custom piece to hide an ugly air return in our main living space.

Thursday, Mr Experience came out to help me with the trim. He brought a helper that is going to help him this summer with roofing two houses. I will now and forever call him Muscles. Since I was late getting home, Mr Experience had Muscles mow the lawn! Best thing that could of happened this month. They even had to reassemble the gas line and get it going. I let it air dry out after the diesel fiasco. He finished the lawn then started weed eating, this is so nice! Eventually, he let me know that he had a mind and liked to tinker with stuff.

Mr Experience and I worked on floor trim on Thursday. We decided on a 45 degree angle on the quarter round as I did not want to catch my pinky toe on the edge of the trim. Annmarie thinks its for cosmetic reasons.

Kinda working

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I did do some work yesterday and a lot of online shopping. I love Craigslist and am starting to like Facebook Classifieds also. I am always on the lookout for fencing material as I am constantly running out of it. We just found a ram on the Facebook classifieds and I found this cool chest yesterday. The best part was it was in Pilot Rock. I put in an offer on some fence gates early in the morning but was unwilling to pay what they wanted. I stockpile extra gates as I always need them so I can wait for the right price. I managed to get this wonderful trunk in the early afternoon and went to pick it up. I am always amazed by small towns. the lady selling it knew Annmarie’s grandparents on both sides and her daughter used to maintain Jim and Ruby’s lawn and garden while they did their summer Oklahoma pilgrimage. She offered me some flower planting’s from Iris’s old flower garden that she took over 30 years ago! So I will make arrangements to get some transplants this summer.

I take some of my best pictures accidentally! I was fumbling with my phone camera trying to get shots of the trunk to send to Annmarie, as she is in Washington, DC for MathCounts. I snapped this beauty below and decided that it was a keeper!!

I also managed to glue and nail on the trim for the air return register. All those pegs are covering up a screw hole. I countersunk the screws so I could put a dowel in the hole and cover them up. I just filled the top of the screw with glue and pounded in the dowels. This caused glue to ooze out around the dowel. I glued all the oak trim pieces and then used air gun to nail them in place. Since it was just trim I did not clamp them on after I did the glue and nails. I figured that the glue and nails was sufficient to hold the trim in place. I wanted to give this 24 hours to dry before messing with it. I would like to get it done and stained before Annmarie comes home. It will stink when I stain it and with this weather I need to do it inside the house.

I managed to snag 7 panels 8.5 feet by 3 feet for the barn. We need another portable wall inside to allow us to give the mothers more room to be with their newborn babies. I really need to add 10 feet to the front of the barn and hook it over the L shaped area that is unused on the other side of the tack room. I have not done this yet and will not have time this year. Next year I want to do the greenhouse so the addition is a couple of years away.

The lady from the morning messaged me and said they would take the price I was offering. I offered to get them today. Nope, they wanted them gone on Saturday. This I do not understand as all things take time to sell. But I offered to meet them in Pendleton, then her husband blew out a tire by Echo, I ended up driving to hermiston, getting gas and having to drive back to the broken pickup. I was able to make the transaction in the dark, on a side road off the highway. Not the most ideal circumstances I agree. I texted a buddy to call me back and my location before getting out of the vehicle and I had the killer attack dog Gizmo with me. He stayed in the pickup keeping warm. I follow the same rules for craigslist, always carry cash and always go armed. Smart meeting places cover most of the problems but weird stuff happens. I have met some very nice people buying on the internet, very few bad experiences. It gives me faith in mankind.

One of the gates will be used inside the barn. I think I can build what I need for about $400 versus the $1500 in panels I was going to have to buy. It won’t look as pretty but it will be very functional and the sheep are pretty easy to please.

Today I got the air return all sanded and ready to stain. I have a hard time getting the dust off of a project and ended up taking a very damp rag and wiping everything down to get the last little bit of dust. This looks great and I totally want to get it stained. I just need to wait a few hours to make sure there is no leftover water on the project. I suspect if I was shooting for a satin smooth finish I could not use a damp cloth as it would cause the wood fibers to lift.

Birds are here

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Life is happening every day around us. We keep seeing more and more birds and are now pretty sure that this pair of ducks have been coming back for several years. I spotted them up the creek last week when I was discing and Annmarie saw them down by the house the other day. If I can get the shallow ponds dug this summer I may line a 8×12 foot section of bottom in the lowest spot with a pond liner. This should act as a very durable weed barrier and allow a small open spot of water to be visible in the spring in both ponds which will hopefully entice the ducks into nesting.

We looked at the spring head again yesterday and the watercress is starting to fill up the waterway again. I have to pull it out several times a year. I think that two domestic geese are our answer. I don’t want ducks as they are not tough enough. I think the geese will survive the predator attacks better. Unfortunately, I don’t want super mean geese that bum rush us whenever they see us. So far I have only found one pair that someone is willing to part with and they are super aggressive. I don’t want them chasing the sheep or cows. So maybe next year I raise my own.

We had not seen the quail in a few months and were afraid that they might have all gotten eaten. But yesterday Annmarie spotted them on the back hillside. Hopefully this year we get the quail back in droves. We only usually have one to two coveys on the place. This is why my mother-in-law doesn’t want the hunters to shoot quail. The pheasants are like weeds, no matter what we do they come back and are plentiful. Eventually, when I run out of tasks and hobbies I would like to contact the ODFW and try and get a remote setup to raise quail with minimal human interaction so they are wild and turn them loose on the property. I am going to start putting cow panels around the rose bushes in an attempt to create more habitat.

Annmarie spotted five barn owls on her 2 mile drive home yesterday. We have lots of hawks of different varieties but the owls are usually an occasional sighting phenomenon. We only see our great horned owl every few months now that it has moved down to the schoolhouse. There used to be a mated pair but we have not seen them together in years and I am not a birder, they all look alike to me.

We are also now seriously talking about a large subterranean greenhouse heated by passive solar energy. All these food scares and bacteria outbreaks really make you conscious of the food chain. The shorter the chain the better.

Now that the weather is changing the working dogs have started to get overheated. An hour out working the animals and they start wandering over to the creek to lay in it, drinking is secondary to immersing their bodies. Last year we shaved them and they did great all summer. They were much more comfortable and worked better for us. Sarah shaved them for us last week and they are getting used to it. Mouse thinks the process is humiliating and hides for a day or two afterwards. They both look kinda funny for about six weeks until they get a little hair back. It also makes it much easier for us to find ticks on them. This wet weather has caused the ticks to come out of hiding and we have found three already. Gizmo is taking his cues from the big dogs. I make them wait and sit before they can have food and he so wants to come eat but he keeps looking sideways at the other two and they are holding still so he waits.

We sent out a deposit on a new ram for out flock today! We figured that May was our six month mark and we should be safe to get a new ram. Yesterday during our walk around we spotted as brand new baby lamb born hours earlier, they just keep coming!! We are going to get a full blooded Katahdin ram this time. He has good genetics and the breeders are doing genetic culling and comparing them in a national database for growth and disease traits. Way more work than we want to do but so handy for us to look at when choosing a new ram. If this guy works out good for us we may keep him for several years and use that farm in the future. Here at Muttville Central we want happy healthy animals that are super self reliant. This is a harder task than you might imagine as the industry has bred self reliability out of a large portion of the breeds in an attempt to concentrate on size, growth rate or fat marbling. We are looking at disease resistance, ease of birthing, twins, growth rate, size and ease of handling for us these characteristics determine how many animals we can raise and how well they do.

This is why we have a mix of three main crosses, Katahdin, Barbados Blackbelly and Dorper. There are certain characteristics of each breed we like and we keep mixing in different rams and keeping the sheep that meet our above requirements. Its working well for us. We don’t vaccinate, we worm every 1-2 years as a precaution. We have never had any type of infection go through the herd that killed any animals. We had ORP, basically a oral herpetic type disease, go through a couple of times it came in on some sheep we purchased. That is it, no other problems in 8 years. We totally attribute this to our low bioload. The animals have so much pasture to roam on that they just don’t sit in one place and live. This also accounts for why our animals are such good grazers. We also allow the animals access to shelter year around and in the winter we lock them up in the barn every night. The barn gets dug out every year and fresh straw laid down throughout the winter. Now that we have upped our barn cat population I have not seen a single rodent in the barn!

Alone time

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Now that the easy part was done and the field is burned off it needs to be disced. My little tractor can just pull a double set of four foot discs. It doesn’t like to do it and I have to use four wheel drive and if the ground is too wet I cannot get enough traction to pull the discs. The field was a little wet but I managed to get it done over the course of two days. I always have something else to do on the way to pull the discs. I stopped on Saturday and pushed the burn piles together with the tractor and got one end of the double downed trees burning again. I hope they burn up the entire tree but I am not holding my breath. All the extra limbs are now on fire so it should be pretty easy to work around. I then went and dug the front ditch out for another 25 feet in the upper prime pasture. If I don’t clean it out it starts to grow in and spread out. It was also eroding the ground behind the large blackberry bushes and I just about could not get the tractor past. I am using the dirt from the ditch to backfill a new passage by the blackberry bush. I looked at the upper prime squared pasture and it needs some more ditch work. My initial digging is helping but I need to extend it out and dig a new exit channel, but I had already messed around long enough so I hooked up the disc and started to drag it around the field. I also made a vow to pick up every single rock I found. I had an offer from a friend to bring in a big piece of equipment that would smooth out the entire ground. The trick is rocks are a killer on this machine so I vowed to pick them all up! I just tipped the front bucket upwards and every time I spotted a big rock I jumped off and threw it in the bucket. There were not very many rocks, I bet I got less than ten in the few hours I went in circles.

There were lots of voles and mice throughout the entire field. I almost regretted not bringing the dogs as they love killing them, but they eat every one and after 15 or so each they get some very smelly farts. So I left them in the yard, knowing that Zeke was off the run and hoping he would stay put. I kept spotting various wildlife but I never could get a picture! I chased up a vole and this hawk swooped down out of the sky, snatched it and landed on a nearby wooden fence post. I watched that bird for almost a minute before deciding it would stay put for a picture, as soon as I reached for my phone it flew away, vole clutched in its talon.

I spotted a four foot bull snake partially in a vole hole, again I stopped the mistress and watched for 30 seconds then reached for my camera. The picture above with no snake but various vole holes was taken 2 seconds after it disappeared down the left most hole.

I spotted various baby killdeer running around and had to stop once to let them get out of the way. I really wanted to get that ash layer down into the dirt before it rained so it could get absorbed into the soil and not washed or blown away.

I was circling around and suddenly a hawk jumped off the ground on the far end of the field. I looked over and spotted a nest with eggs! So I skirted around the nest and left a patch of grass and weeds for the hawk and its nest.

The amazing part of this is driving the tractor is a very good core workout. I hear the scoffing now but try to stay on the seat with the tractor bouncing around and trying to throw you off constantly. I finally put the seat belt on and tightened it up across my upper thighs but this does not stop you from keeping your stomach and back muscles tightened the entire time.

I disced the far side and was working down near the upper prime pasture end when another hawk jumped out of the grass and there was another nest with eggs! The amazing part of this is we burned the field on Friday but both nests were placed such that fire could not get to them but the birds could see predators coming. I finally ran out of fuel and had to drive back to the house.

I ended up getting more diesel then digging out the barn lot front creek by hand. I will keep digging a small patch at time until I get it cleared all the way up to the spring.

Sunday I did the same thing, as in I procrastinated in going right to the discing portion of the day. I stopped in the upper prime pasture, as there was no fire to play with and started working on my ditch network. I had tried to dig a small pond but there was too much water and it was forming another swamp. I needed to dig a channel connecting the side ditches with the main ditch. I did this then dug the side ditch down and extended it out into the field. I really need to dig out the center of this area as I have dug a horseshoe shaped ditch. I started digging the dirt out of the middle of the horseshoe with my box blade on the tractor but I only got about ten loads out before it got too muddy. Once the tractor tires fill up with mud and the ground turns muddy I cannot use the box blade. This is the seventh year on my original tractor tires. I am going to try and milk them along for another 2 years. It will be an expensive fix to replace all four tires, probably around $1500-2000.

I did manage to get the entire field disced except for the two hawk nesting areas and the upper end where the super wet low spot is located. I have circled the wet area on the picture below. It is probably almost an acre and it is still too wet to work with my light tractor. What I want to do is let it dry out a little more then get in there and drag it down about 18 inches and use that dirt to build up the entire surrounding area to keep it dryer and let a natural swamp occur. The real trouble is it always dries out in the summer which limits the type of plants we can plant. I would like to plant some type of native grass that can survive the wet time and the dry time. I want to place tall “pecker poles”, 2-3 inch wooden posts that are 8 feet tall. These will be easier to see when the alfalfa is planted, therefore allowing us to avoid the damp area with the haying equipment and tractor. I may even put up some bird nests for the red winged blackbirds. I would love to put up bluebird boxes but I have only ever seen one bluebird here, we are too low in elevation.

I started dragging the dirt out of the swamp area but the predicted rain turned into a deluge and I was loosing traction and body heat fast. I stopped long enough to hike up onto the rock bluff to take pictures. Zeke decided that he had enough confinement time and had dug his way under the yard fence and joined me. He did kill lots of vole and mice while he was busy getting covered in mud.

Every time I go up on the hillside and see the old rock wall I want to rebuild it. Since it has taken me multiple years to work on the one behind my house this will have to wait until I win the lottery or a parent needs a summer punishment for their child. The child must not be afraid of snakes and must be able to move 150# rocks. This probably limits my options way more than they were before which was slim to none before the lifting requirements were added.

Next week I attempt to get the yard mower running as I told Perm Boy that the fuel container was in the old wood shed. Turns out he found the only can of diesel not out in the machine shed. I had to drain the gas out today and managed to get the mower to start once and then it died. I put fresh fuel in it after emptying the tank. I also need to spray some weeds! Oh and the trim inside the house needs to be finished. I did no trim this weekend as the field took precedence. I will now be able to spray both fields and then they can sit idle until this fall. I suspect I will need to spray one more time this summer.