Farm

Name Game

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It’s that time of year again, in the search for cheap help that works hard I have yet again reached out to my neighbors and friends. I have scored another new helper. As is tradition here at Stewart Creek Somethings he needs a name for the blog. The longer I do this the more pressure there is on me to actually pick something good! This pressure could be self induced but it is still there and even before my help arrived I was aware that today was the day I would bestow a new moniker on another fellow individual. I enjoy the permanence of the written word, once the moniker is in play it can never be taken away.

On the proposed work schedule for the day was picking up boulders from the back hillside to line the yard fence so that Zeke cannot dig under the fence. He has to go on the overhead run every day still. Mouse and now Gizmo cannot get out of the front yard. Zeke is a firm believer in making your own exit plan.

The trouble with this plan was on Thursday there was no wind and it was a beautiful day. It was the perfect burn day and I still have a 8 acre field to burn. If I wait much longer then everything will dry out and I will have to wait till next year and I don’t want to do that. Thursday night someone told me it was supposed to rain over the weekend so it was a total do over on the priorities. Zeke was going to have to spend a little longer on the run when we go to work.

The young man came out early, dressed for work, rubber boots, jeans and T shirt and a bottle of water. He only forgot leather gloves but I have come to expect that so I always have extras stashed at the house. We loaded the propane tank into the back of the pickup and went to get more propane. They could not fill it, it kept leaking. Now this is the newer propane tank, I think the gas station needs to fix the washer on their propane nozzle. I was hoping we had enough gas to get the job done. Now this young man was a fire newbie, and had never intentionally set a fire before. I had him run the hose out, gave him the 2 minute safety speech and then had him light the outer edges of the field as I drove around the edge. He walked and started with the torch, I didn’t think about just having him sit on the tailgate. He is young and can use the exercise! We lit the whole outside and then waited 30 minutes and started to light patches here and there. At one point he starts playing with his hair saying how it has “so much body”, and its fluffy. His hair is touching his shoulders, he calls it a mullet (not long enough yet) and I couldn’t take it. I told him the reason his hair was frizzy was because its burnt!! He got too close to the flames and his hair curled up on the ends! Now he wasn’t that close, I kept checking his arm hairs to make sure they were still present every time he got back in the pickup. He finished the day with arm hair and eyebrows intact so it was a stellar day. After the burn revelation he kept playing with his hair and saying how he was going to get a perm. Hence a name was born, “Perm boy”.

Perm boy and I burned along the creek, burned a stand of blackberries that really took off, we lit two piles of dead trees that had been there for years and we lit all the old patches of hay on the ground! We even burned up a broken hay bale over by the grain bins! I almost drove up on the hill and burned the old old fallen down barn but it still has a lot of dead tall grass all around it and I didn’t want that to get away. I need to get the sheep in there first and eat it all down then I can safely burn the broken up board pile that has not been a barn for 40 plus years.

Blackberries burning are pretty hot. I went down to look after it went out and discovered that they had totally filled in the entire waterway. I really need to burn out three more patches that are touching the water. If we had had a bad runoff year they would have acted as a dam and caused us problems.

We had an hour to kill before Perm Boy had to leave so we dug out the front creek in the yard by hand. It looks a lot better now. I need to continue this all the way up to the spring. Perm Boy splashed some mud onto his blue jeans and had a slight panic about them not ever getting clean again. We had the its only mud speech. At one point we had a discussion about the large dent in the door of his pickup and how to get it mostly out easily and quickly. I told him it added character to the rig. Besides every dent in my pickup was put in it by various teenagers at one time or another. He informed me that he would never put a dent in it, strong words from someone who just got his drivers license two days ago.

We got a lot done, I am going to spend the weekend discing the field so I can then start spraying weeds. Perm Boy did good, I asked him back as we still need to get rocks so Zeke can come off the run.

Another baby

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Thursday we were lamb bombed again! Annmarie went outside to go to work and heard the tell tale mewling of a newborn lamb. We had moved the sheep over to the orchard to eat down the grass. We have been rotating them to eat down various fields. We are currently rotating them between the ram pasture, the orchard, the back hillside and the barn lot. As soon as the orchard is eaten down we will be moving them back to the barn lot. It is already six inches tall!

There was a brand new baby lamb over by the yard fence all alone. All the sheep were at the other end of orchard. The lamb was covered in mucus as it looks like someone just squeezed and dropped. Annmarie had to be in to work for a meeting so she wrapped the lamb in a towel and put it in a small cardboard box in front of the propane stove. It needed to get warm. I was finishing my shower and then I would be on lamb duty. I made up a bottle and sent a text to our bummer adopter. She was willing to meet me in Pendleton so I just loaded the lamb up in the cardboard box and transported it into our rendezvous point in my car. I never even checked to see what gender it was, not that it mattered but it was still pretty slimy despite me using an entire dry towel on it and a second one.

My mother had some lilac bushes torn out of one of her rentals and I am going to try and transplant them. I am not sure if they will take but dropping them into the creek has snapped a few of them back to life. This makes me very hopeful that they will survive. The hard part now is finding a spot where the animals won’t eat the plants while they are trying to grow!

We are looking at starting our own hydroponics inside the house. This lettuce scare with everyone catching Ecoli is making us leary of bagged salad. We are getting serious about the greenhouse but unfortunately that is going to have to wait until next year. The bull pen is eating up this years greenhouse money.

Getting there

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Sunday was catch up day. I had big plans for the trim but we really needed to work the sheep. I stayed home while Annmarie went to church (this happens a lot) and I busted out one more window, the largest window in our house. Annmarie came home with the great news that Sarah was going to come out and help with the sheep.

We needed to count the sheep as we had no clue how many there were. We also needed to get a count for how many we were going to need to sell come summer. Plus we still had to tag and band the stragglers from the last two months of random births. We rearranged the barn panels and ran the sheep into the barn. The sheep were pushed down the chute. I like to just wade in and randomly catch the babies but this is stressful on the sheep and I don’t get to do the catching. I sit down on my kiester and have the babies brought to me. I do the tagging and banding. I am the only one with a strong enough grip to hold the banding pliers open and to punch in the ear tags. I have a secret thought that no one else wants to torture the baby lambs but the banding pliers are very hard to hold open and you cannot let them go until everything is correct and there are 2 peanuts on the right side or it doesn’t work! It can be hard to hold open if it takes any time to fish around for the second testical.

We have 100 sheep exactly! We need to sell 40 lambs this summer and hopefully will get another 25 ewes this summer also. Each mother generates on average 1.5 lambs/year. So with 85 ewes we will make 255 lambs every 2 years or 127 lambs/year. We are going to hold off on getting another ram until all the ewes have had babies. There are still a few that are pregnant. We want everyone to get on the same cycle so that all babies will come in a single month. At least all born within a two month period, not constantly trickling all year long.

I have started digging fence post holes in the barn lot for the ram and bull enclosure. I have called the custom wood mill in Reith and will be purchasing some tamarack 2x8x16 foot rough cut lumber to use inside the enclosure. This is the hardest native wood we have in the area and they only do 2 runs a year for this express purpose- corrals. I also managed to get 50 boards of 1×12 x16 foot rough cut boards to finish the siding repairs on the barn. Again I called at the perfect time as they had cut the boards just not run them through the dryer yet. I will be picking those up next week.

I am done with all three windows in the living room and dining room! Unfortunately, I ran out of caulk! I had 18 tubes and used up 17. I ordered 20 more tubes from Amazon and will work on the floor trim when they arrive. I know, Amazon is the killer of local businesses but I waste hours going to those stores and they never have enough as I want more than a few at a time. Its a trade off and Amazon has been good to us so far. I am getting so many boxes now that I am having to burn them on a semi regular basis now.

We have another barn kitty getting used to the place in the barn kennel. We had one die but have seen several around the place. Not sure why the one died.

We also may have a pack rat in the barn! No one has seen it but we are starting to find hordes of nesting material in quantities that mice cannot form. I sure hope not as they are hard to catch and can be very destructive.

Window trim mania

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One of the first things to do is get stuff ready. I spent part of Friday and Saturday getting all the tools ready for work. I added wings onto my radial arm saw so that I could cut the L shaped cutouts on the sill plates. Then I had to add a support arm past my table saw so as I ripped boards down they would be able to rest on something. I just clamped a piece of scrap from our furniture project across the end of the porch. I had to clamp my featherboard onto the table saw also. I wish I had some 2×8 board glued to the underside of my table to make clamping to the table easier. I may have to do something like that soon.

I managed to get one window done. I need to level the sill front to back a little better on the other windows. I am installing the sill, then but both inside upright pieces and the top inside piece. This lets me rest the top piece on the sides while I then set the reveal on both sides and staple them in. I use cedar shims always around doors and windows. I run a small bead of caulk on the end of each board so it sticks to the window. I know this makes window replacement very hard, but it really seals the building from stray breezes and bugs. The BUGS are the important reason to do it! I am then taking 100% silicone and sealing the backside of each board to the window frame. This is taking way more caulk than I anticipated. I am making sure to get a nice seal but in some places I am filling a 1″ gap. Yes I know I should have gotten some of that foam core rope to fill the area first but I didn’t do that. I also am hesitant to use that spray in foam insulation, even the low expanding stuff. It puts a lot of pressure on the window and I have screwed up door frames with the stuff and don’t want to mess up the window.

The pattern we used for the window frames is the original one from the house. It was still in place upstairs and we have duplicated it throughout the house. The only place we are deviating from it is the window at the bottom of the stairs and above it. I don’t want to fall down the stairs and hit my head on the corner of the window sill plate. So we are doing a flush mount with square pieces in all four corners. That way when I fall down the stairs it will be the landing that gets me not the fall. Annmarie was super happy that the trim is going in. I will be doing a bug audit to see if it helps cut down on the inside critters.

Desire

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On Friday I had to go fix fence again. On Thursday the neighbor moved his cows into the pen directly across the road from our property. This means our bull can see a hundred plus cows across the road and starts to immediately think like a teenage boy. I noticed the cows on my way home and vowed to not work on our window trim but to instead fix the fence. Usually, the bull gets out every year at this time. We had noticed a weak spot in the fence a couple of months ago and I had vowed to Annmarie that I would fix it before the bull got out this year. Its in an awkward spot and there is a huge wild rose bush that has enveloped the fence in the way. The only real way to fix this section is to cut out the rosebush and rebuild this entire section. I don’t want to do that, so I plugged the hole with a 16 foot cow panel. I had brought a few more tools but no T post driver. I needed the driver. I ended up having to fix the entire fence all the way up to the gate on top. I put in new staples and Tpost clips where the bull had popped them loose. I added about 8 new wooden stays from scrap on the ground and my scrap pile. Eventually, there will be no more scrap piles laying around. I keep bringing the junk together and throwing it away, recycling it or burning it to clean up areas. This took me all morning long and put me way behind on the trim plan.

Before I could get started on the trim I had to install a couple of extenders onto my radial arm saw stand. When I went to cut the sill pieces I realized I only needed to cut a corner out of them and they would have to be way put away from the saw blade for that to happen. To make that possible I had to add extenders to each side. Its not permanent but I am going to leave it in place until all the trim is installed.

I managed to get all three large windows bottom sill plates installed on Friday. My goal is to use silicone to seal the boards against the window and then fill all the air gap behind the boards with more caulk to make them 100% sealed. This will stop the cold air but more importantly we are hoping it will stop the bugs! There are certain times in the year that they get out of control. This happens to be one of them. It is highly annoying to have bugs everywhere. Annmarie was very happy with the progress.