Fencing with a vengeance again.  I am now working on the fence that splits the lower pasture.  There is a wobbly 2 strand fence with a few marginal rock jacks and some wooden stays there now.  Yesterday, I drove in steel posts along the bottom.  It is nice soil so it wasn’t too bad.  I started up the rocky hillside and only managed to get 1.5 posts into the ground.  It was awful.  It was over 100 degrees by 1030 in the morning so I just quit.  Last night I went out with my nephew near dark and we pounded in the rest of the steel posts all the way up the hillside!  I was very happy that we got posts in the ground all the way up the hill.  Another week of this hot weather and even with two people we would not have gotten the posts to drive into the ground.  I will have to turn three rock cribs so they are out of the way of the fence and rebuild one rock crib.  After those are done I can start stretching wire.  Yesterday we rolled out woven wire alongside the new fence line so I will just have to lean it up and stretch it.  I use three fence tighteners at once on the woven wire and it works pretty slick.  Unfortunately, I ended up with 7 blisters after an hour of fence pole driving.  My calluses are obviously gone.  I had to pop the blisters this morning so I would be ready for work.  My goal is to get this section done and then I just have two small sections and I can turn the sheep loose.  Once they gain access to this new section we will not run out of pasture for the rest of the summer.   We will even be able to run the cows in this lower section without fear of anyone escaping or running out of food.  

Annmarie had suggested (strongly) that I make some progress on something outside.  Since it is over 100 degrees the water pump seemed like a priority. I needed to set a couple of concrete blocks on either side of the front creek, dig out the creek, fix the pump inlet pipe, run power to pump.  All this seems simple but nothing is simple on the farm.  

The creek is starting to fill in with vegetation and still has a nice layer of cow mud on the bottom.  I got the blocks set in either side and the board some what level.  I dug out the mud with a shovel then by hand.  I drug the pump over and changed out the suction pipe.  The original was too long.  I got that fixed and set the pump up in it’s new home.  The inlet was sitting down next to the mud, so I went and got an old clay pot to put under the inlet.  I have several old nonfunctioning extension cords that I have been saving.  I checked it with the voltmeter (had to change the battery in the voltmeter first) and then drug it out to the pump.  It was long enough to reach (I forgot to check first) and I wired the motor, plugged it in after I primed the pump and got nothing.  I then had to check the relay, it works and come to the conclusion that the pump is not moving.   I unhooked every thing and drug it back up to the pickup so I can take it to town and get it fixed.

 

The back creek is almost dry.  By the end of the week it will be dried up.  No more snowmelt/rainfall fed stream till next year.  All the more reason to get the irrigation pump working.  

The tractor is going to make me a mechanic yet.  My nephew stated that the bucket on the tractor is not working again.  He got about 5 hours of use out of it before it died.  I am sure it is the quick disconnect.  I must have damaged it and under pressure it slips apart just enough to shut off the fluid flow but it still looks connected.  My solution is definitely farmer inspired, I just swapped the raising and lowering connections.  It worked today but I didn’t do any heavy lifting with the bucket.   I scraped the gravel road and leveled the area in front of our house.  I did the circle down at my in-law’s house but I need to finish leveling it off.   It looked a little rough when I drove by it to go to work.  

My nephew did use the tractor this evening to finish moving the  straw from the barn floor and the bucket was still working.  So my fix may work.  I went inside and looked at the buckled barn floor.  I am not certain if it is from the barn shifting or me not screwing that portion of the floor down.  I won’t know until I start pulling the boards up and look for screw holes.  I figure four hours to fix it.  It took 20 hours of manual/tractor labor to clean out the barn and move all the straw to a separate pile ($200 labor).  

Sarah started on the rock wall today!  It will take her a while to get it done, I am not sure it will be done in two weeks.  I told her her she will have to dig a little deeper to expose the wall.   I called Premier fencing to check up on our adult sheep sling so we can weigh the sheep.  I ordered it in April, but the lady said they still had backorders from February so she was unable to guarantee that I would get a sling in the next shipment. She said they just cannot seem to get enough made to meet demand. 

 

It finally quite raining long enough for me to go out and work on the tractor.  First thing I had to do was give it a bath and get all the mud off of it from the irrigation ditch.  I used actual warm water and soap plus much high pressure water and pulling of weeds and grass from various crevices.  Once the tractor was clean I discovered that did not fix the problem.  Dirt was not holding my bucket arm down and causing it to creep up at a subpar snail pace.  I then concluded that it was the control valve and it just needed a little adjustment (I hate being a mechanic).  I attempted to get a wrench into a small gap under the seat so I would not have to take any plastic cowlings off.  No go, three nuts and two of them jammed up against the middle one to prevent it from moving.  I had to remove some weird plastic pin/clip things that held the cowlings on (I had to move two not just one), a screwdriver pried them out with some difficulty.  I adjusted the valve and it did not solve my problem.  This necessitated me stooping low to something I don’t usually do, I broke out the manuals and read them cover to cover.  No help troubleshooting my problem.  

Well I have done a little work on the farm in the last week, but with Monica leaving tomorrow we have put off any plans this last week and have just done whatever and some things that needed to be done to get her ready.  I did manage to start some water on the ram pasture.  The sheep ate it down pretty low so we locked everyone off of it and have started to pore on the water in an attempt to get it to bounce back.   I also planted three very little black walnut trees out in the ram pasture.  They were volunteer plants from Grandma Lane’s garden hitchhikers in some imported compost. I will need to encase all three plants in a wire fence to keep the sheep/horses/cows/deer away from them for the next five years at least.  I have some time with the animal restriction in place before it has to be done.    I have a couple more wild roses to encircle and two small trees out by the grain bins.

I struck out on the sheep again.  I had a buyer on the hook for 20+ sheep but she backed out.  So now we are back to the drawing board.  We have three sold for meat and we will be eating three more.  That gives me five more months to find buyers for the rest of this years babies.  I am going to expand our craigslist add to the tricities and see if that doesn’t help.

I had decided the pastures are drying up so they need some water.  Passive irrigation is my favorite way to water.  Of course this involves lots of manual labor, hard manual labor.  I decided the lower pasture needed to have the irrigation ditch redone.  I fired up the tractor and started to drag the ditch with the box blade.  I spent one day dragging the ditch and then tried to scoop out the ditch near the concrete weir.  The ditch walls got washed away years ago when the back creek got dammed up and jumped to the front creek.  Their was too much water to contain and it washed out the western side of the ditch.  This created a huge swamp!  I cannot drive the tractor out due to it sinking.  The plan was to try and get the most water back into a channel so the swamp will dry out.  Once it dries out I can maneuver the tractor into place and hopefully finish the ditch.  Today I went out and hand dug the ditch.  The channels were off by five feet so I had to hand dig the connecting ditch.  Digging ditches sucks a lot!  All those people that pay for working out need to come to our house.  I can provide a maximum effort workout with some constructive output for free!  I ended up jumping into the water and grabbing the weeds and throwing them to one side to clear the channel.  By the time I was done I could hardly move my legs or arms.  On a plus side, when I went out a few hours later to take pictures the water had made it all the way down to the horse fence.  I had ended my ditch at that exact fence.  It was running into an old flood irrigation path.  In a few weeks I will get back down there and finish the ditch down to the school house.  The water will be able to drain back across the bottoms underground and back into the creek.  No electricity needed. Now if the ditch would just dig itself…

Gannon, Zeke and I put the cows into the pen and dusted them for flies.  Hopefully, they will be happier now.  Zeke had a hard time moving the cows due to the babies.  Everyone kept pawing at the ground and charging him.  We did get the cows into the pen in 15 minutes.