The baby lamb is growing and is very fast now, hard to catch the little booger!

Well I spent most of the weekend fencing.  Sarah and I set railroad ties in the orchard on Saturday.  She got sick about 2/3 of the way through.  She is so not used to hard manual labor any more.  I ended up finishing with some help from Annmarie.  We are trying to get Sarah to take her drivers license permit test so she can start driving.  This means she has to practice driving when we are on the farm.  I made her drive the pickup when it was out in the orchard.  The only problem with that is there was an irrigation ditch on one side of us and four foot drop off on the other side.  The pickup needed to be turned around by jockeying it back and forth.  Witch then left her with a drive over a 10 foot culvert and eventually to a 10 foot gate opening.  After much yelling and screaming (partly out of fear for my life and frustration with the amount of time it would take to get the pickup out of the ditch) we did make it out of the orchard.  We had to stop twice so she could finish crying, but she persevered (dad would not let her quit) (and only the front tire went into the ditch while crossing the culvert and she managed to back out) and the pickup doesn’t have any new dents.

Anything not in line with the metal posts will be removed and on the far side a couple more will disappear also.  After the fence is installed I will shorten the posts.

Orchard fence with tie posts installed, they look tall because I have not cut them off, will do that after stringing and tightening the fence.  It is the very last step to the fence construction step.

This is my second attempt at an orchard fence.  The posts are very obtrusive.  They are sticking way up in the air and making an eye sore.  After some discussion it was decided that I need to minimize the number of posts utilized in that fence line but I didn’t know how to do that as I am crossing the irrigation ditch twice.  So my engineer wife came up with a great idea.  I had to install extra posts so that I could cross the irrigation ditch at a ninety degree angle.  I was using boards across the ditch to stiffen the posts and the longest board I have is 16 feet long.  She told me to use a piece of cable and I could then hang wire panels from them.  So I am going to do that.  This will allow me to pull up four posts and I will remove two more from the back side of our people gate.  This will let me remove 6 of the 13 posts.  Great ideas usually never occur in my life on the first or second try.  This is why experience is invaluable, but how do you get experience if you have never done it before?  By doing the same thing over and over until you get it right!  This whole farm thing is one big learning curve.  I am still not over the hump of the bell curve yet.  After I finish the fencing, the bridge and rebuild the barn then I will be at the hump.

So on Sunday, I went up and set the posts for the upper barn lot fence (I need a new name for that area, may start calling it the spring pasture for the spring (water) that surfaces there).  Way more posts, but not as obtrusive as they are very spread out.  I will be installing three gates on that section of fence.  A new gate in the outer fence so that the person leasing the pasture can drive in and out of the pasture without going through the barn lot.  The ruts in the barn lot are over a foot deep now after having had a tractor drug over them.  That new gate will also allow me to tighten the fence.  There was nothing I could pull to as most of the fence is pretty loose.  I needed an anchor point.  After all that fencing is completed I want to put in one small internal fence to separate the barn lot and the spring lot.  This will give us six separate pastures to rotate the sheep and horses through.  Should be plenty of opportunities to keep the animals rotated and the grass happy.

Horses up by the house, they keep trying to stay in pen sized areas.  We are pretty sure they didn’t see a lot of pasture.

Purebred Arabians, they are so tame they come when called like the dogs, sheep, and chickens.  It is incredibly handy.

I finished dragging railroad ties to their future resting homes this morning, did it in the rain.  Annmarie called to have me cancel the rental on the post hole digger.  I vetoed that idea and told her at this rate I would never get anything done and I would just have to work in the rain.  I redrew the plans for our front bridge.  We are going to go with a four foot wide instead of six foot wide.  The six foot wide bridge was going to cost around $3300.  The four foot bridge is going to cost about $2100 who coulda thunk that?  I placed the order for all the bridge supplies today.  So things are looking up.

I rented a post hole digger that is basically a walk behind machine with tracks.  It was amazing!!  I dug 31 holes in three hours and four of those holes were next to the creek and went through 3-6 inch rocks the whole way.  I was ecstatic that I will not have to build a single rock jack this time around.

Sarah and I will set all the posts in the ground tomorrow.  Sunday we will measure the distance and mount the cross pieces then I will be able to tighten the two posts together by myself on Monday.  Hopefully, we could start tightening on Sunday but we have to install almost 20 cross pieces and cross the creek twice. Progress is being made.
I forgot to take more pictures of the horses.  I will try and get Sarah on this tomorrow.  

This is my wounded rooster, he is on the mend!

The weather has conspired against me.  Our yard is over 18 inches tall.  I cannot get a push mower through it due to the rain arriving every other day like clockwork.  Since the Winter was especially hard on everything we just decided today to go old school.  Yup, we locked the sheep up in our yard.  Those 17 critters are staying in the yard until the grass is below 6 inches.  They are already complaining to get out, but they have a job to do and they are not getting out until it is done!

I figure about 6 days to clean up the yard.

See our yard really is tall

I met the horses today.  Amazingly people friendly, I (complete stranger) walked over to the loading pen and they came right over and greeted me and let me pet on them.  Very calm and well mannered.  I was amazed.

More baby chicks arrived today.  I picked up another 25 babies (12 buff orpingtons and 13 Easter eggers (mutts)), so Sarah and I had to dig the baby area out, clean out everything, lay in new bedding and fire up the heat lamp so they would not get cold.  Now if I could only catch whatever is killing my chickens.

I did a nighttime security check after dark, locked and loaded!  I thought I heard something when I was on the computer.  I did not find anything, but my chicken butler is still on the fritz.  I worked on it today, but there is a limit switch that is mounted too low and it keeps blocking the door from falling down.  I emailed tech support tonight so hopefully we can get it worked out soon.  I did lock the coop up manually.

25 three day old baby chicks

This is the weekend for fencing.  I have four more days off work and I already reserved a post hole digger for tomorrow afternoon.  Sarah and I remarked again today as the cows had moved all our flags.  We also placed the gates in the right spot so I drill holes correctly.  I started moving railroad ties to their future homes right before dark.  I just grab 2-3 ties with a chain and use a redneck tractor (pickup) to drag them to their future resting spots.  On a plus note, we did purchase a small tractor (23 hp) for use on the farm with all the implements I would need to get things moving, but it won’t arrive until mid August.  So I am still having to rent a tractor a couple of times this Summer.

Meet Meeka (the gray) and Mahogany (the bay). They are the newest Stewart Creek Somethings.

May report:  I lost $13.06 for the month on an average 26 hens laying (I realize that last month I predicted no more chicken lose due to the Chicken Butler, but I had not counted on the predator ingenuity.  I lost 6 hens last month all in the last two weeks.).  My net income total is $193.53 for the year .  I had $44.28 in expenses for feed (200#) this month (this is probably going to go up in consumption since I have the chickens locked up due to predators).  For the year, my monthly expenses are $108.04 (a decrease of $0.50/month). We collected a total of 429 usable eggs averaging 13.8 eggs/day collected (for the year the average is 13.6 eggs/day).  My productivity for the month was 53% (decreased 13% from last month) (for the year it is 51%).  The chickens ate 0.47# food/egg (a raise from last month probably due to me having to lock the chickens up ) (for the year are averaging 0.56# food/egg).   It cost $0.10/egg or $1.20/doz for feed (my yearly average is $0.13/egg or $1.56/dozen).  My monthly net income is a loss of $38.71/month this year. 


I did make a move in the positive direction (I lost less than last month).  Of course since I just purchased more chicks this month it is going to go more negative again.  I just cannot seem to stay ahead.  I did have a $61.78 expense last month in live traps.  I bought two more and that was a single expense.  I have three live traps set out now all varying sizes from rat size up to raccoon.  My original raccoon size trap is taking a beating.  The predators have bitten holes in it, scratched it up and bent parts of it.  One would thing they don’t appreciate my hospitality or are suddenly blessed with an end of life vision.  So that may not last another couple of years.  


The wife and child are doing some serious horse seeking.  So soon we will have horses…