#stewartcreeksomethings

Predators 8/ Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Friday I went up to field #3 first thing in the morning to attempt to call the coyote in. I am using the new electronic call I got this week. I hung out for about an hour and did not see a single coyote. The quail did not see me as I was hiding behind the cattle feeder. The sheep ran by without seeing me either, yet no coyote showed up. I went down and picked wild blackberries for a little over an hour. I filled all my containers I had brought. I only picked two patches and skipped another three. It was starting to warm up and the hornets like the berries when it gets warm. I went inside and washed them all off and then repacked them into individual bags and froze them. I ended up with 25 snack size bags full. Annmarie uses a single frozen bag every morning in her breakfast smoothie. I try and collect them for her and I will need to collect more in 2 and 4 cup quantities so we can make pie and cobbler throughout the year.

I got all the tools together to go up and work on the fence surrounding field #1. It is a green seven acre field that the sheep and cows need to get into so they can eat for a few more weeks. I had the tractor bucket full of tools and wire and stays to drive up there. Of course I did not take a rifle, there is no place to put it on the tractor, I would have to hold it the entire time. Of course I saw two coyotes running out of field #3 and a dead lamb in the field. They had just killed it and it was almost noon! I dumped off the supplies and went back to the house to get the rifle and call. I spent another three hours trying to call them back and had no luck. We have now decided to lock the sheep into the barn lot and feed them last years hay from the machine shed.

This is honestly a stupid problem. This weekend alone I have spent about 6 hours trying to spot coyotes. Each sheep lost is $100 down the drain. I will keep going out every day until I can kill them. The next evening when I walked up to the find the carcass and hopefully catch someone snacking I had to walk around looking for the carcass. The only thing left after 24 hours was a hide and a spine with a few ribs attached. Nothing else! I of course did not see a coyote.

Sunday I went out to get Annmarie some blackberries for her breakfast, as I froze all the others I had picked. I went out and checked on our thornless berries in the garden. I had to come back inside three times to get more containers. The berries are huge compared to the wild ones. I left some fresh ones for Annmarie and froze another 16 bags. I will need to pick berries again in about four days. I had plans to go up and look for coyotes again but ended up cleaning house instead. Sarah said she would help me shear alpaca after she got done at church. My helpers are gone again for a couple of weeks. So we need to get the alpaca done.

When she got home we rounded up the alpaca and ended up shearing four more in about three hours. The only ones left are the three babies. One of them had crawled down into the ditch and was covered in water so he would not have been easy to shear. We are planning on shearing the rest on Tuesday or Thursday this week to get them all done. Annmarie has been washing the alpaca and is on her second saddle. It is amazingly cleaner when she is done.

My priority now is the fence around field #1, coyotes and finishing the freezer room. I want to store the cleaned and ready to be cleaned alpaca fiber in the freezer room. This will get it out of the house and into one spot. I just have one piece of OSB to install on the wall and it will be ready. Okay, I need to wire five outlets also but that will only take an hour. I can wire the light later. I am pretty sure I stole power from the next room for the overhead light. Basically, I need to get some more stuff done on the old house but it will have to wait until this winter.

Predators 7 / Farm 1

Steve Hardin2 Comments

Mr Rainman came out today and sprayed the orchard. We have to use the backpack sprayer so the trees don’t get damaged and it took two sprayers full to get the entire area done. Once that was done he went out to mow the fields. I asked that he started close to the house and work his way outwards. I figured this was as good a plan as any. If the mower starts a fire at least the short grass will be near our house. There is a water fire extinguisher tank strapped to the forks on the front of the tractor. I don’t anticipate any problems with fire but its better to be safe.

He was in field four when he found the first lamb. It had just been killed, still soft. It had its throat torn and intestines opened up. Most likely a coyote did it. As he kept mowing he discovered a second corpse. All bones and a little hide with an ear tag. Two more sheep dead! This is just the other side of the barn lot. I know the sheep are in every night next to the barn because I keep getting up in the middle of the night when the puppy is barking. I see both groups of sheep as a sea of eyes when I am searching the area for predators. The tractor proceeded to overheat due to the dust filling up the radiator and then he saw only one quail baby. I finally messaged him and asked for some good news and he sent me a picture of a tape measure he found out in the middle of the field while mowing the cheat grass!

The dead sheep are still not enough loss to justify extreme circumstances or the expense of a guard dog, but it is a principle thing. I will be getting up at 0400 on weekends for a while and going up to the pasture and attempting to call in the coyotes. I purchased an electronic call that can be triggered from up to 200 yards away. I can stick the speaker into a patch of blackberries and back off about a 100 yards. I will be able to spot the far hillside, its within 400-500 yards. Not ideal with a 243 but not unreasonable and the whole point of the call is to be patient and let it come closer. I don’t believe we have a den of coyotes on the place this time. Usually, those become self evident when the pups start coming out, they are easy to spot. This one is very cagey and has only been spotted twice on the farm and in different places and not for very long.

I have not managed to spot any more raccoons, possums or skunks during my nightly excursions. I did manage to get some serious uninterrupted sleep this last night. I was so tired after two nights of broken sleep from night patrols that I heard nothing. There was a harvest moon the other night and it was amazingly bright outside.

Front porch now 96% done

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Annmarie has been working on washing and cleaning the alpaca fleece. She uses a bin and some fabric netting. She has washed this single fleece four times and each time she pulls it out of the water the organic matter gets physically picked out. After four times, actual progress is being made. It will have taken a solid 48 hours to get the fleece dry. Annmarie wants to dry this one before she starts in on a second one. She has some medieval looking device that is full of nails that is supposed to align the fibers and help pull out the rest of the organic matter. Getting the fibers all lined up will make a huge difference. Just being clean has made a huge difference. She will sort it directly into a vacuum bag and can work on spinning it when its cold outside. We cover the fiber with the fine netting and fold it under, all around the edges so that the wind cannot blow it away and the birds cannot steal it for nesting material.

Annmarie and I had been discussing my weekend project priorities all week. The alpaca are pretty high on the list but I have someone who has never helped shear coming out next weekend to assist me. It will be a hoot for them. So that is next week. I need to hammer out the fence around two sides of field one so I can turn the animals loose in there next month. This was my preferred choice. Nope, my number one task will be to fix the front porch decking. We did not get the last board screwed in correctly and it is bowed now. Unfortunately, the thought was someone would have to crawl under the porch and army crawl 40 feet through cobwebs, gravel, dirt and yellow jacks to get to the far end of the porch. The real problem is there is a special decking screw for the TREX decking and I know I have some somewhere on the farm I am just unsure where they are. So Mr Rainman and I proceeded to look for said special screws. After about 45 minutes I came to the conclusion that piling stuff in the old house for the last eight months has made a huge mess and I cannot find anything. So we started to throw away trash and put stuff away. After almost one and a half hours cleaning Mr Rainman found them on the shelf we had both already looked at. On a plus, side the old house is a lot cleaner now!

I did not really want to crawl under the porch. It had a lot of spiderwebs and a Yellowjacket nest under there. Unfortunately, the entrance is fairly small. I did not realize how small until Mr Rainman attempted to get in through the opening. I had to lay on my belly with my arms forward and crawls forward using my feet and elbows only. I was only able to move forward about two inches at a time. We had an old long handle to knock down the cobwebs so you did not have to crawl through them. They can be a little overwhelming. I was about ten feet under the porch when we realized that I could not actually scoot the board over from underneath. I had to back out two inches at a time. We were able to pry it from above and get it screwed down. There was dust and cobwebs everywhere so Mr Rainman pressure washed the entire porch and outside furniture while I went and put away tools in the machine shed.

Mr Rainman did some preventative maintenance on the John Deere tractor. We cut down all the sucker trees from the front yard and tossed them over to the sheep as a snack. We started to work on the floor in the new freezer room. I had measured and cut the new floor boards but somehow am off by a bit. The new floor is not quite level. I will need to cut a little piece for two legs of the freezer so it sits level. I am still not sure how I managed to do this. On the plus side I think I can finish the floor and maybe the siding tomorrow. Once that is done we can move the freezers into this room. They should stay a lot more clutter free this way. Once the freezers are in I will see about adding some storage shelves into the space. The space where the freezers are currently will be for the two tool boxes in my future office space. This should open the space up so it can be worked on gradually. The front porch will be done when I finish installing a door to get under the porch. Currently, it’s a crawl way with the horse mounting block stopping the dogs from getting underneath it. I will work on this also! I will, really…

Predators 5 / Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We have been leaving the dogs outside at night this summer. The puppy has been raising Cain some nights but the few times I have gone outside to look, I have not spotted anything. The side effect of the dogs being out is that the sheep from the upper and lower pasture come in next to our yard in the evenings so the puppy can watch and patrol the yard. We have not lost any sheep to a predator since we started doing this, stupidity yes but not a predator. You cannot fix stupid.

We picked some plums from our orchard today. Another side effect of the puppy patrolling the yard is the deer are not coming in near the house. Every piece of fruit in the orchard is untouched by four legged animals, this is amazing! A first for us since we started the orchard. I had thought up plans to raise the fence another four feet and just leaving the dogs out at night has fixed it. We don’t even have the dogs in the orchard. My fence raising plans are on hold now. Because we are storing our fruit ladder in the orchard now we can selectively pick the fruit as it ripens. This will stretch out our fruit supply. The ancient pear tree (120 years we think) is going to die. It survived splitting but now it is getting some brown all throughout its leaves. I may get lucky and get one of the shoots to survive. I had one that was about five years old and I thought it was going to be a replacement and it up and died on me. As an added bonus I spent 15 minutes tossing fallen apples from orchard over the fence for the animals. They are starting to realize that the fruit is falling so they come check the alleyway twice daily looking for sweet treats.

I was switching sprinklers on the front hillside this week and found a dead possum. This is the second possum that has been killed. It was just dead. It either fell out of the tree or the puppy broke its neck. She doesn’t maul them or anything, she just protects her yard. Mouse (older border collie) just hides under the bridge footing. He has dug a nice hole under there to hide and stay out of the heat.

Wednesday night the puppy, Chance, was just going to town and would not shut up. This woke me up and even without my hearing aids it was annoying enough to get me out of bed. It was pitch black outside and I needed to retrieve the pistol and flashlight from the car, so I just ran outside in my slippers in the buff, the uniform of all night time farm predator responses. I ran out to the car, grabbed the flashlight and started panning around the farm. I spotted both herds of sheep and the alpaca. There was a cat under the flatbed trailer but nothing requiring my attention. I went over to the side of the yard and spotted the chicken coop and yard to make sure nothing was trying to get at my chickens, nope. Just before going inside I decided to pan the flashlight over the back garden. I spotted four pair of eyes on the back hillside near the creek. I whipped open the gate and ran down the sidewalk toward the creek and spotted four raccoons! I opened fire with the 22 pistol. It does not take long to throw ten bullets downstream at four targets. I was hitting them, at least two for sure but they don’t go down easily. I ran out of lead. This has now required me to break out the second clip to carry out with me at night. I got up the next night due to Chance’s barking but there was nothing but skunk smell. Luckily, it did not get on the dogs. Annmarie doesn’t credit me for any predator control until there is a body. I tell her its not like fishing stories but somehow she doesn’t believe me. Running around naked in the summer is a lot more pleasant than the winter!

Predators spotted so far this year are raccoons, skunk, coyotes and possum. I have two raccoon traps at the mother in law’s house but so far they have not yielded anything. They are eating her cat food and she knows they are around. The coyote has not been spotted in over two weeks.

Alpaca shearing time

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It’s getting hot! The alpaca needed shearing about a month ago but with vacation and haying they seem to always get put off until July. I thought it was going to be easier this year. I honestly think this every year and seem surprised when it isn’t. I had three unused blades and had kept all of my used blades from last year. I figured I could use the old blades on the old alpaca as their coat is fairly thin compared to the young alpaca.

Mr Rainman and I pushed the alpaca toward the barn lot. I had picked some green apples off of the trees and had attempted to bribe them to follow me but they were not buying what I was selling. So instead we steered/chased them to the barnyard. When everyone was in the front of the gate I tossed the green apples into the barn lot and they all ran in to eat them. So I guess the apples did help just not when I wanted initial results. We had one of the alpaca from last year with a missing eye that was again starting to drain. It did not heal up over the winter. Before we let everyone out I put him down so the flies didn’t get into his head literally.

We sheared Snoop first, he is the calmest and mellowist old man. He just laid there and let me shear all his fiber off. He is so easy in every way, even when he is being antisocial toward his buddies he likes us. We have treats! We caught one of the older brown alpaca (I cannot remember his name) and sheared him, again very easy.

Then we caught Padre. Padre was not happy, he was less impressed when we held his head, turned his eyelid inside out and got the cheat grass from under his eyelid out. We then irrigated his eye and cleaned up all the gunk. He is halter trained so he did follow us into the milk shed and stood next to the shearing table. But he is huge, by far and away the largest alpaca we own, probably around 150#. It was all Mr Rainman and I could do to get him up onto the shearing table. Once he was up there he started to growl. Mr Rainman equates growling with getting spit on. He also has a weak stomach and dry heaves at everything nasty. So the more Padre growled the more Mr Rainman thought about gagging and dry heaving. I honestly think the alpaca knew what he was doing. The old blades did not work at all. Padre has very thick hair and required 1.5 blades to get his whole body cleaned off. Unfortunately, the last little bit was hard to get off with a dull blade so his hair cut did leave some questionable styling. We finally just had to be done as Padre kept getting more and more agitated. He was basically sounding like a motorcycle and jumping every time he was touched. We suspect that someone was fairly rough with him when he was younger.

Annmarie had me make some hobbles from a piece of rope that are self tightening and they worked great. We were doing pretty good on time about 20 minutes to shear Snoop and 40 minutes to shear Padre. I did cut Padre’s toenail a little too deep and made him bleed. We had to use the clotting powder which sort of worked.

Once that was done, we were done as there were no more sharp blades. I went in and printed a sharpening order and packaged the blades up and had Sarah ship them off that day. They should be back in 7-10 days. I did order some more ceramic cutters. I like the ceramic ones better than the metal ones. We then went out and fixed the fiber tumbler so it could be stretched out on its side and the leaf blower used on it to blow the loose fiber and dirt free. I even attached two eyebolts to the machine shed uprights so Annmarie could stay inside the machine shed and blow the fiber clean.

She tried this the next day and it worked great. Now she wants to be able to wash the fiber. I just need to find the skirting rack we made a few years ago. I am not having much luck with that task. I have looked everywhere now except the barn and the woodshed. I even checked in the root cellar! There were a lot of spider webs but no skirting rack. She processes the young alpaca fiber and we use the old animal fiber as matting to toss down and keep the areas weed free. It works pretty good for that.