Summer is definitely here, all of the fields are dead and the only green is along the creek where patches of water still exist in deep pools or along the spring path. Nothing can kill the blackberries. They grow along the creek and spring in multiple places on the farm. I have managed to pick 181 cups of blackberries so far this year, so just over 11 gallons. I need to pick about another 10 gallons. We will have plums coming on in next 2-3 weeks and we can pit and freeze them for the wife’s breakfast smoothie. I try and collect 2 cups of fruit for 365 days. It takes a lot more than you would think when you are planning for the entire year.
The grandbaby is turning one year old this month. He is all over the place now and getting into everything. Nap time is still my favorite time. I loved it when our daughter was young and I still love it. Annmarie snuck down while I was “babysitting” this weekend one morning before going outside to do something.
It was time to sort off the sheep. I had two lambs to sell and we needed to sort off all the lambs so we could put the rams in with the ewes. We also traded a ewe for a new ram so I needed to chose that ewe and mark her so we can sort her off in December. The final count after multiple sorting passes is 12 wether lambs (#434-447), 17 female lambs, 2 sold so 15 to add to our herd at the end of December (#439-456), ewe #380 is going to Mr Horse Tamer, we also have 25 ewes that are being bred by 3 rams. We will be eating the lazy ram this winter, he will be made into 100% burger. The Quiet One came out and helped me sort everyone. It took a bit to get everyone moved into the correct pasture. The lambs are down below, the ewes and rams are up with the cows and bull. All the boys got turned in with their respective opposing genders.
I am working shifts at work so I am taking days off mid week to account for days worked and I wanted to get the chicken coop hardened and the fence around the greenhouse. So we put the 6” auger on one of the tractors and got the three 50# weights applied via my custom welded jig! There is just not enough weight if the soil is hard someone used to have to try and push down on the arm and that is not very safe. I bypassed the seat pto safety on the older tractor but I have not done that on the new one yet. It is fairly simple I just have not needed it yet. Eventually I will have to do it. The plan is to get this done on Tuesday & Wednesday of next week. I have no idea how hard it will be do dig the holes. The ground has not seen any water for about 2.5 months, the good thing is it is creek bottom so it should be deep soil. There are not any rock bluffs in the area we are digging holes.
Well the brothers Mr Shady and the T-shirt bandit came out for day two of their farm initiation. I wanted to do a little work on the rock wall and it kinda morphed into an all day event! The spring banks, a path to the gazebo and the back creek fence line all got the weed eater treatment. The boys traded off about an hour into it. The T-shirt bandit started out with me working on the rock wall. After 30 minutes of watching him try to pull his pants up every five seconds I was getting frustrated. I asked him about wearing a belt but he told me he could not find it this morning. I finally went in and found an old belt I had thought I had thrown away and was never more grateful to find. He wore it all day and shockingly did not have to lift his pants up again.
Mr Shady traded out weed eating and started to dig on the wall with me. It was going so well I thought that we might even get finished today so I just kept pushing forward and we kept going. We were able to get the entire front wall installed. We did have to go and pick five buckets of rocks off the back hillside. I will need to get the sprinkler to spray that corner so I can drill a post hole with the tractor auger. I will need to set a new wooden corner post about five feet from the current one. I am pretty sure we do not have enough of the small metal fence panels to go across the entire front rock wall. So I will have to build something on one end to make up the distance.
We picked small rocks for the yard side but I left T-shirt bandit alone to make a straight line from one wooden post to the other across the front of the lawn. He said there were a couple of S shapes in the “straight”line. After looking at it I found the old string we had for the front wall and we strung it up so he could see the S shape. I will need to redo that section but it should only take about an hour. I did find myself with less patience today than yesterday. I believe that is due to me being tired and my overall intolerance of teenager behavior. It could be that new vocabulary words were learned today or at least one was used creatively in various contexts. Everyone survived and that is the goal.
T-shirt bandit did get the hole to China filled in again so Chance will now have a new goal over the next two weeks. The birthday party is at the end of the month but I do not think I can get a ton of sand unloaded spread and several hundred bricks laid before the party.
The next thing I need to focus on is getting the greenhouse door assembled and hung up. Once that is done I need to get the chicken enclosure all fixed and bird tight. Once that is done then I can hook up water and lock all of the chickens into the coop area. We have over 30 chickens and I did not get a single egg today! Once I get the coop area predator and chicken proof then I should jump to a dozen eggs/day at a bare minimum.
Unfortunately, we need to sort and worm all the sheep and dump the rams in with them. This will be the very next thing I do. Besides pick more blackberries! There is always something to do on the farm.
This has been a long week for me. I have been working at the paying job during the day and fixing haying equipment and haying after work. I cut the hay on Sunday and then turned it on Tuesday after I got the tire for the new tractor repaired and installed. I had to tighten bolts on the power rake so I could rake. I was able to do that with a little bit of tractor light. I spent Wednesday after work on repairing the baler. I was able to get most of it repaired but on Thursday it still took me two hours to finish it. I had to clean up hydraulic fluid from the entire outside so I could get to the hose with a micro-hole in it replaced. The dirt and dust and hay had formed quite the layer of gunk all over the baler. I baled Thursday night until 0130 when the grass started to get super wet. I did not manage to get the baler as silent as it used to be but it worked like a charm after I replaced the guts.
Friday morning the Quiet One was coming over at 0700 or so I thought. Annmarie told me that she was here at 0630. Turns out I had said 0600 and forgot. I was out the door and working by 0705. We worked on getting the greenhouse finished. It took us until 1300 to get it all assembled except for the front door which I can do alone. The Quiet One was going bear hunting and wanted to get up there early on Friday afternoon. I needed to finish baling hay so I did that after dinner and was home by dark. I had made arrangements to have a couple of teenage brothers come out on Saturday and Sunday to help me clean up. The plan is to get the yard all ready for the grandson’s birthday party. I won’t have the bricks laid on the floor in the Gazebo but all of the trash and stuff will be put away. At least that is the plan. It will depend on how hard they work. I am sure their father has warned them about my work ethic and expectations.
The boys came out this morning and we started to work immediately. I had them bring lunches so we could stop for lunch and they would not have to go anywhere. Especially since they are not driving and had to be dropped off. My plan was to just start out by the driveway and slowly work our way toward the house. I figured it all has to be done but doing it this way creates a systematic plan. Plus, to clean up the driveway we had to empty out both broken cars that are going to the scrapyard. The pickup we were able to tow with the tractor. I tried to start it and it actually tried once to start so when we towed it to the machine shed I put the battery charger on it. I would love to drive them both to the junkyard. Weeds got pulled, trash got tossed, vehicles cleaned out, scrap moved to the burn pile or metal pile. The bags of soil that I had not taken out to the garden got loaded into the tractor bucket and taken over to the garden, cut open and both troughs are now full of soil. After a couple of hours on the driveway we hooked up the flat bed trailer to the tractor and drove over to pickup all of the hay I had just baled. They picked up almost 90 bales of beautiful grass hay. We are going to trade the grass hay for some large alfalfa bales that can be easily fed to the cows this winter.
Mr Toad was on the front hillside just jumping around. I might have disturbed him when I was pulling up thistles.
After we had filled up the troughs with soil I noticed a couple of buzzards flying around and landing in the apple tree. I love the buzzards. We did not used to have any and it was hard to tell if something had died. Nowadays I can always tell when there is a carcass on the farm as they show up and circle it. Today was no exception, there was an old dead ewe under the apple tree. We left her and I said we would come back later today and take care of her.
After lunch the vehicle items migrated into the house or out back of it to be addressed at a later time. I am sticking to the plan and cleaning as we go. I had been working on knicknames for them all day long. I had Mr Shady (older brother) doing weed eating after they cleaned up all of the branches. I had the T-shirt Bandit raking sand in the gazebo. The sand had gotten all blown up against one side of the gazebo. I looked over once and he was on his cell phone. There was a round of verbal prompting on the correct location for the phone and it was never an issue for the rest of the day. After he raked it was time to go deal with the corpse. I was able to get the tractor bucket fairly close to the corpse. The T-shirt Bandit kept trying to hold his T-shirt over his nose like a bandit would in an old time stagecoach robbery. I think he thought it was going to make things smell better, it did not. It was pretty rank.
Once we got that carcass dropped off we came back to the yard and beat up on the trumpet vine. I am trying to get it to grow on its trellis so we wound it around the trellis and tied it up in several places in the hopes that it would grow where it is supposed to. I cut away every thing that was growing against the house. Occasionally, I get a little overly excited and cut out too much of the vine but it cannot grow under the expensive siding we just got done last year!
We still have some holes to fill in yard and I am going to clean off the old house porch plus clean up the garden area in the back of the house. We are doing so well I am thinking about trying to get the rock wall completed also! Mr Shady kept his sunglasses on the entire time and just kept working. It was refreshing.
Well the granary situation has improved dramatically. It was going to cost almost $700 in sheet metal and welding wire to make another 5x5x5’ bin and one of the nephews sent me a link for a local person selling two large upright bins! I did not need both of them despite their willingness to sell me both. So for $750 they delivered it to the house on Friday. I had cleared a spot and dropped a bunch of gravel in place but after looking at the container I think I need to level the area and then drill five holes in the ground, add some wire and fill them up with concrete. I can take a piece of all thread and put it into the concrete when it’s wet. I don’t think I will try and line up the holes with the grain bin. I will just weld some plates and bolt them in place.
I also managed to get some paint sprayed on the finished bin I repaired and got the slider door installed. Of course when I used a chain to roll the bin I bent the brand new door. I crawled inside and beat it back into shape with a hammer. It works now, it’s a little stiff but that is not a bad thing as I want opening the door to be an intentional act. It looks like the bin has a ladder built into its side so someone can climb the bin and open the top when filling it. This is a good thing as long as you are not scared of heights. I will have to get the cap removal process down before we lift it into the air. I would like to stand on the ground while learning, not holding onto the ladder with one arm 25’ into the air while fighting the lid with the other.
The Naked Gardener called on Thursday to say that he thinks his field is ready to cut again. I swung by on Friday and he is right, it is ready. So I spent most of the day Friday tearing the baler apart. I figured out that it is a lot easier to work on if you remove the front arms and some extra pieces. It took about an hour to disassemble the front but it was a lot easier getting to everything else. There was one guide piece I could not remove but I just worked around it. I was going to have to grind the nuts off and it is just not necessary as I am not replacing it. I replaced about 1/3 of the pickups and tubes. Anything that was bent got tossed in the trash. I have about an hour left to get the races lined up and then I can spend another hour putting the front all back together. I also need to replace a hydraulic hose. The entire thing is covered in hydraulic fluid. It needs a wash down.
Unfortunately, I am on a timer now. I went over and cut the field this evening. So the new tractor “Juicy” has had a flat tire for two weeks in the upper field, I had to go up and remove the tire tonight so it can be fixed. The hay turner is on the back and it needs about 45 minutes of TLC before I can go turn the hay. Once that is done then I will need to spend three hours with the baler to get it up and running so I can bale the hay!
I also will need to install the two new gates on our stairs to prevent the grandchild from crawling up and falling down from the bottom or falling down the stairs from the top. This is what happens when your grandparents work in the hospital and see bad stuff all the time.
The new chickens area settling in nicely. All of them are staying out of the yard which is good for them as being a play toy for the dog tends to an eventual slow death.
We now have three kittens living under the old house porch. We have installed a temporary fence to keep Mouse away from them as he is a definite kitten killer. He only comes on weekends with the kids. Of course, the kittens don’t know this so they were going through the fence as they are now starting to become very active. So we now have a plastic chicken netting zip tied to the fence so the kittens cannot get through the fence. Milo likes the kittens so we will work on socializing him to them. He still does not like their mother and barks at her whenever he sees her.
I have plans to get Annmarie’s greenhouse in place and put together so she can use it. We would like to grow vegetables through the winter so we are going to give it a go. We will probably put a remote thermometer in the greenhouse so we can track the high and low temps throughout the year. This will not be possible if I do not assemble the thing. Rainman and I had already built the base earlier in the year we just needed to assemble the actual greenhouse, or so I thought. The Quiet One and I worked on changing out panels down by the spring first. I had purchased some old metal panels and we swapped out the newer horse exercise ring panels for some old ones that can stay forever. I of course found a deep spot with my rubber boots and ended up getting water inside my left boot first thing in the morning. My foot stayed wet for the rest of the day.
Before we could even assemble the first part of the base I had to bring over almost two yards of gravel to spread around the outside of the base. The chickens had spread out the gravel and were eroding the base. Once we got that corrected we assembled the base and the instructions said to bury the base. We brought in another three yards of gravel to fill the base but kept it away from the metal. I wanted to get the entire thing assembled then use some metal to wood screws to attach the greenhouse base to the wooden base we installed. We also bolted the wooden frame to three foot ground anchors screwed into the ground in the spring. I do not believe it will be able to fly away. It might fly apart due to the wind but the base frame will stay attached to the ground if it does! All the videos said it would take two days but we were making stellar progress despite reading the instruction booklet. That is until the instructions started to tell us to disassemble one piece for every two we attempted to add. We will have to change out some longer bolts for shorter ones as we used up all the long ones and we need them for the roof.
I ended up on my back after attempting to jump off of a ladder at what I thought was a foot or so. It was more than that and I did not stick the landing, my feet slid out from under me and my back stopped my fall when it pounded into the ground. Surprisingly, I did not knock the air out of my lungs. I did end up bruising the bottom of my left foot. It hurts to walk now and I have a slight limp until I get used to the pain. I also wore a short sleeve shirt, it was hot, and I don’t usually do that so I got an impressive sunburn on my arms and neck. At 58 years old I am not near as spry as I used to be.
We ended up almost getting the roof truss pieces in place before quitting. The Quiet One did bring over chickens! I now have an extra approximately 25 chickens. So there are about 40 chickens running around now. They need to figure out that they have to go to the front spring if they want water. I got a dozen eggs today, so the dog is back to getting an egg on her food twice daily.
Our Ring camera is getting a lot smarter. It can now tell you that the critters it sees are a flock of chickens! It is pretty amazing. They now need to work on the logic so the camera tells you when a dog enters the picture.
