#stewartcreeksomethings

Haying half done

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It has been a long couple of weeks. I am still covering random night shifts at work so I am trying to squeeze in haying in between the repairs, sleep and rain. I was going over to cut the neighbor’s field when I realized that the stop nut had fallen off of the sickle bar transport bar. It is of course Metric and I do not have a replacement laying around, but what I did have laying around was a whole bunch of cable clamps of various sizes. I clamped one of those onto the bar and it works great as a stop nut! This will now be my permanent fix.

I ended up having to cut the field twice, it was pretty thick, tall and wet so it wanted to push down and avoid the sickle bar mower. Once I had it all down I had to leave it for five days before I could turn it the first time. It is beautiful grass hay but if I bale it wet I am just going to create a fire hazard at our place.

Said neighbor convinced me I should cut his lower field also. It was even taller and wetter than the upper field! It also had a lot of sprinkler heads poking up out of the ground. I managed to get it all cut and only cut off one sprinkler head 3/4” PVC pipe riser.

I had to turn the upper field two more times before I baled it. Even after all of that I had a two sections of the upper field, about 10 bales that I had to wait until I did the lower section as they were just too wet.

Bathroom remodel day 47

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Well it’s that time again, time to actually go back to an old project and try to get it closer to the finish line. The bathroom is totally functional at this point. Never mind that there is no storage or that we cannot hide electronics. The shower has hot water that gets you clean, the sink dispenses water and the toilet flushes, the crucial tasks can be checked off the list. It was going to rain on Sunday so I decided to start in on the custom bathroom cabinet. I bought furniture grade 3/4” oak plywood at a paltry $95/sheet. I was disappointed to learn that it was necessary to trim all of the edges of the plywood to get rid of the damage on the edges. I don’t have a furniture grade table saw so I found this guide rail and put an expensive blade on my DeWalt skilsaw and made the first cut. I then had to go back and tape the edge I wanted to cut and cut through it again to get a clean cut. The first cut still caused some tear out on the laminate.

My goal is to get all of the pieces cut, then sand them all, then assemble them. I will stain it once I get it assembled. I am going to just go with the Tried and True finish. I like it and it tolerates moisture fairly well.

The guide rail did okay but I will need to run the pieces through a table saw. I have about a 1/8” difference near the middle. I need an expensive guide not a $30 guide if I want a perfectly straight edge. I did this a couple of weeks ago and have only managed to get most of the small pieces cut since then. I need some help getting the table saw down and running them through, Gingerman has agreed to help but our schedules have not been coinciding recently. I am working intermittent random nights for the last month with another month to go and it is really slowing down my projects. You tend to want to sleep the next day after being up all night.

Haying again

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Now that Pendleton Round-Up is over I can get back to farming, I need to cut the neighbor’s hay field. Before I could go cut hay I needed to do a little work on the tractors. I put the sickle bar mower on the Kubota after I dropped off the weed mower and forks. I took the John Deere and hosed it down as it was covered in dust and mud. I ended up finding a cracked cowling. As I was fixing that with zip ties I discovered the reason it cracked is that the metal support running along the inside had broken off from its plastic holder. So I drilled a couple of holes in the metal support and used my new fancy body zip ties to hold it in place. They work pretty good!

I went over and scoped out the field to be cut and moved the sprinklers out of the field. It was too wet to cut early in the week so I ended up cutting it late afternoon on Thursday. The grass was even thicker this time than the spring cutting! It was incredibly thick. I went over it twice with the sickle bar mower in opposite directions to try and ensure I got it all cut. Cutting the field has ensured that we will get rain this week and big surprise, three days later we got 1/4” of rain! I would have turned the hay today but instead I am going to have to wait 1-2 days more and let the top of the grass dry out some before turning it. I had some big thick piles so I may just have to give up and turn it tomorrow afternoon and then turn it again the next day. After that I may be able to wait two days and then bale it. I am going to have to be careful to not bale it wet. I think I can get close ot two ton (100 bales) of beautiful grass.

Our second batch of chickens are now laying eggs. We are getting close to a dozen a day now. I have a couple more roosters to dispatch. We have four now and I am only going to keep two. I did find a stash of about two dozen eggs in one of the barn hay feeders when I was cleaning out the barn. I just tossed them out the window. The hen that had managed to hatch out some chicks did not manage to keep any of them alive. I was going to be surprised if she could save that lone chick by living out in the barn with three barn cats. The new chickens need to learn to stay out of our yard so the dogs don’t get them.

I need to spend a day grinding grain. I have about 400# to grind up. It should fill the rest of my chicken barrels I have stashed in the back of the chicken coop. I will be going through about 50#/week all winter long.

Barn clean out done!

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I managed to finish getting the barn dug out this week. I figure my total time on the barn was around 12 hours. This is a far cry from the 40 hours it used to take me. Using the manure forks on the John Deere and just figuring out how to make it into most crooks and crannies with the tractor has cut way down on the hand work. I probably only had to do about four hours of hand digging. The next big thing is to haul the old round bales from the lamb shed and put them into the overhead walkway so we can use them as bedding. They are three years old and have virtually no nutritional value but will make great bedding. I used to buy straw but using old round bales has zero cost associated with it. I used to spread it out when I put it out on the floor. Now I just spread the rolled bales evenly throughout the floor and the sheep break it apart and spread it out throughout the barn. If I have a gap or two a week later I just dump another bale in the shallow spot and the sheep do their magic again. I do need to reset the chute and bring in the four feeders from outside. This will need to happen next week as I am thinking about taking some sheep over to Hermiston next week.

Annmarie wants me to work on getting the old compost out of the barn lot so the horse will quit digging in it for a snack. About 1/3 of the way into digging out the barn I remembered this so I started to put the bedding into the momma/baby area. This has a very shallow soil depth and does not hold water very well. I am hoping to increase the soil depth so I can add some seed. I figure this area can take next year’s material also and I will hopefully have something to work with after that. As I was filling that area I noticed our chickens in the front ditch eating out of the water. They had waded into the shallow water and were eating bugs out of the water. I had no idea chickens would do that! I have only ever seen water birds do that. The chickens do have all you can eat grain available so it is not because they are starving. It was pretty weird.

We had several people send us pictures of Annmarie in the Mounted Band so I picked a couple I liked to add in here. Roundup is pretty much nonstop for us with me having to work in the ER and Annmarie working and doing Round-Up stuff also so not a lot gets done on the farm except feeding animals and collecting eggs.

Our honeybees are still alive from the nuc we purchased this spring. The flowers are fairly sparse this late in the season so we have had to start feeding the bees sugar water. So Annmarie took out one frame so a one gallon frame feeder could be dropped into the hive box. I scraped it and let it gravity drain into a bucket, we got almost a quart from the one frame. We are using it all for ourselves! We are hopeful that we can get one more hive next year and then we can start to actually harvest some honey. I set the frame and wax back outside so the honeybees can clean it up and get it ready to be used next year.

Rooms are always a work in progress

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Annmarie’s laser cutter died so we got another one, this one is upgraded and will do circular items and will cut thicker material and can etch into metal directly. It has a water cooled laser. We did not really compare any measurements so when it arrived we realized it was significantly larger than her old one. I had to build a table top to go onto the top of the old TV stand we are using as the base. We also had an old Victrola cabinet in there for the 3D printer but they both would not fit. Gingerman and I made them fit but it was not pretty and did not pass the quality inspection later done by Annmarie. We agreed that a shelf for the 3D printer would take up less space and I had kept an old table leaf that I was able to cut into a shelf. I used the leftover wood from the table top to cut the other three shelves out. We may put shelves under the 3D printer but I will wait until Annmarie requests those. She will need to use the space for a while before those will be used. I may but a narrow one directly under the printer so she can put her filament rolls on it. I will need to use book ends or build some so that they don’t roll off.

I had to run ductwork along two walls to accommodate the fumes. I decided that cutting another hole in the wall to the outside and moving the exhaust fan and power was not going to work for me. I might have to do this three more times and I did not five holes in the wall. I was able to use some low profile dryer venting and keep it fairly close to the wall. I taped all the joints so the exhaust fumes stay inside the duct. This laser has a really good exhaust fan so between it and the one on the outside of the office the fumes will get moved right out and the longer path should not be much of an issue. There is a lot of push/pull action happening in regard to the exhaust.

My plants on the breeze porch are doing very well. When I got this plant it was six inches high. The only thing I seem to be having trouble with is starting the new African violets. I have always had trouble with it but this year I have not been successful. I ordered some root stimulator and hopefully that will solve my problems. I am starting to root new plants so I can get them ready for Christmas. I usually take at least 30 plants into work as presents for the ER staff. I have a couple of new plants so I wanted to offer a little more variety. I add a few plants every year to the collection. I have enough room for another six African violets and was hoping to fill it up this year. They tend to be fairly expensive when buying them at the store.