barn

Catch all before starting Barn lighting

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The Apprentice came out on Tuesday for her final before school push and we did some work. Well, she did a lot of heavy lifting and I did some other stuff! She worked on moving 120 blocks over to our bridge foundation area. After we get the foundations poured we are going to lay the bricks from the foundation over to the gate and woodshed. But before we can lay those blocks someone has to move each block, weighing 33# each! She got it done!

I was able to get an email reply from the livestock auction house near Hermiston and we pushed our little bull into the trailer. I drove right over, dropped him off and was gone in ten minutes. The check will be in the mail, he needed to go so we could make room for our bull and two rams to go into Alcatraz soon. Once we do that I can make one herd of cows as the young heifers will not get impregnated. They are for eating next year.

I stopped and got some supplies to store more pipe in the overhead of the machine shed. Eventually I will be installing this drain pipe in the barn lot on either side of the barn. I have added some drain pipe already but this should really help with keeping the mud under control in the fall and spring especially. I even remembered to cover up the pipe openings before hoisting it into the air so the birds don’t nest in the pipes. Thank you Mr Rainman for that suggestion.

I dug out the light post near our front bridge, the sheep had knocked it over and honestly we don’t need a light there. I poured a concrete footing and will build a bricked outlet box. I also dug and inserted a piece of conduit so eventually (hopefully next year) I can get the 16’ grain bin outdoor kitchen area installed and we can have some outdoor lighting. Hence, the reason for having power available.

We also managed to find two dried black walnut boards from the old chicken coop to use inside the house. One is for the new dried spice shelves I want to add in the laundry room and the other is for the upstairs bathroom. There is one spot next to the toilet that is still plywood and needs a covering. Unfortunately, I need a 21.5” x 26” triangle and my wood piece is only 20” wide. So I am going to cut a 3” square piece and glue it on one side so I can sand it all down at the same time and cut my triangle from this fabulous piece of two inch thick black walnut.

I of course set all this wonderful wood out on a stand in the yard to sand and it started to rain the next day as soon as I got home from work. I had to run out and move the wood in out of the rain. One would think I pay attention to the weather but I don’t, only during hay season.

As it was pouring down rain today The Apprentice and I worked on getting the 12V lighting system installed. We managed to actually draw out a plan and get all of the lights mounted. I started to run wire but there was a disaster at work and I had to go in. So we will hopefully get all of the wire runs completed tomorrow and maybe even get the lights to work! It’s a pretty ambitious goal.

Lambs for sale

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The Apprentice has been incredibly game for whatever comes her way. So on Friday we were ready to sort lambs and I wanted to weigh them. We have never weighed our sheep before. We bought the slings and scale several years ago with the intention of doing it occasionally but in all reality it was not necessary. I had posted an ad for the lambs on Craigslist and someone was interested but they wanted to know how many of the lambs were slaughter weight. Well we are keeping seven of the big lambs for our local customers. We have six sold but due to the current coyote problems we are having I through it prudent to keep an extra on hand.

Due to us keeping seven and me stating they weighed anywhere from 35-85# I figured we better have some weights. We grabbed a short section of chain from the fence (I keep all of the short sections I find all over the farm next to the outhouse trash enclosure). The new scale and slings were in the tack room. The one sling is for newborn lambs and the other for everyone else up to 200#. We hung the scale up in the momma/baby area. This way if the lamb got loose we could easily catch it again. The only bad part of this plan is you have to get the sheep into the harness on the ground then lift them up onto the hooks of the scale. So this means lifting every single lamb after you have already caught them and drug them over to the scale.

We got all 59 lambs into the barn and pushed down to the far end so they can feed into the chute and then we can count and sort them. I manned the sorting gate and chute. The Apprentice was at the end of the chute and had to catch them as I pushed them out and drag them over to the momma/baby area. Keep in mind she weighs 115# and is 5’4” and has never wrangled sheep before. It went pretty well actually.

She determined that horns on sheep are unnecessary. I like to use them as handles but the ones with little nubbins kept managing to head but her or dig their horns into her biceps. She got tossed around a few times and losses control of the lamb. We just pushed them into the momma/baby area and then caught them again. We had one crazy female, who weighed 112# that just head butted right into my left side and tried to knock me down. We finally snagged her and got her into the scale. If she was not already going away that behavior would have earned a ticket to cull city! One time she held on but got tossed all over the barn while managing barely to stay on her feet and keep ahold of the very large lamb. On one occasion while getting the lamb into the harness she got jerked toward the side and I had to catch her to keep her from hitting her head. After that I held the sheep and she put the harness on. We finished with all 59, with 52 weighed. We did not weigh the seven we were keeping. It was getting pretty long as that took us about four hours to do fifty sheep. So about 5 minutes per sheep.

We then let the 52 go out into the upper end fields and moved the keeper seven over to the lower pastures to go into our main herd of ewes and two rams. We only kept whethers so this is possible.

Once that was done we needed to take the pile of discarded and not valuable alpaca fiber that was still in the milking area of the barn over into the lavender patch. We are using the fiber as a weed suppressant, ground cloth. It works pretty good for that but it takes a lot of fiber to do that. Luckily, we have a lot. We drug it through the corral and front yard and then went to toss it over the fence. This is when the Apprentice announced she “cannot move my arms” when we went to lift the fiber over the fence. It was a 12 x10’ tarp full of fiber.

We worked on clearing the front hillside of puncture vine. It’s so hard to get rid of so we are taking it out and bagging it all to go to the dump. We don’t want any of it on the property. Once we had the bag full the apprentice could not lift it so she brought the trash can into the yard and managed to get the bag into it on her own. We called it a day after that.

I am getting too old to go all day, I hurt by the end of the day. Annmarie tells me I should be conditioning my body in the off summer season but I am not sure that will help my joints, my achy knees, elbows and shoulders! So instead I just keep moving and keep doing stuff despite the pain.

Barn is now ready for the winter

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The Apprentice came out for a couple of partial days early in the week and got the frost free faucet holes filled in. She stated that she is constantly hurting all of the time due to the laborious nature of the work she is doing on the farm. I stated that it was merely training for her apprenticeship at the end of September. Plus, she keeps returning and working every time I ask. This is a win/win situation for both of us.

I have some extra time off of work so I am playing catch up before winter starts. I have several projects that are on hold, the old house freezer room, the back bridge, bee hive storage room and moving the old lamb shed over near the machine shed. Instead I am working on the barn. It needed to be set back up so we can use it. So on Thursday I cleaned up the house some, then picked two more gallons of thornless blackberries and then the Apprentice came out to do some more work.

We gathered some tools and drug them out to the barn. We needed to install more hooks for the buckets. It’s so much nicer to be able to find a bucket when you need it, so we installed another ten hooks. We installed bungee cords on all of the doors so they auto close now so the sheep cannot get into any area that we forget to use the latch on. We installed the sorting chute and even put some hinge joints into the chute so when we start using the chute panels to block off portions of the barn it will be easier to move the panels. I think we need another six metal pins as there are only two left unused. The door into the momma/baby is always out of commission early as it get stuck open due to the level of the bedding rising quickly. So we raised it another three inches. It cannot go any higher or the lambs will fall under it when they lay next to it. They all lay next to something that will potentially allow them to fall under it. The extra bungees were all placed in the bungee hanging spot and all of the bucket straps were placed on the wall in their appropriate storage spot. We added three more rails in the momma/baby area to hang feeders from. We added two more eyelets for the creep gate so the area under the stairs can be converted to a baby feed fattening area.

The big thing was to put metal support hangers under all of the cross braces holding up the bedding. One of the boards had split and another was cracking. We had to force the broken one back together and install the hanger. Now that they all have a hanger we don’t have to worry about the space above the feeders crashing down onto the unsuspecting sheep dining below. We just need to toss out some straw bales but literally you just toss them down and the sheep will tear them up and spread them around themselves.

First hay in the barn

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It is time, haying season is officially here. I went out and inspected the fields last week. The cheatgrass is a menace. Fields that I tried to replant in the fall with new grass are nothing but solid cheatgrass. Fields that were full of cheatgrass last year are not this year. So we are mowing the cheatgrass down wherever we find it and just haying where I can find big patches of good grass.

The lower schoolhouse pasture looked pretty good this year so it got cut on Sunday. The new sickle bar mower cut through the whole field in under two hours. I then turned it after work twice in the late evening. I was able to finish just as the sun was going down so I did not have to use the work lights on the tractor. Wednesday it was ready to be baled.

Mr Rainman came out Wednesday to start baling. He had to wait until it warmed up a little and burned off the dew. He managed to get the first bale made but could not get the net wrap to roll out like it was should have. I came home to trouble shoot it, I should have known that the first time operating the baler for the year was not going to go smooth. I was hoping it would! I washed the feed roller, no go. I then verified net was installed correctly and finally I just pulled some of the netting loose from the roll. The roll was very dusty as it has been on the baler since last year. I think I may need to cover the baler with a tarp this year after we get done and get it cleaned up. Once we got the first roll wrapped the clean netting worked just fine on the next bale. He was off and going and managed to bale the entire lower field, 133 bales in a about 3 hours. I came home, we hooked up the flat bed trailer to the pickup and went out into the field and picked it all up. The first 83 bales went into the barn. The next 50 bales made it to the barn lot but not inside. Their were about 3-4 bales that had a moisture reading over 20%. So we spread the bales out on the trailer so the sun and weather could heat them up for a few days.

The weather was cooperating fantastically until last night. We had a storm come through last night and drop 11/100” of rain on us in under an hour. So now the bales will need to stay out in the weather a little longer. I had big plans on cutting new hay down yesterday but I had to prioritize the paying job an spent most of the day working. When I came home I was tired, took a nap in the yard for an hour and then Annmarie told me to just do it the next day. I took her offer and by the time the rain showed up I was grateful that I had not cut any grass. I will have to wait another day now before I can cut hay. This rain should give my field #1 a needed boost. That is going to be the field I cut last. There are 50 bales to a ton this year. The bales are 40-45# this year. The grass looks great and since we are only doing small batches it is very green and lovely hay.

Lambing update

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This weekend some time had to be devoted to the sheep. The ewes have finally started to have lambs on a regular basis. We had ordered four more portable panels and they came. They come in two feet sections and have to be assembled. I put them all together on Friday. I had to go into town and get more grain for the ewes and mothers. We have been feeding them up for the last month. They had started to get skinny. So when I went out Saturday morning to check on the sheep I rearranged panels and built a couple more jugs. The jugs needed fresh bedding and feed buckets and water buckets filled. The mother/lamb area needed to be expanded also, by the time I was done two hours had passed.

  • Date of update- Feb 20, 2023
  • # of Lambs born – 35
  • # of ewes who have delivered babies – 21
  • # of ewes still pregnant – 23 in area, I don’t think they are all pregnant
  • # of single lamb births – 8
  • # of twin lamb births – 12
  • # of triplet lamb births – 1
  • # tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-11
  • # tagged female lambs-9
  • # of bummer lambs – 2
  • # of lambs who died in first two weeks – 1
  • Total # of lambs on farm -32
  • % birthing rate- 166%
  • % production rate -152%
  • % survival rate at birth – 100%
  • % survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 91%

We have a single lamb from one mother who makes the weirdest noise, it sounds like a cat! I tagged and banded him today and when I picked him up his rib cage is narrow and big. It is not the correct shape. We will be watching boy # 347 to see if he survives. The sheep are now at the annoying stage, they are super friendly and know that you are bringing good treats and they just want to be the first one to get them. We try and usher them gently out of the barn but after five minutes of trying to be gentle and quite we end up hollering at them to get out of the barn and chasing them out. There is only so much patience one can have before you realize that it is getting you nowhere and there are other things that need to be done.

Our spring is running a little muddy so I drove up the pastures to look and see how our pseudo soft spot was doing in field #2. It is pretty boggy and soft, I had to get out of the soft mud so I did not sink the tractor and there is running and standing water. There is one corner of the field that I had not marked out that is really soft. I need to mark it as off limits so in the spring when I need to cut hay I avoid that area.