Black walnut wood

Winterizing still and office run

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Mr Rainman came out today! He agreed to come out and help me get caught up on the office for a few days. He brought a helper who is willing to help finish winterizing the place. I have dubbed him Mr BeardMePlease! He needs a lot of work to get that beard to fill in. He dug right in and got the gooseneck hitch installed in the pickup and got the raspberries and blackberries trimmed and tied up for the winter. The pickup kept dying, but it has not really even been driven for almost two months. I need to rotate rigs driven to work on a more regular basis. Each vehicle should not go more than two weeks without getting driven.

Mr Rainman and I worked on the office. The plan was to get the East wall completed today. Unfortunately, this did not occur. We had a hard time getting the two top boards in place. There was much hammering and cussing. We ended up having to sand the board in place over the door opening. This took quite a bit of time. I worked on building a window box for the casing. My lack of attention to detail caused the pieces to be cut three different times and I had to tear the box apart once due to a piece going in wrong side out. I did finally manage to get the box constructed and installed. Once I had the frame in place and nailed in tight Mr Rainman decided that I needed to use squirt in foam around the window to get a good seal. We are out of optimum usage temperatures but I did it anyway. This meant it was going to take forever to dry. We ended up plugging in a heater and closing up the room.

The black walnut tree I went and picked up this summer got cut up into lumber today. Mr Rainman and I went over and picked it up. There was more wood there than I realized when we dropped off the tree. Unfortunately, there was not room in the old chicken coop for the wood to dry out there. We ended up putting it in the barn! This meant that we could not set it up so that we could band the boards together. We got it all snickered and laid out flat and tomorrow we will pull down some of the long boards stored in the barn and pile them on top of the walnut. I figure a few hundred pounds of weight on top of the pile should help keep everything straightened out. All of the boards are cut to 1.5” thick.

They took the pickup home with them and hopefully will come out tomorrow with an excavator. I want to get the new ditch in field #1 finished before the ground freezes hard. Mr BeardMePlease will be cutting up all of the fallen tree branches in our yard and cleaning up the yard. Once that is done then the back bridge to the wood shed can be cut up so it doesn’t get washed away in the spring rains. I will reinstall it after the spring runoff. Hopefully, we can get the East wall done in the office and the second window installed.

The puppy, Chance, looks cute but she can be a terror. We are still working on potty training her. She has not been easy.

Cows have not been cooperating

Steve Hardin1 Comment

The club wheat on the farm looks great! On our drive to Adams to get the walnut tree I kept comparing wheat fields and ours looks very good in comparison. I talked to the responsible farmer and he said they are trying a new mineral supplement and it seems to be doing the trick. Time will tell if the moisture will hold out for the needed amount and times.

This has been a long week related to cows. The bull keeps getting out of our pasture and going under the road via the culvert to visit the 100% papered Angus heifers that the neighbor has next door. We pushed him over on Sunday and figured we had the access point hardened enough he could not get through. On Tuesday, our neighbor was texting Annmarie to tell her he was in with the heifers again. This time I had to gather tools after work and Mr Professional had come out and pushed him back into our field. He laid down on his belly in the middle of the stream, reached down with his horns and lifted the panel up and then army crawled under the fence, in the water, to get to the other side. He did this because his normal access point is at the side of the fence but we had secured those enough he could not get through. This led to more additions, some tightening, a few extra panels and a ground panel that sticks forward so he has to stand on it to get his horns into the upright panel, therefore holding it down with his own weight. All of this done by tractor flood lights as it was getting dark and the culvert is down in a hole. I was down there working alone and the bull snuck up on me, I didn’t realize it until he was about two feet away. He scared me so I chased him away, he knew what I was doing and did not really want to leave, it took some encouragement to get him moving. So far it is holding I would like to say it is fixed, but I then leaned toward certain as a better word. After a few minutes and thinking about how often he gets out I am pretty certain he is contained, it looks pretty good and we sure gave it the old college try. It kinda depends on how lovesick he gets, maybe it will be good enough, we will see.

There is another creek crossing further up on our property that was destroyed in the flood that lets him drop down into the creek bed and scoot on down to the culvert. If we can get that crossing hardened enough then he will most likely be contained. The crossings have to be removable in the fall so the spring runoff can happen and nothing gets damaged.

I had the opportunity to get another black walnut tree! This one was a ways away and I did not want to load up the tractor on my trailer and drive over there. I would have to make two trips and decided that taking longer to load was an acceptable trade off to not having to make two trips and haul the tractor. I gathered chains, cables, sheet of plywood to cover the metal ramps, come along and a metal pipe to use as a cheater bar. I picked up Mr Professional and away we went. This sounded like a well thought out plan but honestly I did not take into account the shear mass of a large piece of this wood. It took us three hours and the first half of that time was moving the large base piece onto the trailer first. We needed two come alongs to do it and everything else we brought. Unfortunately, by the time we got done the custom cut shop was closed so the trailer just stayed loaded and I will get it offloaded this week. We will go back into the cue for cutting and may get it cut up in a couple of months. Luckily, I ordered more banding and it’s a different color so it makes it easy to differentiate the trees that will banded and stored together in the old chicken coop. I am even considering getting into the maple pile, cleaning it up and then having it all planed down to useable flat pieces. I can then shrink the storage space it takes by banding it all together and storing it in the coop.

The alpaca seem to have finally come to a consensus and are now behaving. They are such weird creatures. The rabbit is back! I have seen it several times and it is still not afraid of humans, you can get within a few feet before it even moves.

With all this wind we are having the new windmill needed an addition to keep the top plastic bushing in place. This should keep it from popping out now and the windmill can tear it up, which it is doing in the 35-40 mph winds. It is only rated up to 65 mph so we will see how it does in our area long term.