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.
Friday morning we lost water. Now this happens at least annually and he had just had some power blips so I figured the pump had just kicked off. The controller resides in the basement of my mother-in-law’s house. I called a few times and realized she was out of the house. Around noon I called and she was home, she attempted to reset the pump without success. I went down to try and see if I could get it started. The pump controller is pretty complicated so I try not and mess with it too much. Annmarie has to reprogram it when I do just randomly push buttons and that takes some effort on her part. We could not find the instruction manual after I tried to turn it off and on (would not do it) then pulled the fuses and got the error code to change from “OC3” to “Er2”. I then attempted to search the internet for the control manual without success. I even called a pump distributor with no success. The longer I stared at the case the more the weird melted plastic section stood out. I could not ever remember that being there. I touched the plastic case and discovered that not only was the case melted but that section was hotter than anywhere else on the case. I called Pendleton Electric, as they do well pump controllers knowledge gained courtesy of Google. I was able to say I thought the pump controller had burned up and to read the tag on the size with the power ratings. They wanted the Hp of the well motor but we don’t know it.
I had to feed the bull and his two charges and the ram next. The bull had gotten tired of the four panels surrounding the large bale of alfalfa and had hooked and thrown it off with his horns. This is one of his talents that he knows and performs on a regular basis. I pulled a large bale of alfalfa out of the machine shed and pushed it down to Alcatraz. I had to open the gate to push the bale inside but this let the bull, 2 steer and the ram out. I thought, foolishly, that they would follow the bale of alfalfa back into their pen. Nope! The bull ran over to the far gate and started hollering for female cows. I got the bale situated and the panels around the new bales. Both horses were in Alcatraz happily munching on alfalfa when I went out with the tractor to chase the animals back. No one wanted to back to isolation. It took me about 30 minutes of tractor wrangling to get everyone back into the pen. I considered going and getting the dogs but last time I lost my voice convincing them that I was boss. The tractor worked eventually. The dogs do best in wide open spaces. I was unable to get either horse away from the all you can eat alfalfa buffet so I just locked them in with the cows and ram. Annmarie got them by just walking over to the pen later that evening. They just walked over to see her, I am not their favorite or their leader.
Once in the barn we put up three gates to shrink the available area for them to roam in and I grabbed the tag and band supplies. I sit down on the floor of the barn with the supply bin on my left and my coffee to the right. The coffee didn’t last five minutes before some random sheep knocked it over repeatedly. I finally had to give up on having coffee during this labor intensive endeavor (I spent the entire time on my backside while Annmarie did the lamb catching!). We ended tagging 25 lambs and 2/3 of those were boys. We still have had more girls than boys lambs born on the farm since we started over 10 years ago. We have just been increasing the ear tag numbers every year sequentially and we started with the number one.
Stewart Creek Somethings 