Bull

And it continues

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It is amazing some of the things you learn when you work with old stuff. When we first moved to the farm one of the kids that was helping my father -in-law would collect old railroad tie date nails. I knew he had found a couple out on the farm but I never really paid any attention to it. As we build this Bull enclosure we are ripping down an old fence line and a few random railroad ties. About 50% of the ties are rotted off but the other ties are still good and are getting reused in the new fence. I have found two of the dated nails and managed to pull one out intact. The head popped off the other one. Annmarie looked it up for me when I came back inside. They were used to date the tie as there were several different methods to treat the posts and the railroad company wanted to track which ones worked the best. So this railroad tie is from 1929 and I put it back in the ground! I am hoping to get 100 years out of a railroad tie, truly amazing. A real testament to what living in a desert like climate can do for stuff. I guess that < 12 inches of annual rainfall is good for something.

I decided to do something about the front gate entrance. When you step in through the gate I always have to step to the side and onto some gravel I had piled up. Well that gravel is sliding down hill so I thought that creating a short wall would help the problem. I bought 25 blocks on Friday and got them installed two days ago. I am still not certain it is a good thing. It will keep the gravel from slipping as much but now I have to actually pick up my feet.

Bubba has been out for a few hours the last couple of days and has been filling the rock cribs. This is an essential task as I cannot move forward without them full. I was very clear that I wanted him to get them from the old rock wall to minimize driving on the hill. So yesterday when I was out working on the enclosure I had to finish topping off a couple of the cribs. I ended up crawling on top of the the cribs and moving rocks around by hand to get them to stack better. This made more space therefore requiring me to haul more rocks. I decided I would drive to the top of the hill and get some random rocks that were sticking out of the ground. I would eventually like to pick all of the huge rocks off of the hillside. As I drove past the old rock wall I marveled at how many rocks were still left. We had four rock cribs almost full and it looked barely touched.

Yet as the mistress took me up the hill i noticed what looked like a well beaten path going up to the top of the hillside. I knew i had only been up there a couple of times and could not have made that many tracks . I was right, Bubba decided that the extremely large pile of rocks on top were a lot less work. The rocks are all loose and you can just drive to one spot and load them up. Now this might upset the rock chucks that live in the pile but other than that no harm. If you look at the below picture the old rock fence is at the top of the shadow and the huge pile of rocks is at the skyline. Oh well, the grass truly is greener on the other side!

I went out and worked on the bull enclosure again until dark. This is cutting into my wife time. I need to just get it done so I can move on to the next thing, which is going to have to be the machine shop. All of my evening help was busy so I worked alone, I did three loads of rocks to top off cribs and then hung a gate over but the lamb shed. The gate only opens out toward the bull enclosure, it only went about 25% of the way in the opposite direction. I will need to remove some earth to make it open both ways.

I had to go get some woven wire but I my choices are severally limited as there are only three rolls left on my fencing pile. I managed to find two that will hopefully work. I will have to reuse the woven wire from the fence line I am tearing down to make the entire enclosure.

I managed to get the woven wire stretched over one section and will now just need to install the tamarack railing and it will be done!

Annmarie took these pictures out our kitchen window. We had some water issues and fertilizer issues this year with our boxes and had a hard time with some of our seeds growing. We have lots and lots of onions and potatoes. This is only our third year and we may have gotten it figured out. I still want to do the underground greenhouse next year. I think it would be amazing to grow fresh vegetables year round!

Supply time

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Friday, I opted for a supply run to get the last of what I think I need for the bull enclosure. There is one item that I forgot, some Fastenal anchors I will need to put up all the enclosure railing. I will have to get those next week but I don’t need them yet. The store I was going to get the other supplies doesn’t carry them so its a second stop. This defeats the purpose of the quick trip if I keep stopping at various stores. I had the 16 foot trailer also and did not want to drag it around town, parallel parking it would be a special kind of torture. I ended up buying cow panels to cover the used feeder panels we picked up at auction. These will be wired directly over the panels. I may cut some of them in half lengthwise to make them stretch farther. But on the other hand, if I don’t cut them then at some future time I would be able to reuse them. I am still torn on which direction to go and have another week to ponder a choice. I am all about reusing stuff! I have saved a ton of money by reusing materials. It isn’t always the prettiest of things but it is always functional.

I also picked up a few blocks to put next to our gate. When we step in we step next to the concrete. I poured a bunch of gravel there to keep the mud away but over time the gravel is sloughing off down the hill. I need to put in a short wall to contain the gravel and allow us to have a clean stepping spot.

My other nephew, came out in the evening and we worked on setting more posts. I am paying him and offered to give him some cash but he wants to save it for college. I talked to him and we will fill an envelope with his wages and keep it at the house. This way when he gets ready for school he can just come pickup the envelope. We don’t care as we will just keep paying him about every ten hours. It just makes the math easier. Annmarie is going to help me with the water system for the bull. She thinks we have enough of a gradient that we can simply insert a hose upstream and run it to a trough. I can then put an overflow from the trough out onto the ground. This will keep the water clean and keep the bull out of the water. I am all for this and we will be testing the theory soon. We could pump it also with a solar pump, this will work as the bull will really only be spending three to four months here out of the year and only during the summer. The pump can be very low volume, as little as 5 gallons an hour. I can wire a float switch system to keep it from running all the time. The first option is far cheaper.

It tried to rain on us while we were fencing. It never really put down enough rain to stop us or to knock the wheat kernels out of the the drying heads. I don’t mind those kind of showers when it is hot outside. I have been drinking more water but I need to increase my intake. I have noticed the last couple of years that I cannot go outside and work in 100+ degree heat all day any more. I get too tired and usually get sick. Ten years ago I did it all summer long, it is not happening any more. I do wear a long sleeve shirt when out in the sun and that helps considerably. All the teenagers think I am a freak when they see me dressed for work. They think shorts, tennis shoes and T-shirt are the go to garb when working in the summertime. I make them wear boots, jeans and gloves while they are working. I even supply the gloves if they don’t bring any. They learn over the course of a summer why we do things a little different on a farm.

Bully for us

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This week I have been trying to work on the bull enclosure. The best part of this is after last weekend I went and got a load of hay and had Mr Consumer unload it while I was at work! This is the absolute best way to move hay, by not moving it at all and letting someone else do it.

I decided to change my name for Mr Consumer. Its a big deal for me as I don’t usually do this but I just cannot pass up the opportunity to use a better one. His mother calls him Bubba! I cannot make this up and it is way cooler than my name! So I am switching forever and ever, this one time.

My nephew has been coming out to the house in the late evenings to help me out. We are focusing on the bull enclosure. Its slow going but we have been able to sink 6-8 posts every night. We are setting each post with gravel instead of putting the dirt back. This means we are staying out till 2130on the nights we can work. This means I just come home, eat dinner and then head out to the barn lot to work. This only works 2-3 evenings a week but it is a little more done every day and ultimately it will be done if I just keep at it.

The only lousy part is we are having to manually dig the holes the rest of the way. My tractor just won’t do it. A 16 pound breaker bar will move a lot of rocks a little way then we manually dig them out of the holes. Most of the time you have to dig them out by hand as the post hole digger doesn’t grab the rocks. It is amazing how you can literally break a rock in half with a steel bar and enough effort. I can tell we have been at this for over three weeks, my T-shirts are starting to not be as loose on me from the upper body muscles compensating for the hard work. Now if only this would contribute to a six pack ab set without having to work at it!

We are reusing some old cedar posts in an effort to keep costs down. I am hoping they will hold but the only real way to test this theory out is to build it, put the bull in there and see how it works. So we are going to do a trial by fire after completion.

If only it were easy

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I really want to get the bull enclosure finished but it is turning out to not be an easy project. My choice of locations is making it difficult. There is a hidden solid rock bluff just under the dirt on this hillside. This is good as the soil never really grows anything but bad when you talk about actually trying to drill a hole in the ground. Sarah came out to help me and she proved valuable. Its funny, I am not sure if I will ever outgrow riding my child verbally to work faster and hit harder even though she is an adult. I did the same thing when she was a child. It went well and she kept calling dibs on moving the tractor so I was hoofing it around the barn lot. I am trying to reuse some of the old cedar posts that have been on the farm 50+ years. I don’t want to put a railroad tie into every hole as there are over 50 holes and a railroad tie is $20/each nowadays. We are not certain the bull wont push over the posts so it is a guessing game. I am going to create solid corners and then anchor the two posts next to the corner on either side together with an overhead wooden support. This should keep the bull from tearing up the corners. I have put in one rock crib on every stretch and may have to put in two to keep him from pushing the fence outwards. We will see how it goes as we actually start building the fence. We are still just drilling holes and have managed to get 9 posts set in gravel and 6 more dropped in holes. I set all my wooden posts in gravel now. They stiffen up much nicer and I am hoping that they last longer, time will tell.

This corner arrangement will have a triangle shaped rock crib between these posts. The posts are 8 feet apart and my lovely wife tells me that is 32 Sqft. It will be four feet high so I am betting it will take about four hours just to fill this single corner up with rocks. I have five cribs so far that will take at least 16 hours just to collect rocks off the hillside and fill them up. On the plus side it does help cut down on the rocks on the hillside but since we are pretty sure rocks grow there it is an ongoing battle.

I had better luck digging some of the holes by hand. I could manipulate the smaller hand tool to get through the clay faster. I may even need to take a metal file to the teeth of the auger on my tractor. I can knock off the burrs and sharpen the auger teeth, the problem is if I do this it will dig faster but every time I hit a rock I will cringe even more than I do now and I hit a lot of rocks when digging holes!

This week I was looking out the kitchen window and realized that it just looked weird. The light was very dull and the ground was a very unnatural color. I ran out the front door with my cell phone and took the above purple blue tinged picture from the front porch. I wanted one without the power lines so I walked across the bridge and stood on my trailer. This took maybe a minute, what a difference that minute made in the view. Five minutes later this was all gone. It was an amazingly beautiful sight and one of my favorite pictures from the farm.

Auction day

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I got called into work on Friday night and managed to get out before midnight. As I was sitting in my car contemplating driving home I decided to read the paper and spotted a college farm surplus auction the next day at the local community college. I convinced Annmarie we should go in the morning, I think she really just wanted to go back to sleep. My argument was that by the time I paid someone to help me build a bull corral we could have just bought most of the panels at the auction for cheap. My only real fail in this thought process was that other people would think the same thing. We transferred money over into the checking account and drove the pickup and trailer into the auction on the off chance we would score lots of stuff. Unfortunately a lot of people came for the same thing we did. This made the bidding for some of the gates and panels steep. We had to bail on several gates and panels as they just sold for too much. We did score on the metal T fence posts and ended up getting over a 100 at only $1/each. I usually pay $2/each at the junk yard. We ended up with 244 lineal feet of panels, three corner horse feeders, 100 + T posts and a heavy duty welding table and vice. I wanted to get the welding table repaired from the machine shop but for $25 I got a much heavier table and another vice, which is way cheaper than I would have paid to repair the old. Annmarie got me signed up for the evening welding class this fall at BMCC , two nights a week. I am really looking forward to it as I am going to build our custom metal railings and back yard fence. I will just buy the material and weld it together myself.

The only real trouble with this is we stood around on the hot pavement in the sun for over five hours then loaded heavy panels onto the trailer and realized that this would not be a one trip show. When we got home I had muscles help me unload and then we went to get the second load. It filled the trailer and the pickup again. This time when we got home we unloaded and built a section of fence for the bull corral out of panels. We built it over the rock bluff portion of the enclosure. This is going to work out very nice. I will still need to build several rock cribs but it will be much faster than trying to dig into the rock. I have 2000 lf of 2×6 tamarack to pick up from the wood mill and 800 bf of 1×12″x16′ for the barn siding. I plan on doin this on Friday.

Mr Experience kept on working on floor trim while we did the outside work. I had a coworker come out and borrow my disc set. It went onto my trailer with some difficulty but it got easier after Annmarie made me remove the 400# of iron weights from on top of the discs!

Annmarie and I had to go get our bull from the neighbors place. He keeps sneaking over there to say high to the heifers. Unbeknownst to us he has had already been over visiting three times before we found out. The neighbor had been pushing him back through the culvert to our side of the road.

He was at the top of the hill and would not budge for Annmarie. We were going to push him down to the road then across it and over through a gate and into our property. He had other plans, first of which was not moving for any human being. He was a despondent rejected bull and he was not going any where. I had to drive back and use both dogs to get him moving. He ran right for the panel that was covering the culvert from the opposite side. I ended up wading into the creek and lifting the panel. Annmarie swore he would not go by with me standing so close to the opening. Once he figured out I was opening the gate he went right around me. I had brought some tools and extra 1/4 inch cable to install across our side of the culvert and then weave it into the panel in an attempt to keep the bull on our side of the fence. This whole process took about an hour to get completed. The best part of this was when we held the barb wire apart and told Zeke to jump and he popped between the wires but Mouse did the same thing with some encouragement. This was a first for him and he loaded up into the back of the pickup by himself and stayed in the back of the pickup! All of these are great accomplishments for a working dog.

If you look closely you can see the wall for the bull enclosure going up. I will need to set at least 3 rock cribs in place to hold the fence in place.

I am going to keep having Mr Experience and muscles come out and work on trim. Muscles stacked some loose wood in the barn and greased the tractor and fixed my truck exhaust also. I took him up on his offer to fix things. I even ordered new blades for the mower and as soon as they arrive I will have him install them also.