chickens

Predators 12/ Farm 8

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It was a sad day in Chickenville, many residents perished when the great big doglike predator decided to visit yesterday. Annmarie went outside with the grandbaby ready to depart the farm and spotted a coyote right next to the barn with a chicken in its mouth! She grabbed the wrong rifle and had a hard time getting a focus through the scope, they are all set for me. In the end she did not get a shot off. We have since decided that she can just grab the 30-30, it has open sights and from the house she can hit anything she can see with it.

She ended up walking the road up along all of our bottom pasture looking for the offender and spotted it ducking into the creek bed down near field #4. Again no shooting commenced, she does not believe that random fire in the last known location is an effective dissuasion. We differ on this belief but I was not the one out walking the field, I was in town shopping.

On a plus note the spring up in field #2 is putting water out again. It had dried up late summer.

When she came back and searched all around the barn all she could find was one lone hen and multiple different feather piles. There were no other hens near the barn. Annmarie was sure that the coyote had killed a rooster which is good as I have an extra. I could not count the chickens until after dark. They all need to go into the coop and settle down for me to get an accurate count. We do in fact still have three roosters, (they are hard to kill and are usually the last to succumb to the predators) and now only have 17 hens! This means we have lost 10 hens to the predators in recent days. I was pretty sure the count should be 25-27 hens. I had to look back three months on the chicken spreadsheet to find the last hen count.

Once again the predators are winning. It is a rare year that the farm comes out on top. We almost did it this year. When I was getting rocks last week I noticed a coyote dig under the fence into the wheat field. I am going to have to set out a trap again in very specific locations where they are crawling under the fence.

We had a bird hunter come out today and we asked that he watch for coyotes. He ended up shooting one coyote but no pheasants! Good for us, bad for him.

Treasures

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Sunday we went over to a neighbor’s house to finish getting his chicken coop ready for chickens. It now has chicken wire over all the windows and around the entire yard with bird netting over the entire chicken yard. He is all ready for chickens. I will hopefully be getting a few laying hens over there in the next week. He doesn’t want a rooster so I will have to get rid of the third rooster we now have. I usually only keep one rooster but we now have the chickens ranging up past the old chicken coop, behind the barn and up on the back hillside. Both roosters are trying very hard to keep apart and it is leading to a much wider roaming region.

Mr Rainman went over with me and we got our trailer loaded with an old cow feeder, a wind directional feeder, an old grain bin that used to be on a very old combine and an old cook stove. The cow feeder just needed rolled out into the pasture and filled with hay. The wind directional feeder needs a wire bucket installed so the hay will be contained while the horse is eating it. The grain bin is big and should hold a lot of grain but the entire bottom is rusted out. We poked holes in it while we were loading it. We knew this before we loaded it but reality set in when the tractor forks went through the floor. The stove just needs a wire wheel brush and some new stove black paint to get it back in shape.

We are going to put the stove in the gazebo. I will cut a vent hole in the door of the gazebo and make a covered wood pile out next to the corral. We won’t need that much wood and it will all have to be fairly small to fit into the fire box on the stove. The fire box and ash box are in great shape and do not need any repairs. The floor has to go into the gazebo before the stove can be set.

I will need to get some sheet metal to fix the grain bin. I am thinking 1/16” should be plenty thick. I am not sure what gauge of sheet metal that corresponds to, Google will have to tell me. Google says it is almost 14 gauge so I guess 14 gauge is what I will use. I will definitely need to practice first and I suspect the wire feed is going to be the key to my success when working with sheet metal.

The wheat field has gotten enough water to really shoot up and is doing well. The mild temperatures have been allowing it to grow.

Bathroom remodel day 50

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The deadline for the bathroom to be completed is our daughter’s wedding in January 2026. This seems to have become a mantra whispered, sung, stated regularly to ensure I do not forget. It is going to be close! After our grandson’s baptism today, Gingerman helped me get the cabinet into the bathroom.

The first thing I had to do was kill the power and get the outlet attached to the back of the cabinet. Luckily, my measurements were good and the hole lined up with the box on the wall. I was able to get it fit properly in my electric nook. I have another small extension that needs to be plugged in so I have enough plugs for all the various bathroom electric items. I just cannot remember at this point what safe spot I chose nine months ago. I am still in contemplation mode, I have not started tearing apart the mud room or old house yet. I think it’s in the back room of the old house but I am just not sure. We have been moving things around so there is no telling where it is actually located.

I was able to get four countersinked screws in the upper portion while leveling the cabinet. The trim near the wall is going to be painful to get lined up correctly. The wall is slanted and the wooden and tile portion are different thicknesses, I am going to have shape the trim piece to fit into the gap. Annmarie ordered metal hooks Sunday so we can hang hand towels next to the sink. I also think this will cut down on water splashes against the cabinet. I am going to carry the ceiling trim around the top of the cabinet to help incorporate it into the room. I had to bend the trim during removal so I will have to hope I have two more intact pieces out in the cellar. I know there is at least one leftover but I think there may be two. I will need to check that this week so I can order some if needed. I will also need to buy four feet of 4-5 inch oak for the foot and top of the cabinet.

When we turned that cabinet on its side to get it into the bathroom, there is about a 1/4” clearance from the ceiling. If I had made the cabinet any taller we would not have been able to stand it up in the bathroom. I would have had to try and shorten the bottom equally. I am not sure that would have gone smoothly as I would not have torn the cabinet apart again to do that.

I had some more straight run chickens grow up. I had to kill two extra roosters as I only want two. When I went into the coop for eggs tonight I saw one more extra roosters that will need to go. The chickens adjusted to daylight savings time well. They were all in the coop when I went out to get eggs.

Our first 30 bales of small round bales has been eaten by each group of cows. They each got another 15 bales today. The grass is green and the cows were not really interested in the hay. Not a single cow even budged or gave me a sideways glance when I was putting the hay out into the feeders.

I got the second coat of oil onto the $25 sewing cabinet we bought. It turned out really nice, a little Formbsy’s, tung oil and a lot of elbow grease made it a gem.

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.

Bathroom remodel day 26

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Well my vacation is over and the bathroom is not completed. I am sure that I am not the only man in history to utter those words. Wow, this has been a large complicated project. There have been more than a few setbacks but we are still moving forward. I was feeling so good about progress that I bet the wife that by two weeks from today we will be able to use the bathroom. This may have been premature as I figured out two more setbacks today.

Mr Rainman and I have been going at it every day for the last three days. I have been drinking nothing but coffee for days and not very much of that. So much so that last night my legs spent all night cramping up. Today I decided to up my water intake game and drank almost an entire container of V8 juice and spiking the glasses of V8 with liquid IV powder to give it more kick! The V8 hides most of the taste but I would like to sleep tonight so I am sticking with it. The shower walls are still not perfectly square so that has caused us some problems getting the tiles installed. The predone tiles stuck on a 12×12” mesh has caused us some difficulties. The gaps between tiles is sometimes way off and we have to try and move them around. It’s painful as you usually have to cut the mesh.

The All-set we are only mixing in 1/4 bag batches. Mr Rainman has been weighing it out and measuring all of the water. If the batch is too thick we lose working time (bucket time) and then have to waste it after a couple of hours. It has been taking me about three hours to use up a 1/4 of a bag of All-set. I am not the Flash. That is a lot of mixing and cleanup over the last few days.

The goal is to go into work early so I can leave early and get some more bathroom work done. We will see how this process goes.

Today we figured out that our metal tile trim will not work inside the shower. That tile is thinner than the tile we bought the trim for so it is too big. I will need to go over to Hermiston and trade it out for a smaller size. We also had the niches back wall completed when I realized there were no shelves installed. I had to do a search on Google and figure out that I should have cut the tile on the back wall to accommodate the shelf. We were able to tear out the tile, take it outside and wash the All-set off and then scrape the wall of the niches dry. After I get the new metal trim we will by dry fitting the entire niche before we even mix any mud up to ensure everything fits perfectly. To make this easier I got the boss to agree to another design change. We will be using our 2×6” tiles horizontally stacked so we can cut each one individually and make the outer edge of the niche clean and even.

The Gingerman was out over the weekend and he put together our new grain cracker/grinder and managed to mill about 100# of grain in 15-20 minutes. It works very well. So we will work on cracking the whole grain we are getting so it can be stored that way. In the spring, once it warms up we can just put the grain in a five gallon bucket and let it sprout, then toss it to the chickens.

Mr Rainman put up our new salt tasting center for the sheep. We found a place online that sells about 25 different mineral concentrations for goats/sheep. The idea is that the animals will eat what they need and by paying attention to it you will know what they are short on in their diet. He put this up a few days ago and I spotted the sheep in the back barn lot eating their type of salt. In a week or two we will look and see what type they are eating. Annmarie made labels engraved onto metal plates that we attached above the bins. This way we know exactly what is in each bin.