chicks

Spring activities continue

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Despite the need to finish the bathroom other work still has to happen on the farm. Mr Rainman came out on Monday evening to help me sort and load cows. We wanted to sell off our four largest Dexter cows, there were 11 for sale and we don’t have enough meat customers for that many animals. I happened to look into the stock trailer while Mr Rainman was hooking it up and spotted the kittens. I just tossed two pallets over a couple of horizontal telephone poles to make a cubby and then moved the kittens out into that hiding spot. It was only about eight feet from where they were originally. I figured out the momma would hear them and deal with it. She did, Annmarie spotted her moving the kittens an hour later.

We got the four cows separated from the other seven and loaded them into the trailer. Only one refused to go into the trailer. She had gotten turned around and would not back up. We just let her out of the chute and ran her around again. This time we did not let her slow down in the chute so she could not turn around . As always it was a five minute gig to just drop off the cows at the auction. We got the check on Saturday. We had one heifer and three steers. The heifer sold for $2/# and steers $1.75/#. They did very good. I was hoping for $1.50/#.

I was able to get another friend to hatch out a dozen straight run chicks for me. She will replace any roosters with new chicks when I can determine gender. I thought I had eliminated all but two of the roosters from the January batch but yesterday I saw two crow that were not on my list! I only want two roosters so I will be looking a lot closer to determine who is a rooster and who isn’t. I will have to thin out at least three more I think. One of the new chicks died by fratricide. Its fellow baby chicken sat on it after it got behind the feeder. So now there are 11 chicks.

Our asparagus did not die last year! We had four shoots pop up from the strawberries this week. We planted ten plants but it is just now starting to warm up at our house consistently and we think that is why we are behind our neighbors on growth rate. We still only have four shoots buy there is still some life and we thought we had killed it all. We want to get another container going for just asparagus.

We had a lamb that got sick and had to be put down. We have had two more sets of twin lambs and think we are all done lambing. We have put all of the sheep back together into one herd. We are only locking them up into the ram pasture now at night. They can go in and out of the barn freely as they want.

Annmarie is working on getting all of the garden, lavender, herb water going today but as always there is some part we are needing to get the job done. She has a shed full of drip line and 1/2” PVC connectors but there is always one thing. We will keep working on this until it is done.

Bathroom day 29

Steve Hardin1 Comment

I have started to change how I am counting days on the bathroom remodel. I am now only counting the days when I work on the bathroom. Otherwise, the days I worked at the paying job would count against me. Now mind you, the project is going so well that I had to set up a portable shower in the mud room on Saturday night and on Sunday morning I had to make some modifications so it would drain correctly. Annmarie will now be able to take a shower whenever she wants which’s is typically at 0430. This is especially important since she is super busy during Lent. I was told that if I had started the project in January I would have gotten an extra month! I was not ready for it in January. At this point, I am not sure I really was ready for it at all.

Mr Rainman and I have been plugging away at it when I can get away from work. I was able to get home early one day last week but I had to go in at 0400 two other days to ensure I got all of my work completed. We have discovered that precutting most of the tile before we mix the All-set is the best way to get tiling done in a timely manner. I had measured and started to cut 76 tiles for the niche narrow walls but when we went to insert the niche it was discovered that I had not accounted for the metal trim and we needed to cut off another 1/4” of tile for them to fit. Mr Rainman cut tiles as fast as he could while I tried to get the shelf installed correctly. We managed to get one niche installed today. There are times the two of us bicker like old ladies. We cannot tell what the other one wants. Usually he cannot tell what I am saying. We get it figured out eventually.

Unfortunately, it is not all tile work. Mr Rainman went up and shut the gates to field 2 and fed the sheep this morning while I fixed the portable shower. He also took bodies to the boneyard. He did say that every rose bush all the way up to the triangle had a small covey of quail in it. They are starting to separate and find breeding partners. We have a lot of pheasants left over from the winter. If spring cooperates with the laying cycles then we will have a lot of game birds this fall. We also have isolated the sheep to the barn lot, ram pasture and area around the old chicken coop. They should start having lambs in the next 2-3 weeks and we want to be able to find them. Once they start birthing we will be locking them up in the barn at night. It makes it a whole lot easier to find and deal with the babies when they are all in the barn. We may need to make jugs next week in the barn so we are ready for the lambs.

Annmarie and I did a thing this week. We bought the other half of the farm from her aunt, Beverly on Thursday. It will take us about ten years to pay it off. We did the math and it will never make enough to pay itself off in our lifetime, it would take 30+ years to pay itself off. We bought it so the farm could eventually be put back together. This is something we have wanted to do for a long time and are fortunate to be able to afford it. Our only real focus on it will be to eradicate some star thistle. Eventually, we will need to repair some fencing.

The baby chickens keep trying to die. I have been having to go out every night and toss the chickens in the door. They keep getting locked out of the coop. I have had to toss in as many as 20 chickens a night. The last few nights the numbers have been steadily decreasing and they are mostly the babies. Tonight when I went out there were none outside! They had all made it inside before the auto chicken door closed. There is hope for them yet. I just need to see how many are hens and how many are roosters now. I should be able to tell in the next 1-2 months. I am going to keep one of the roosters.

Bathroom day 6

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It doesn’t seem like I got a lot done over the weekend without Mr Rainman helping but the wiring I could do without cutting out the bathroom floor is done! I also spent a lot of time looking at problems and how to get around them.

Today, Mr Rainman came out and we started with him just cutting boards for a couple of hours. I was able to get the chimney wall all covered so that it can now have plywood applied. I needed to get the boards to stick out past the chimney. I was going to just line the whole wall with 2×6 but Annmarie told me that was overkill. So I lined them up every other instead. Of course I had them up for about 30 minutes before I realized that I had covered up the recessed shelving space. So I had to cut out the recessed areas.

We also had to trim some board at the ceiling height, it was going to throw off the plywood. He cut all the boards for the pocket door rough opening but we had to shim one side to get it square, level and perpendicular to the wall. We had three more places where we had to put fill in 2×4 so there was something to attach the plywood to in the corners.

Mr Rainman cut out the floor and we realized that they had cut the floor joist eons ago to install the toilet. We suspect it was the original. Unfortunately, they did not just box it out so we ended up putting in several support pieces so we can install the new subfloor.

I was crowing about how awesome we were doing when I remembered I had to crawl under the house and move two wires into the walls, not just next to them. The underside of the house is dirty and there are a gazillion spiderwebs that kept getting in my face. I had to crawl around on my belly to access the wires.

It was at this point that it dawned on me that we had not yet run power from the breaker box to the bathroom for the new overhead built in heater. I had Mr Rainman feed me the wire and I crawled about halfway when Annmarie came home and said she had a student meeting. I needed to kill all power to the house. When turning off the water or power always check in with your spouse. So I had an excuse to not finish the power install today. Plus, you never know when you are going to hit a snag and the power may need to stay off all night!

I had forgotten that I had tripped breaker #29 to rewire the two outlets in the living room. The cables had to be moved to fix the floor. Annmarie could not turn on the overhead living room light so I had to go fix the outlet so I could turn the power back on.

The pocket door kit was delivered this evening! It is still in the box and will need to be trimmed to fit our 29.75” door. We are going to reuse the original door as our pocket door. I am going to install the frame without the floor roughed in. This will let me move the tile under the door pathway. I am about three inches too short on the door for it to not have a gap at the floor. I will build up the floor about 1.25” and I think I can lower the door about an inch, so now I only have to add on 1” of wood at the top of the door to make it work. The patch job will be hidden at the top of the channel and I doubt anyone will notice.

I tried to get the baby chicks to come out of their area in the coop yesterday. I opened up the door and propped it open so they could intermingle with the older hens. They failed at their assignment. So today I tossed them all out, shut the door so they could not go back and put them in the area below the nesting boxes. I did use the heat lamp on that side of the coop for just this reason. They are only two months old and do have all their feathers but they are not big chickens. This should force more interaction between them and the adults.

Bathroom remodel prep work

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Winter can be seen from our house, the foothills of the Blue Mountains are covered in snow and on top the local snowpack is 175% of normal. It’s 44 F today at our house and the most we get is rain on a fairly regular basis now. It is supposed to rain almost every day this week. Of course I never bother to look at the weather person predictions unless we are spraying or cutting hay so I thought it would be a great idea to move some dry wood around on the farm.

Mr Rainman had emptied out one of the old grain bins and the plan is to get all of the rough cut black walnut and maple out there and store it until it is needed for some project. All of the trees were obtained from family or friends for the labor of removing them from the property. I had them custom cut into slabs at our local mini mill. The hardest part is having the space to sticker them and let them dry out. We have had the maple for over 15 years and some of the black walnut for eight years. I have one massive piece of 10 foot black walnut that is 20” wide with one raw edge and 18’ thick, ten feet long. It has split in two almost dead center so that there are now two pieces with a live edge. It has another 5 years to dry out, you only get 1” per year when air drying. The large crack will help it dry out faster as it is almost 1/2” in width. I wanted to get it all in one spot where we do not go, it won’t get damaged so we can use our other spaces. I have about 1/3 of the old chicken coop full of rough cut wood. I would like to get that wood all moved out, do some slight rearranging in the chicken coop and then I can move out most of the tools and storage from the old house. This will give me an open room for projects near the house. A lot of what is in the old house is in bins for various types of activity. There is a bin for working sheet rock, bin for installing ceramic tile, bin for painting, shelf of finishing nailers and supplies, several bins for wiring a house, various organizers for parts, nails, screws and a shelf for ice fishing. I have not been in 20 years, but there are a lot of mini rods!

Gingerman and I went out yesterday and started to load the flatbed with black walnut boards, 1” thick, then 2” then we got to the 3” slabs that are ten feet long and those are heavy! We got the first load all onto the trailer and had a plan to come back for the maple. The rest of the black walnut is in the main barn off of one of the hay rooms and is not currently in the way. We drove to the grain bin over the sketchy culvert I have in the barn lot. It really needs to be dug out and reset as the water is going through, under, and alongside it. This is causing the dirt to collapse so I keep jamming large boulders alongside the culvert to prevent anything from falling into the gap. I have a couple more years before total failure hits. We ended up needing to take out the door metal supports on the grain bin, these add structural strength to the door so it does not blow out when grain is in the bin. I swept up and as we were finishing cleaning it started to rain. So now our dry wood is getting wet and I did not bring enough stickers to put between the slabs. We hustled and got all the wood in and set some leaning on the perimeter to be stacked next time we try and move wood.

I really want to get this done in the next week so I can build the bathroom cabinet in the current storage room. It would help immensely.

Since it was raining I decided to back to working on the new bathroom vanity. Gingerman helped me and we got the holes for the sink and faucet placed on the dresser top. I had found some boards out in the old chicken coop to use on the dresser transformation to vanity. The dresser is made out of oak but I am not adding oak pieces for the transformation. I will stick with some Douglas fir and stain it. I was able to get the large drawer put together with nails and glue, it needs to spend the night in the office to dry. I will be able to cut the back out of it once dry and it will still work as a partial drawer, over one half was able to be saved. I have a small drawer on the top that will only be about 3-4” deep. I may put a couple of 2” long spots on the side, I have not decided yet as to whether they would actually be usable.

We were fortunate enough to get more baby chicks on Friday from Mr Horse Tamer. He has an incubator and started 30 eggs, we got 29 straight run chicks. I spent Friday evening putting down new bedding, food and water in the baby chicks area for them. One had splayed legs and he told me to tape the legs together for 24 hours and it sometimes gives the hip muscles time to firm up and the chicks will do well. Gingerman and I took the tape off the next day and the chick is moving around and doing great. We had one yellow chick just die but everyone else is doing great. They have a heat lamp and a heat shelter so even though they are in an unheated coop they are staying nice and warm. I decided to use the heat lamp in conjunction with the shelter as it will also keep the water from freezing solid if it gets that cold.

The check came from the auction and we were gloriously surprised! Those 18 whethers weighed on average 98# and sold for $160/each! They killed it, the auction website said the average price for lambs was $55-150. We scored, those sheep looked amazing, the timing and quantity all rolled up to form the perfect circumstances.

Experiment a success

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Today we went and picked up the sheep from Hermiston. They probably could have gone a couple more weeks but we can maybe start a little earlier next year. It was a success for the land owner and the field looks great. Their first cutting of hay next year will look very nice. We brought all of our light panels from the barn and were able to form a chute to the trailers. Initially, we had a Y setup but the stupid sheep did not want to go through the chute system so we had to push them and do one trailer at a time. We took down the temporary fence and rolled it all up, we will reuse it next year. The field was so wet that no one used the water trough, they just drank from the various low spots that had a few inches of water. We ended up just loading up all of the sheep into the two trailers then drove them to our house. We backed up to the corral and then unloaded each trailer into the corral area and then we sorted the sheep off into three batches. One group went back into the trailer-those were Wil’s, one group to the back pen-all boys, and last group was all females and the two rams. Since we have three pens that worked great and all of us managed a single gate to move them in or out of the chute as they were moved in. This worked great and took us about 45 minutes.

Once Mr Horse Tamer had his and left we sorted off all of the lambs and put them back in with their mothers. We also sorted off the two rams and moved them into Alcatraz. Then we sorted the boys and took 13 off that are already sold and turned them in with the mothers. They won’t get slaughtered until early January. That left us with 18 lambs that will go to the auction next week. This will be the first time we have ever taken any to the auction so we hope it treats us well, but you never know. We had to move the feeders back into the barn and filled them all with hay. We won’t have lambs until early April 2025.

Mr Rainman and I worked on getting the bee shelter completed this week. He got the posts set and frame built. I made a trip to Home Depot and got three sheets of roofing tin at $45/each. The prices for materials these days are amazingly bad. Now is not the time to build a new building. We were able to use up the last of the 1x8x8’ boards on the shelter. We had to go to a board and batten siding pattern as we did not have enough lumber to go over each side twice. It is very loud inside the enclosure when someone is working on the roof with an impact driver. If the bees complain of the noise we can line the roof with plywood to dampen the sound. I will wait for the complaint department to voice an issue before doing this. We did have to put up a panel to keep the alpaca and cows out of the shelter, they had already found it before we had the roof on it and were hanging around. I had opened up the orchard to allow them to come in and knock down the foot tall grass. Now that there are no leaves on the trees they will leave them alone.

We were also able to but the boards on the new rock crib on the corral. It used up the last two rough cut 2×8 inch tamarack boards I had left from building Alcatraz. We cobbled it together and Mr Rainman will fill it with rocks tomorrow and put a panel over the new gate so the sheep don’t crawl under or through it. We used the old gate today to keep them from going through the new gate, by propping it on the inside of the new gate.

We have finally started getting eggs again, we are getting about a 30% production rate which is normal for us in the winter. Wil is hatching 30 chicks for us so that should get us 15 more hens. By mid summer we should be back up to 30 hens.

After all of that today, I needed a nap and I got one!