cleanup

Cleanup day 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

This has been a long week for me. I have been working at the paying job during the day and fixing haying equipment and haying after work. I cut the hay on Sunday and then turned it on Tuesday after I got the tire for the new tractor repaired and installed. I had to tighten bolts on the power rake so I could rake. I was able to do that with a little bit of tractor light. I spent Wednesday after work on repairing the baler. I was able to get most of it repaired but on Thursday it still took me two hours to finish it. I had to clean up hydraulic fluid from the entire outside so I could get to the hose with a micro-hole in it replaced. The dirt and dust and hay had formed quite the layer of gunk all over the baler. I baled Thursday night until 0130 when the grass started to get super wet. I did not manage to get the baler as silent as it used to be but it worked like a charm after I replaced the guts.

Friday morning the Quiet One was coming over at 0700 or so I thought. Annmarie told me that she was here at 0630. Turns out I had said 0600 and forgot. I was out the door and working by 0705. We worked on getting the greenhouse finished. It took us until 1300 to get it all assembled except for the front door which I can do alone. The Quiet One was going bear hunting and wanted to get up there early on Friday afternoon. I needed to finish baling hay so I did that after dinner and was home by dark. I had made arrangements to have a couple of teenage brothers come out on Saturday and Sunday to help me clean up. The plan is to get the yard all ready for the grandson’s birthday party. I won’t have the bricks laid on the floor in the Gazebo but all of the trash and stuff will be put away. At least that is the plan. It will depend on how hard they work. I am sure their father has warned them about my work ethic and expectations.

The boys came out this morning and we started to work immediately. I had them bring lunches so we could stop for lunch and they would not have to go anywhere. Especially since they are not driving and had to be dropped off. My plan was to just start out by the driveway and slowly work our way toward the house. I figured it all has to be done but doing it this way creates a systematic plan. Plus, to clean up the driveway we had to empty out both broken cars that are going to the scrapyard. The pickup we were able to tow with the tractor. I tried to start it and it actually tried once to start so when we towed it to the machine shed I put the battery charger on it. I would love to drive them both to the junkyard. Weeds got pulled, trash got tossed, vehicles cleaned out, scrap moved to the burn pile or metal pile. The bags of soil that I had not taken out to the garden got loaded into the tractor bucket and taken over to the garden, cut open and both troughs are now full of soil. After a couple of hours on the driveway we hooked up the flat bed trailer to the tractor and drove over to pickup all of the hay I had just baled. They picked up almost 90 bales of beautiful grass hay. We are going to trade the grass hay for some large alfalfa bales that can be easily fed to the cows this winter.

Mr Toad was on the front hillside just jumping around. I might have disturbed him when I was pulling up thistles.

After we had filled up the troughs with soil I noticed a couple of buzzards flying around and landing in the apple tree. I love the buzzards. We did not used to have any and it was hard to tell if something had died. Nowadays I can always tell when there is a carcass on the farm as they show up and circle it. Today was no exception, there was an old dead ewe under the apple tree. We left her and I said we would come back later today and take care of her.

After lunch the vehicle items migrated into the house or out back of it to be addressed at a later time. I am sticking to the plan and cleaning as we go. I had been working on knicknames for them all day long. I had Mr Shady (older brother) doing weed eating after they cleaned up all of the branches. I had the T-shirt Bandit raking sand in the gazebo. The sand had gotten all blown up against one side of the gazebo. I looked over once and he was on his cell phone. There was a round of verbal prompting on the correct location for the phone and it was never an issue for the rest of the day. After he raked it was time to go deal with the corpse. I was able to get the tractor bucket fairly close to the corpse. The T-shirt Bandit kept trying to hold his T-shirt over his nose like a bandit would in an old time stagecoach robbery. I think he thought it was going to make things smell better, it did not. It was pretty rank.

Once we got that carcass dropped off we came back to the yard and beat up on the trumpet vine. I am trying to get it to grow on its trellis so we wound it around the trellis and tied it up in several places in the hopes that it would grow where it is supposed to. I cut away every thing that was growing against the house. Occasionally, I get a little overly excited and cut out too much of the vine but it cannot grow under the expensive siding we just got done last year!

We still have some holes to fill in yard and I am going to clean off the old house porch plus clean up the garden area in the back of the house. We are doing so well I am thinking about trying to get the rock wall completed also! Mr Shady kept his sunglasses on the entire time and just kept working. It was refreshing.

Cleanup day

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Sunday we focused on getting the Rambler set up to grind grain. I walked him through it for about 20 minutes then cut him loose. We had two 55 gallon drums set by the grinder and we set it up next to the chicken coop so he could just carry the buckets into the back of the coop and dump them into drums. There is no way to move the full drums into the back of the coop so this has to be done a bucket at a time. He did pretty good but as soon as he was close to getting finished we brought over two more drums full of grain. He thought he was done and Mr Rainman and I told him there was more after this and he just needed to keep going. We ended up loading four more 55 gallon drums into the back of the chicken coop and we still need to fill 2.5 drums. I am sure once they are all full we will be able to go eight months.

I have an old grain bin that can be mounted outside the coop and a feed hole can be cut into the side of the building. It should hold about 800# and can be loaded from the outside. It needs a new bottom welded on it. I am thinking a piece of 3/32” sheet metal. I am sure the grain gate will need to be altered so it can be manipulated from inside the building. I may even move the gate to the bottom of a long chute so it can be placed inside the coop. I won’t really know until we have the bin moved over to the machine shed and we can take some measurements.

Once the Rambler was set we went to clean up the old house. Annmarie wants the porch cleared so we neatened it and removed the scrap wood. The inside still had tools and materials scattered about from the bathroom project. So we created a huge trash pile and started to put tools away. Tools went into the old house, the old chicken coop, the machine shed and the fencing shed. The Gingerman brought out some more concrete chunks and we dumped them next to the culvert in an attempt to harden the one edge from the flooding water. Hopefully, we will not see any more flooding! But since the weatherman has a hard time predicting the weather, who really knows if it will flood.

There is a little frog living in the root cellar! It is bouncing between the top three stairs. If it likes spiders then there is a lot of food down there. I had to clean out all of the cobwebs before I could go down the stairs. The entire stair area was full of cobwebs. It had been a while since I had been down there. I store all of the construction materials that are unique and we may need to repair in the future. I put some bathroom tiles and metal trim down in the root cellar.

The sheep have been hollering like they are dying. No one likes to get weaned. We had a hard time driving the tractor through the barn lot as the sheep on both sides kept trying to bum rush the gate every time it was opened. The babies had managed to crawl under the creek crossing so we went out and lowered the panels so they cannot get out.

After that we went out and cleaned up amount 75% of the machine shed. We had filled the trash can up already so there is a large pile in the machine shed. I will keep throwing some in every week until I make it vanish. There were parts bins and tools all over from when I was repairing all of the haying equipment. I also replaced the outlet on the wall. I had been too aggressive with a screwdriver the day before trying to reset the GFI trip, it does work again.

We then trimmed the trumpet vine away from the roof and the house siding. I am trying to get a runner onto the new section of trellis around our living room window. It is looking promising. I would like to get a few branches trained then I can kill all the other suckers coming out of the ground. We tossed all the cuttings over the fence for the sheep. They love to eat most plans and trumpet vine is no exception.

I spent the last half an hour with the Rambler. He had stopped grinding to think about a more efficient way to grind grain. So we were so efficient with my system that he could hardly keep up with the grinder unloading and loading and moving the ground material into the chicken coop. He was covered in flour and looked like a ghost. He had it out with the sheep early on as they kept sneaking up on him to stick their nose in and get some grain. Before he knew it he had 20 sheep pushing in and trying to get a mouthful of grain. By the time I came over in the afternoon there were no sheep around. They decided it was easier to find a meal elsewhere. We did end up dumping out one bag of grain that had too many rocks in it. The sheep do not care and will eat it in any fashion offered. I may take the sheep in to the auction. We know someone who took little ones in and got $120-140/each. I would gladly take that price. I need to look at my work calendar to decide when it will be feasible to take a Tuesday off to drive them over to the auction.

I did find out that the dead raccoon was on the fence and had not been moved out to the bone pile. So I had to use a shovel to scoop it up and toss it in the tractor bucket for its eternal resting trip.

Our plan in two weeks is to work the cows to tag and band the calves. There are still only three calves from our six cows. One of the cows was fairly young so it is not surprising she does not have a calf. We did have one of the cows slough a baby, it looked malformed and incomplete, so there is really only one slacker.