cows

Bull fence

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Today I finished painting the downstairs! I even considered starting in on the wood trim downstairs but I really want to do the windows first as the bugs have started coming around. I have the caulk to seal the wood trim to the window and the walls so no bug can sneak through. But the wooden shims have not arrived yet. I purchased a box of them and they will be here this week. I wanted cedar shims and I am going to leave the cedar closet lining boards I put up in the windows temporarily in place and just put the trim over them. They have helped keep the bugs out.

So instead I went out and started working on the Bull Enclosure. It will house the rams also when we are not using them. We have decided to pull the male species off of their respective herds at least a month prior to anyone having a baby. We don’t want the mothers to be stressed or harassed. I marked of a pen in the barn lot that will allow us to use the old lamb shed and lean to out back as shelter. The shed will be off limits unless we allow access. I have set it up so I have opposing gates that will allow us to block off the shed or allow them access to the shed and no where else. I broke out the hot pink paint marker and a tape measure and put a T sign every 8 feet. I will need to dig 57 holes! I think if I reuse what is present and use the old cedar posts I think I can come up with 40 posts maybe 45. I will buy the rest. I want to use railroad ties in the corners and two next to each gate side. I am going to install a 10 foot gate near the shed and another 8 foot gate on the back side of the fence past the lean to. I am contemplating one more near the culvert, but I don’t think so. Each gate is a weakness to be exploited by the bull. I managed to get 11 holes started tonight. I was unable to drill a single hole down to the depth needed even as wet as it has been.

The mistress was working hard and I had to replace one bolt on the auger and just as it was getting dark the shear bolt for the auger gave so tomorrow I will need to replace it before I can get started. My goal is to get all the holes started this week and then take a five gallon bucket of water and put it in each hole. I will do this every day and then drill it out the next day until all the holes are the right depth. I will start setting posts as soon as I can get a hole down to the right depth. I will set all the posts and put woven wire and smooth wire on the outside of the fence and I will line the inside of the fence with 2×6 boards. I will have to go 4 boards high to provide a sufficient barrier. So I will need to buy 2000 linear feet of 2×6 which also happens to be 2000 board feet. I want to buy 16 foot boards as I put the spacing at 8 feet apart, this means I need 125 boards. I will also need a saw and a whole bunch more wood anchors, another 500. This is the expensive part. That will cost me around $400 just for the metal screws.

I have the 10 foot gate, I will have to go scrounge around in my gate pile to see if I have another 8 foot gate. I may need to use a 6 foot gate.

The sheep have been hanging out on the back hillside. The gate nearest the creek is so badly damaged that it is not useful and needs to be replaced. I have simply not gotten to it and the sheep needed to go out on the back hillside anyways. We have had so much rain in the past few days that the back creek is up about 8 inches and running muddy.

Some days life chooses your direction

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I came home on time today after picking up groceries for Easter brunch. The sheep are “mowing” the front lawn so you have to be very careful as you make your way down the steps, across the bridge and onto the stepping stones to the front porch, there are a lot of sheep bombs. I had two loads of stuff to bring in and on the first load I failed to latch the gate securely. This caused a mass exodus from the front yard out into the car area in front of both houses. I managed to spot it and stop about half the herd from leaving. So now we only need to get 40 sheep back in instead of 80. I told Annmarie I would be right back and took the dogs to get them back. We wandered out through the ram pasture. I have been popping thistles all week with my pocket knife and spotted a few I missed so I got those. As I walked by the bridge over the ditch I noticed that it was clogged with tumbleweeds so I waded in and pulled all those out and an old piece of tin I found. I slowly started heading to the barn. I let the horses out and closed the front barn lot off and left the main gate open so we could push the sheep into a secure area. This is when my phone rang, Annmarie wanted to know where I was as she was heading out to help and the sheep were now down at her mother’s house and she was trying to push them toward our house because the alpaca were herding the sheep.

We had to push them around her house and back up to ours. Just as we got all the gates shut and were headed back to the house Annmarie spotted a ewe that was stuck in the orchard and her baby was in our front yard. She went to go deal with that while I snuck off to take care of chickens. After grabbing my second egg the cell phone went off, it was Annmarie there were two separate babies separated and where was I? I left the eggs and went and helped corral the last two sheep. All the sheep were behind the barn and we were getting ready to go inside when Annmarie looked up on the hillside and spotted the Bull outside his area. He was on the open hillside which means he had to have pushed through the creek crossing after I tried booby trapping it. This contraption had lasted for almost three weeks without him thwarting it. I was able to go up to the hillside and have him follow me up and through the gate. I even managed to find a coffee cup out near the fence that I had forgotten when I was building my contraption. The bull ambled down toward the other cows and all was good with the world. We headed back to the house and just as we got to the hillside gate we spotted the bull going through the ram pasture. He had gone down and pushed through the creek crossing behind the house and then went straight to the creek crossing behind the barn he tore up last year and up to the fence next to the heifers. It looked like he had spent a large portion of the day alongside the fence. It was pushed over in areas and there was a beaten path alongside it. Annmarie tried to push the bull back out with the dogs but this went no where as the dogs kept circling around and pushing the bull the wrong way. Annmarie had to be in to town so I took over. It took me another hour of pushing him around to get him to go back down to the other cows.

It was painful for me, the bull and the dogs. I then had to go up to the incomplete fence line and wire up the upper gate and wire up the two bottom gates. I then went and redid the creek crossing behind the house. Then I went and got a heavy metal gate and wired and tied it in place over the ram pasture ditch crossing. I used a lot of bailing twine to get it to hold. There is no flex in that sucker now so he cannot shimmy under it. I also cleaned out the ditch for about 30 feet while I was here. I wear rubber boots all the time now when working outside. It works for me and I can easily clean them off. I need to get in here and rework this fence crossing. I have just about decided that I need to string cable across the bottoms of the ditch so I can clip in the panels during the summer so that the bull cannot lift them. I need to do five separate crossings this way to keep him in. I really need to build the bull enclosure inside the barn lot so we can keep him separate from the heifers when we want.

Tomorrow I will be completing the fence running up the back hill and installing all the gates in that fence permanently regardless of what the weather is doing. I need two fences between him and the heifers.

Gizmo and Bo, the cat were keeping Annmarie company while she worked until eh home office today. They were sucking up a little extra heat from each other and the freestanding heater.

Thank goodness my paying job starts again tomorrow!

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I finally managed to do something I had not done yet and get the tractor high centered. This doesn’t seem like a big deal at first but I was going downhill and pushing a huge rock so I was not paying attention to the rocks in front of me. I ended up getting both back tires off of the ground! I had to use the bucket to push me back and four wheel drive to let the front tires push us off the rock. The mistress yet again came through for me.

I really wanted to get the last two rock cribs filled up with rocks today. Surprisingly, I did not wake up with my back feeling like I had been kicked repeatedly. My butt felt like i had hiked for 25 miles and was sore all over, so i must have been lifting right. I was attempting to maintain perfect posture while lifting. I started around 0900 and only took a light coat and light hat. Yesterday, I started out with too many clothes and had to keep taking them off. I just decided that to stay warm I could work faster.

My goal for the day was to clear the rocks from one side of the new fence line so I can drive the pickup down the fence row to work on it. This proved to be harder than I anticipated. The rock cribs hold a lot of rocks but the hillside is littered with them. I hardly made a dent. There are a couple of patches where I got all the rocks. Looking up on the hillside you really cannot tell where I picked rocks. I stopped for a lunch of Gatorade, granola bars and hot coffee from the back of the mistress. Some people wonder why I work so hard at home. The above picture is why, it was an absolute beautiful day, no wind, not too hot, sun was shining and spring is coming. I sat there and drank a cup of hot coffee from a thermos I had in my tractor canvas bag. It was an amazing cup of coffee.

I also got the road cleared of rocks almost to the top of the hill and graded out a spot for a six foot gate to be installed next to the vehicle gate. This way we can open the small gate for animal only access.

I now need 35 T-posts, 35 wooden stays, four railroad ties and two horizontal supports for H braces. The real question will be if I can drill four holes with the tractor. If I cannot do that then I need to build two more rock cribs!!Ready for double gates

Stop the bull

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Friday was the day to start back up outside. Yes, I still have painting to do inside the house but we still have baby chicks in the dining room and Annmarie doesn’t want me poisoning them. So that leaves chores outside. I considered working on the bull enclosure in the barn lot. I need to drill a bunch of holes in the dirt if I can. The trouble with this is the Bull is still causing me troubles by trying to get to the isolated heifers. So the fence up the back hillside has become a priority. I will run a fence from just behind the house up the hill to the rock crib you can see in the below picture. This is going to be brutal as the the entire hillside is one big rock pile with a solid rock bluff in the middle. Before I could make it to the back hillside with the tractor I decided to try and level off the land behind the barn. It is still too muddy, but while I was back there I decided to dig down both old paths that got worn down. This will make it easier to get to the barn when its muddy out. I did notice that my board keeping the dirt ramp in place is starting to break. I am going to have to tear it out and put in a couple of railroad ties soon. I need about another 35 railroad ties. Unfortunately, they don’t give those things away. I have been watching facebook classifieds and Craigslist but have not scored yet. I found one place recently but the poles were used in a vineyard. Those are usually only 3 inches in diameter and I need at least 6 inch.

I spent almost seven hours dragging the old road to clear it of rocks and create a wide spot for a gate. I am thinking about installing a 12 foot gate, another 4 foot diameter rock crib and a 6 foot human gate near the house. I will put another 12 foot gate on top of the hill. I also drug a path down the hillside and tried to clear out all the rocks in the way. I managed to get all the rocks cleaned out of a small four feet strip.

Once I had the fence path cleared and I attempted to create a few level spots for the wire cages I went and got some old cow panels. I was able to reuse the ones I had just gotten from the same place I purchased the culverts. I drug five panels up onto the hillside behind the tractor. I then cut off just the end vertical piece. This allows me to kinda roll it up like a piece of playdoh. The problem with this is it doesn’t want to go into this shape. I also have to put a lot of effort and body weight into the process to get the metal to form a circle so I can then bend the horizontal ends around the opposite vertical creating a ring. This ring then gets a wooden post nailed in it and filled with rocks. Once it is full of rocks it is virtually indestructible. I was bending the third one when I made a mistake. I had kinked it in half and was trying to get it to form a circle. It just was not going so I jumped on it and ended up rolling up onto it and down the hill. Did I mention I was doing this on a steep hillside? Luckily, I did not go over the entire top and get thrown over the top and onto my back. Instead, at the zenith I went off the right side and came down onto the ground on my hands and knees. I did mention the entire hillside is covered in rocks? It hurt my knee a lot, I hollered and rolled around as the song Tainted Love played. It hurt something fierce. I finally managed to get it to a dull roar and just laid out on the hillside after finding a rock free location. I almost went to sleep but I was afraid that Annmarie or my mother in law would spot me and think I was injured and call the ambulance. So I gave up on the dream of a nice pleasant nap and got up and finished two more wire circles.

Hormones are the male species greatest weakness

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Today was the day to crank out the hallway and another wall in the living room with new paint. The downfall to this is I need to put blue tape everywhere first. I was almost done with the taping when I got a call from my nephew stating that the bull was no longer in his area and was standing outside the separated heifers enclosure. This means he got out again! I know where the hole is, he has to be going under the fence at the creek crossing. The problem with this is I cannot lower the fence down into the water because the spring runoff has not happened yet. If I lower the fence then Mother Nature will rip it all down with a sudden deluge of runoff in the back creek. I grabbed the dogs and walked up the back hillside to the upper gate and opened it up. I was thinking we could drive the Bull back up the hill and inside his area. This did not work as he did drive to the corner but then crawled under the fence again. Ugh! I just remembered at 8:00pm that I forgot to close the stupid upper gate!! Now I gotta go trudge up there in the dark and check for the bull then close the gate! There are days that the farm life is more work and less play than others.

Stupid dogs chased the bull out quickly then when I used them to try and push him away from the creek opening they pushed him back through the opening! We had to start all over again. The second time through I decided I needed to make something that would allow the water to run past but would keep the Bull from getting back through. I thought about making a T-post fence by driving a T-post every 6 inches in an arc in front of the opening. This sounded a lot like work and no guarantee that it would keep him in. I was looking around thinking when I spotted three old wooden posts so I wired these onto the fence leaning in toward the Bull. I wanted something else so I walked over to the old chicken coop and started digging around. I found a piece of corrugated roofing. I used an old nail I found on the ground and a rock to punch two holes in it and I found a piece of rusted 1/8 inch wire to tie it in place over the boards. I am hoping all of this combined will keep the bull from crawling under the fence again and let the water flow by.

As I was sitting down to have a third cup of coffee I saw the bull going by the window. He was unable to get past my obstacle course. I had taken the time to use the Bull as a training tool for the dogs. I took some video but cannot upload it on the blog, our internet connection is too slow. I will post it to twitter in the morning. I got one clip of the bull calling for his women and one of the two border collies pushing him away from his women.

I did finish putting up all the blue tape in the hallway. No paint went onto the walls today. I had plans to finish the blog earlier but I spotted a deal on Facebook classifieds for some fencing material but I had to go pick it up asap. I hooked the trailer up in the snow and drove over and bought some T-posts, gates, smooth wire rolls, wooden posts and two sections of culvert. I brought a lot of cash but needed more. I wrote down all the information to mail a check and as soon as I got home I wrote the check and have it in a stamped envelope ready to go in the morning. There was even more snow down when I got home and unloaded the trailer.

As an added bonus I managed to purchase a stock rack for the pickup! I am going to pick it up tomorrow which is why I needed the trailer unloaded tonight. It only cost $200 but it does need a paint job! I just need to get some of that paint that you brush on and it converts the rust to a primer then I can just use spray cans to finish it off.

I did manage to draw up some plans for the back wall of our in ground greenhouse. I am loving the idea and can stack 3-4 high 50 gallon drums. I think it needs to be 20 feet x 10 feet minimum after doing some research. If you make them small the temperature tends to fluctuate too much. I would love to grow a lemon, orange and kiwi tree inside the greenhouse! Plus have tomatoes year round along with spinach and carrots and lettuce. The barrels will be filled with water and act as storage and heat sink. They will do double duty.