ditch

Winter is coming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Winter is coming and Fall has officially started. I have a bunch of vacation (staycation) planned for October. I had 22 items on the list and managed to get two done this weekend. At least 16 on the list have to be done. I tried to rent a boom forklift and a scissor lift on Friday but the scissor lift is overdue and they did not know when it would be returned. There is no sense renting one without the other. Unfortunately, after further inspection the roof of the gazebo has been blown off the blocks I had used to shim it up. This has caused the one side to fall about twelve inches. Luckily, the strap and platform are holding it all roughly in place. I will try and rent equipment on Tuesday. If not then it will be the first weekend of October project. I will only have two days to get it done. It will still cost about $1800 to rent the equipment. Now had I rented a crane in the first place I may have been able to do it in two days but I am doubtful, I think it would have taken 3-4 days. But, I would not have needed the scissor lift. I think it would have been a wash on the rental price.

I took the day on Saturday to finish up the lavender. I had spent a couple of hours on it earlier in the week. We have about fifteen volunteer plants growing where they are not supposed to be. But I had to really hack into the plants that tried to die this spring and I am not sure that we will not lose ten plants this winter. So in the spring I will replant all that die and take the extras out and put them in the front yard along the fence. This took quite a while as I had to take a pair of loppers and dig into the plants to cut out the dead and save the live part of the plant. I ended up with quite a pile of lavender scraps tossed over the fence. It is amazing how much scent the plants can put off even if there are no flowers. I smelled so strongly that I was occasionally coughing from the scent overwhelming me.

I did go check on Lil Dumper to see if the brakes were done, nope. They had ordered parts and torn it apart and discovered they had the wrong parts. So new parts were ordered and hopefully it will be done this week. When it gets done I will be able to move soil from the barn lot to new flower spot in the orchard. We are going to toss out a bunch of wildflower seed and just let that area go wild for the honey bees. Mind you we don’t currently have any bees but there are still honey bees around we just don’t know where the hive is located. We have a Nuc on order for the spring so we can start over again next year. I told the brake place that it was taking as long as the tires and rims took to do the brakes. He had assured me when I dropped it off this time that it would be done faster than the later, he was wrong.

I also ordered more parts for the baler. I was sent the wrong large gears and am missing two crucial bushings. When the parts come I can send the others back for a credit. Which is a good thing as it is $500 worth of parts, they should be here this week.

Sunday I spent on the weed eater killing the nasty stuff on our front hillside. We had a lot of thistles and tall weeds that needed knocked down. This is a messy process and it gets worse when you crawl down in the ditch and try to weed eat all of the water plants. If you angle the weed eater one way it tosses the water away from you and the other tilt angle throws it right at you! I was able to dig down into the top two inches of water with the weed eater. I did the lower half of the ditch first and by the time I started back up the ditch I was beat and left the last 1/3 for later. I thought I could just go back inside but after I filled the horse trough with water it took me another 45 minutes to spray off the walkway and bridge. Otherwise we would have tracked all that cut grass into the house. Annmarie got chain and figured out how to keep our porch gates open. The puppy, Milo, can no longer squeeze between the rails and has yet to figure out how to open the gates with his nose. So we have to keep going outside to open the porch gates for him to go potty. Since winter is coming we want him to figure out how to go potty by himself without us standing there and encouraging him.

I am just starting to get back to some sustained level of physical exertion. I had no idea how doing nothing for six weeks and then doing slightly more than nothing for four weeks would affect my level of conditioning. I still feel like I am going to die by the end of Sunday but at least I can get to that level of exhaustion now.

The coyotes are making me crazy. This morning when I went out to let the sheep out of the pasture and the moms/babies out of the barn the coyotes were right on top of the hill barking and howling. I could not see them but there were there. So after feeding I ambled back to the house, grabbed the shotgun and some hearing protection and popped off a round out the back door. They took off and quit making any noise. This is a stupid problem.

Hay storage remodel

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have been thinking about hay so Mr Rainman was mowing fields, the cheat grass is trying to take over parts of the farm. I went in and moved out the last of the broken hay bales and started to dig out the hay storage area in the machine shed. Once I had all the hay out I cleaned it out with the bucket and started working on digging a “T” shape at the back of the building to allow me to put in a French drain that will remove moisture and drain it out into a water sink in front of the building. The runoff from the roof is collecting and causing moisture issues.

Mr Rainman and I spent about two hours digging ditch and moving the dirt out. We are waiting on gravel to be delivered. I ordered it and it came this week. The ditch needs to be a little deeper and then I will install the drain and fill it up with gravel. Once that is done the entire bottom will be graveled. My hope is that I can get the Gingerman to come over with a bigger tractor and stack the bales 3-4 high. I could store 45 large bales in that area if they are stacked. Once we have the inside all completed we will work on a French drain on the backside of the machine shed. I dug a gravel trench years ago and it did make a huge difference but now I want the majority of the moisture to go away fairly quickly. We are no longer just getting “a little” rain at a time now. We are getting 1/2-1” at a time! This causes other problems. If you had not noticed the problems tend to change therefore causing new problems that old solutions no longer cure.

Once Mr Rainman left I got on the tractor and mowed cheatgrass until dark. I remembered why I need to not wear my hearing aids with ear muffs after the muffs pushing my ear up against the hearing aid for four hours. I had a heck of an external ear ache that lasted a few hours. Plus, the external pocket battery did not have enough juice to recharage my Bluetooth speaker headphones so I had to mow in silence. I charged them up that night so that would not happen again!

The wife says I managed to snore and moan at the same time in my sleep that night. She believes that I should do some form of baseline exercise year round instead of diving right in at spring time and working myself into the ground or until I cannot physically continue. It does make more logical sense, no question about it. In another month or so I should be past most of the pain.

We are having raccoon issues again. We have one coming to the back porch where we feed the cats. The Gingerman and wife failed to kill it. I have not seen it yet but keep getting woken up by the dogs barking which causes me to get out of bed and attempt to see the raccoon. No luck, but I am not losing chickens yet so I will keep after it. Eventually, I will get lucky or the raccoon will get unlucky.

Really, we are almost winterized

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Last weekend I was very productive! I am still in winterizing mode and there is still plenty left to do. On Friday last week, I cleaned out the machine shed to make room for both tractors. I need to be able to park them out of the weather. Annmarie, let me know we needed to get the lavender trimmed up, another winterizing chore. I broke out the new DeWalt battery hedge trimmer and started in on the task. This turned out to be a little more difficult than I imagined. The lavender had shoots super low and I had to lift them up to cut them and the huge tree keeps dropping small branches into the lavender making it necessary to clean out the lavender bunch before trimming. I only got half the patch done before it got super cold and for sanity reasons I needed to go back into the house.

On Saturday it was cold, very cold. I put on neck warmer, wool shirt, carhart insulated bibs stocking cap and thick insulated gloves. I wanted something warm to drink, my go to drink is coffee. Coffee is the perfect drink and solves most of what ills a person. I was in a hurry and ended up just boiling some water and throwing a tea bag into the thermos. I wanted to get out and finish the ditch up in field #1. I keep trying to get it finished before we get a hard freeze. I was able to get another 200 feet dug up, reinforced. I found a 20 foot section of the embankment that had been washed out in the last flood. It took quite a while to get this section built back up. It was cold, so I broke out the hot tea. Yeah, it’s tea, simply not a substitute for coffee. I only tried it a couple more times out of thermoregulatory needs, it was cold! The oddest and best part of the day was that my coat smelled amazing. The lavender I had cleaned up and removed from the patch ended up rubbing some lavender oil on my coat and when the wind let off or I had to wipe my nose I could smell the lavender. It made for a nice surprise.

Sunday I decided to start feeding the cows out of our overflow hay in the corral. Each bale weighs around 40# and I fed 16 bales to the upper cows and 16 to the lower cows. I can get 8 on the tractor at a time. I have learned to cut off the net wrapping before I load them onto the tractor so I can just drive them out and dump them off. Its way faster this way and I can contain the wrap. This year I have started putting a bag of used wrap in the trash can weekly. I don’t want to have a huge pile by the spring. I went back to the lavender patch and got it all trimmed up. I pulled weeds and raked the entire patch. The only thing left in the garden to do is to trim the raspberries. I pulled out the prime rib from the freezer. We are going to have it for Thanksgiving

Predators 15, Farm 5

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I seem to be doing one of these updates weekly now. As we go into winter things definitely slow down. Our kittens came back to the wood shed this week! We have been feeding them out in the wood shed but would like to get them to come over to the garden so we don’t have to cross the bridge. I will hopefully get to cut the bridge down in the next two weeks. I will need to make some 2×6 crossing for the kittens so they can get over the water to food once the back creek starts running. It doesn’t need to be much to allow the cats to cross.

Between Annmarie and Donna the alpaca are getting pretty tame. Annmarie keeps apple flavored treats in her car for them so they like seeing her come home. They are not all compliant with eating out of her hand. Our blind one is definitely blind and still a bully. I saw him today tearing up to another alpaca at full speed, chest checking it then start neck wrestling. I was hoping that injury would slow him down.

I asked Annmarie what she wanted for Christmas and she stated she wanted a little shed for the bee supplies and her drip system tools and spare parts. So we found one online and had it shipped. I did not want to assemble and install the shed in January. I realize this may be an early Christmas present but it is only realistic if we do it now so I can get it assembled. It came this week and I spent a day putting it all together and creating a gravel pad for it so that it would not rot out the bottom. I just need to bed the back fence toward the yard and I should be able to attach the shed to the fence to prevent it from blowing over. I found a metal cable and used it to temporarily hold it down. I just need to get the spare drip parts out of the wood shed. So they are all in one place.

Chance, the puppy, is getting bigger. She is not as focused as mouse when it comes to the animals but she does like to chase things. After her run in with the front gate last weekend she has been limping. We keep telling her to take it easy but a six month old puppy does not know how to do that. Yesterday, they got out of the yard when I was working on the shed. This was exhausting so diner time was spent laying down and eating. The puppy is now limping on the other leg. We are starting to take her out on a lead rope around the sheep. I will be taking her out to the barn in the evening to expose her to more animals. She is sitting well for us and holds until released for food.

This week I went and picked up six more adult chickens from someone on Facebook. I was down to only nine hens, the raccoons have been slowly picking them off. I am reluctant to use live traps as I get tired of catching the cats and chickens. But Friday night Annmarie woke me up and said something was trying to get a chicken. This was obviously a stupid chicken as it did not go into the coop at dark. I had to run outside in my underwear and boots in 23 F weather. It is not comfortable! I spotted a raccoon under the old house but failed to hit it after three attempts. It is much harder to hit something in the dark. The next morning I ordered new batteries for my pistol laser. Someone told me there are traps that are dog/cat proof and will only catch raccoons. I got three of them and set them out yesterday afternoon. Today at 1000 I heard the dogs throwing a shit fit over by the chicken coop. They just would not let up. So I went out with my pistol and there was a raccoon that was trying to get into the coop during the day! There is one less raccoon on the farm now.

I went up to the bone yard, dropped off the carcass and proceeded to go up to field one to work on the ditch. I was able to get about another 120’ of ditch dug. I am over 2/3 done with the ditch. I still need to cut the tree out of the dry creek bottom so it doesn’t push the water out of the banks. I am hopeful that I can get this all done before it does a hard freeze and stays frozen.

Winter is coming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I finally had to cry uncle and take some time off of work to get stuff done around the farm. I had worked six weekends in a row and winter just keeps getting closer. I have several projects to get done. The first one I am attempting to complete is to get some flood control and water management ditches dug. It seems I always wait until it starts to rain then it is so muddy I cannot get any dirt moved. I have managed to dig ditches out in pasture #3 and #2, they are all ready to go. I have managed to get all of the roadside ditch done in field #1. This way when the flood comes from upstream over the road the ditch will catch it and let it flow back to the creek and not out through our pasture. I still need to finish the secondary ditch alongside the field so that if the creek bank gives (like it has the last two floods) there will be a secondary ditch and another dirt berm to keep the water from flooding out into the field. This has been a lot of tractor work. I have about 40 hours into just tractor work alone moving dirt. I am hoping to have the ditches finished in 1-2 more days then I am going to hook the mower up, mow weeds for a day then start dragging a disc around and then planting more grass and a couple of fields of triticale hay. I even have some fertilizer that I want to toss out this fall.

The ditch digging is really letting me get through the books on tape! I can get a whole book listened to every 1.5 days. At the current rate of diesel consumption I am going to have to get the diesel tank filled for a third time this year!

I also need to rearrange the machine shed and get all of the equipment under cover and out of the weather. I have nine days off so I am going to make the best of it and I may have to take some more time off to get everything done. I did let the sheep into the front yard and get in a good mow down on the yard. I think I will have to do it one more time this year before winter sets in. A few of the ewes are pretty skinny. We did not get all of the old ones culled and boy can you tell who is old and decrepit. The new ram is fitting right in. He did wait until I turned my back on him yesterday before hitting me in the leg with his head. He only did it once and it did not knock me down so when I swatted out at him and he dodged it I did not pursue smacking him. I just let it go.

I found another dead lamb in field #3 yesterday. We have been spotting a coyote up on the back hillside but have been unable to get a shot at it. I may have to actually get a coyote call and start taking some time to thin the coyotes. Time is the most precious commodity I have when it comes to chores on the farm.

We had to tag and band the last two calves that were born late. We ran them up to the corral today and separated off the two babies. The nephews were out working on their grandma’s deck so they took ten minutes and helped us. Calf number 35 yellow tag is really a girl not a boy. I had two boy tags and placed the ear tag before I checked the gender. We separated off the bull and put him in Alcatraz with the other two bulls and then pushed all of the cows into the upper fields as there is a lot of green grass after that last rain. Tomorrow I am going to push the three bulls down by the schoolhouse. There is not as much grass down there but for three cows there will be plenty. We can keep the two fence between rule going so we should not have any winter surprises. I keep seeing at least two large covey of quail when I go up to the far end of the property. We will see how many survived when they all band together this winter.

The back creek finally dried up a week ago. That is the latest it has ran since we have moved back to the farm.