elk

Honey ahoy!

Steve HardinLeave a comment

This week was amazing! Some things got done that really needed it and it was a banner week. I was able to arrange for the septic tank to be pumped at the same time as the safe cracker came out to break into our old Victor safe. We wanted to use the safe but needed the combination to do it. The septic tank truck arrived first and after I briefed him on the plan to go into the barn lot and across the spring the safecracker showed up. I had him go in and start in on the safe. He had to wade through the alpaca mob to get to the gate. They were in rare form and all bum rushed him as he got out of the car. I got the septic truck into the barn lot and once he saw the spring crossing he said nope, he thought he had enough hose to pump it from the front gate. So we went back out and he he backed up to the gate and started hauling hose. It took four sections of hose to reach the septic tank and you could see the outline of the tank in the dead grass. He started digging and was right over the lid, as soon as he pulled the lid I realized we were lucky! We most likely could not have made it to the end of the year without having problems or destroying our drainage field. When the main drain pipe was replaced, just before we arrived the plumber took it all the way to the septic tank! This was very nice. It is a 1000 gallon concrete tank and he got it all pumped out and then I sent him down to my mother-in-law’s to pump her tank, we think it had never been pumped but were not sure. It was worse than ours but again, it had not caused problems or ran out into the drainage field.

I had to go in the house for the big reveal after the safecracker got the safe open. It was empty except for a 1974 penny. So obviously the safe had been open until then. The safe guy not only opened the safe but he serviced the lock and ended up sanding a couple of edges of the door to get it work correctly. The door had sagged a little. The tolerances are so close that he did not have to remove much. I then had to prove that I could open the safe. This turned out to be a little more complicated than I thought. The safe has four numbers and the route to get there is very specific and cannot be deviated and is not intuitive. As far as we are concerned this is just one more barrier to getting into the thing. We have been practicing ever since then to get used to opening the thing. That evening I took the little lock box and cleaned off all the rust and spray painted the outside. I reassembled the shelves and put it back in its spot, you don’t see any of th new paint job but it was pretty rusty on the outside before I did all of that. We are going to get a new rug for the bottom then I will move all of our paperwork over into the old safe. I think I need to get about 4-5 folders to sort the paperwork better. Currently it is just thrown into a pile that attacks you whenever the safe is opened. This way legal documents can stay in one place. No one will get my social security paper card, they will just steal it off the internet.

I had to work late and Annmarie woke me up via phone to say there was a coyote out on the hillside and to bring a long gun. I thought about just going out in my slippers and underwear but it has been getting cool at night and I wasn’t sure how far up the creek she was, so I got dressed first. As I was slogging my way up to field #3 I spotted the coyote up on the bluff but then I spotted an elk butt. By the time I got up to where I could shoot the coyote had vanished but I got to see a three point bull elk with four cows and four calves going up the hillside and over the hill. It is way too early for them to be down this low. I suspect this is where the calf came from last weekend. The farm always surprises us.

We have been working on feeding our bees and figuring out how to get them through the winter and what we need to do to get more flowers next spring for them to eat on. Both of our supers are full, the top one with honey and the bottom with bees. Annmarie checks every few weeks and she finds the queen bee every time. I avoid the bees but did go out and feed them a pollen pack a couple of weeks ago, they were very calm and happy to see more food. So while talking to Annmarie yesterday I convinced her that we should try out our honey this year. Since we’re going to feed them through the winter we can take out one frame of honey was my premise. After a little bit of discussion she agreed, the only problem was she had just gone into the hive 30 minutes prior to our discussion and installed mite treatment. So she ran out and pulled one super and just hung it on the side of the hive, we have little metal poles for this. We decided that we would wait till night time for it to cool off before retrieving the frame.

I went out and spent a few hours on the tractor digging a diversion ditch for the next flood and then we went to town for dinner. We got back after dark and she went out and retrieved the frame. At the back door she hollered for me to come remove the bees. I grabbed a paint brush and brushed off about eight bees, we both got inside and shut the back door. I spotted two bees in the laundry room. Annmarie went to the kitchen and then started hollering for me as I had missed some bees. On the way to the kitchen I got stung on the right thigh! I never saw the bugger coming, never knew it was there. It hurts, it had been a while since I was stung by a honey bee. I now changed tactics, the first shot had been fired and my leg hurt! I grabbed the fly swatter and popped three bees in the kitchen and two more in the laundry room then suddenly it felt like I had multiple bees inside the leg of my pants. I dropped my drawers in the kitchen to my ankles hollering about more bees when the puppy rang the bell to go outside. So I shuffled over to the door with my pants around my ankles to let the puppy out. I managed to find the actually stinger in my leg and remove it and my leg started to instantly feel better. It still hurt. I grabbed the large sheet cake pan and put the frame in it and then covered it with Saran Wrap. I killed four more bees under the plastic. So the bees had to sacrifice nine workers for us to have one frame of honey. Annmarie also said that the frame had a lot more honey in it when she pulled it out. The bees had stolen a bunch of honey from the frame. We watched more videos last night and saw that we need a storage container to prevent that and that we should always collect on a warm sunny day. I had to kill one more honeybee this morning in the kitchen! The goal this year was to learn. I almost never touch the hive, I have been stung. Annmarie futzes with the hive all the time and has never been stung. I am unsure what I am learning.

Oddity

Steve Hardin1 Comment

The last couple of weeks have been hectic. I have been trying to finish up little projects all over the place. I have finally managed to get the last of the kitchen doors installed! I had to cut down another one to get them to fit correctly. We will be doing some touch up painting in place now but honestly the new color is so much nicer than the yellow. It really brings the countertop and backsplash together in a way that the yellow did not. I do not see us doing that again for at least another 20 years to allow us time to forget how awful it was the first time.

I went out one morning to feed the horse and she would not eat! This is so odd that I stopped doing and looked around to figure out what the horse was doing as she was not at the pile I had just placed outside the barn. She kept staring out into the area behind the grain bins. I walked over to her, pet on her and started to scan the area myself and spotted it, a calf elk was stuck behind the fence. It kept running alongside the fence line looking for a way back out into the wheat field. I walked around and opened up the gate and allowed the calf to run out into the stubble field. I figured it had just wandered down and would wander back up into the mountains.

We have been dressing the baby alpaca’s wound on its right back leg and it is doing great. It went from horrible, to bigger, to not as deep and then to closed with a small scab. It was a daily dressing and then finally I went every couple of days to just watching it the last four days. They keep trying to one up each other and this one figured he could be king of the hill so he took the opportunity to lord it over everyone else. I let Snoop and the injured Musketeer out to roam with the rest of the alpaca herd. They are getting tamed down quite nicely. Annmarie keeps treats in her car so if you are a woman and get out of a car alone at our house the alpaca all run over to you to see if there are treats. They don’t bite but the crowding is a little disconcerting if you are not used to it. They don’t even touch you, they just get really close.

Elk damage

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well the elk did make it down to our orchard, luckily not very many of them came down onto the bottoms. This was a boon to us as they did dig in the snow and try to find the grass. We had one cow elk that stayed low and even spent the night in the machine shed with the alpaca one night. The weather has finally warmed up and the snow is slowly melting off. One of our greatest worries was that the elk would get down into our newly planted grass hay pastures and tear them up. I have been driving up to the upper end of the farm three times a week to look at the pastures and check for elk damage. I can go all winter without ever normally seeing the other end of the farm. I am unclear how me watching for damage will change anything but it did not stop me from looking. People ask why the elk are different than deer. The picture below is a great example. You can see above where the elk dug down and ate the grass. When you look at the picture below you can see the yellow spots on the ground. Those yellow spots are where the elk dug down and ate the grass. They will tear up the grass and eat the roots. In a couple of weeks we will know how much damage was done to the pasture but since it needed replanted we are not going to worry about it. The elk started moving up the hillsides as the snow started to melt off. They did not want to stay low and only came down because the weather forced them out of the mountains.

Our back creek is running a little muddy but it is doing great. We have a rock on the creek bank we use to measure the depth of the water. This rock has been buried but the creek has gone down again and it is visible. The water is starting to run clear also. All in all if this will continue for the next 6-8 weeks it is going to be a glorious Spring!

Uh oh Elk

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Mother Nature finally drove the elk out of the mountains last week. There is so much snow up there that the elk cannot dig their way down to fodder. When this happens they move to lower elevations which means wheat fields, hay patches and CRP. The real problem with this is the elk are very destructive. Not only do they just tear down fences by going through them but they dig up the ground looking for food. We have about 80-100 animals on our property. My real worry is that they will find the 14 acres of planted grass I put in this fall! I don’t mind the deer nibbling the green tops of the grass but I certainly cannot afford for the elk to go down there and dig it up by the roots. It would cost me about 2 weeks of time and another $1000 to replant but the hard part is we would lose the growing time. Which would mean we would lose an entire first cutting on the grass fields, maybe even both of them which could cost us 30-60 ton of grass at a minimum loss of $4500-9000. This would hurt us on top of the extra feed costs we are incurring now due to the late and deep snow. So far we have put out for 2 ton of bagged feed for the sheep and may need to buy another ton still so we are out about $850 so far. We have just enough alfalfa to keep the cows going for another three weeks, longer if the snow will go away.

Several of my coworkers have offered to come kill elk if if I had land owner depredation tags. The problem with that is there are thousands of elk in the area. Me killing a handful is not going to make them go away from our property. So we just suck it up and hope they don’t tear up our fields.

The problem with the snow going away is there is a lot of snow! At this point we want a nice gradual warming up or our back creek will flood and try and rip out fence. I know it seems like a farmer is always bitching about the weather but in all reality they live or die or succeed by the whim of Mother Nature therefore giving them more right to complain. That is my take and I am sticking to it. The damage to the fence is gonna cause me problems. I had the upper fence all repaired and tight. So far I have not noticed any damage to the lower sections but I cannot get to the upper fence without just hoofing it up there and there is currently nothing I can do about it so I am leaving it for a surprise later this spring when I can inspect it on the tractor.

Annmarie tells me that last night the elk came down into the orchard to eat grass. We have been seeing a couple of them here or there but she said they came down en masse. I didn’t see any this morning when I went out to feed except for a lone cow elk down by my Mother-in-law’s house. She ran off when I came with the tractor to feed our cows.

The sun was shining today and melting snow despite the temperature only being 30 F. The elk are still on the back hillside. We have mostly cow elk with the occasional bull, there are larger bull elk in other fields, just not ours. We are getting so much moisture that the bottoms are starting to create wet spots, this one below is in the 7 acre barley patch that we are going to turn into alfalfa this spring. This wet spot is going to delay planting. The deer are hanging out in the bottoms away from the elk.

No horrible raging runoff creek yet. It is very sedate and clear at the moment and we hope it stays that way for the next six months.