farm life

Feeding complete

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I spent Friday and Saturday getting more winterizing completed. I was able to set out a cow feeder in the orchard and empty the rest of the hay from the Naked Gardener’s fields. It filled the entire feeder and should last the single alpaca and the three yearlings at least a month. I opened the gates up to the orchard so the feeder cows would come in. I think I am going to lock them into the orchard and just keep them near the house. They are a lot less crazy when they are around people.

My new $60 chicken door came a few days late but I did get it installed. The chickens are so stupid, I shut the main door, one foot to the left of the chicken door and the chickens were not sure how to get back into the coop. I had to wait until they all went inside the coop and then shut the main door. The chicken door had closed so now the only way for them to get in and out of the coop is to use their chicken door. I know the door worked as I saw them the next morning. We only have 12 chickens left and only ten are hens! The raccoons decimated the chickens this year. So I am on the lookout for more free adult chickens. I guarantee to give them all the food they can eat and let them free range to their hearts content. The raccoons have different plans for them but the strong and savvy will survive.

I went down to four corners and hooked up the old pickup bed trailer that has been down there for over three years and got it emptied and the tires all pumped up. I am going to use it to feed the round bales to the cows. I can get 16 round bales in the trailer and four on the tractor forks. It is enough to fill one round feeder full. So it will only take me three trips to fill up all the cow feeders. I also spray painted the sides that said “for sale” a grey putrid color again so that no one thinks I want to get rid of the trailer. Although no one ever called me asking to buy the trailer when it was at four corners. The rust helps it drain so that it doesn’t hold any water.

The ewe lambs just eat with the cows. They are not coming into the barn every night yet. Mr Golfpro has all the raspberries done and is finishing up the blackberries. He is almost done for the winter. I saw these inflatable animals at a kid’s birthday party and knew that the Grandson had to have one. I ordered it while we were still at the party. Little did I know that it would go with his Halloween costume! I did not know what the kid’s were going to dress him. He loves the big cow!!

Barn clean out done!

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Well I finally got it done, the annual barn clean out is complete! I had to hand dig for about 6 hours to get the last little bit done. I put out old straw/hay onto the ground for the sheep to spread out and I put a couple of bales of good hay into the feeders. We only have the 12 ewe lambs that did not go to Hermiston at the farm.

I still need to fix the Y gate and redo the entrance fence to the barn. I will work on that next weekend. I did get the box blade onto the little tractor and drag it around the barn lot collecting all of the surface dirt/poop to put on the compost piles. I did this for a couple of hours until I had all of the poop onto one of the piles. I also cleaned up all of the horse poop from the barn lot. I like to do all of this before Winter sets in so we are ready.

The next thing to do is fix the entrance fence/gate and to trace all of the light wires and attach them securely near the lights. I am positive that the raccoons have disturbed some of the wiring and that is the cause for two strings of light not working. I will have to run all of the wires to figure out where the loose connections are located. It is a lot easier to feed when all of the lights work.

We are going to have to start chasing the sheep into the barn at night so the coyotes do not get them. The coyotes keep getting closer to the house every day.

I also need to order our winter diesel for the tank but with the price of diesel being so high I am dreading the final price to fill our 125 gallon tank.

All of this is in preparation for winter. I keep thinking I am ready for winter and I think of something else that I need to do.

Almost done with tractor counterweight

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The weight box project continues to be painful. I have flopped between the wire welder and the stick welder. The wire is great for the light duty sheet metal welding and the stick is great when doing heavy pieces of metal. I am just pulling scrap out of the machine shop that I have accumulated over the years at various auctions or yard sales. Plus I keep digging around in the scrap pile for various other pieces. Honestly, it doesn’t matter what the thing looks like when I am done it just needs to not fall apart from getting bounced around on the back of the tractor. The corner pieces are made out of 3/8” thick angle iron and the two cross pieces that need holes drilled in them for the 3 point attachments are 1/2” thick and 4” wide. I do not believe that those will be bending from a little bouncing around. The rest of it is just assorted pieces of scrap that I found laying around on the ground in my work area.

I do plan on hitting it with a wire wheel when I am all done so that I can spray some paint over the entire project. I had to switch out tractors to hold the weight up in the air while I am working on it. At one point the little tractor started to tip over onto its side! I had to grab a hold of the tractor side and hurry to the controls to let the front end down. If I had a counterweight on it there would have been no issues! So I switched over the forks to the bigger tractor and I can now lift this weight up to waist height without worrying that it will tip the tractor over on its side.

I am not sure that I have a metal drill bit that will go up to size 1”. I am going to have to dig around in the tools and see if there is something like that out there. I honestly don’t know between donated tools and auction tools I may have one.

I dug around today and fount 1/4” bit and was able to drill both sides of the counterweight. Then I went up to 1/2” bit and was only able to drill out one side and got about 2/3 through the other one. I had a 1” bit but it would not go through. I ordered some hardened bits in graduated sizes so I could get to the 7/8” hole I need for the three point lower pins. I had some brand new pins so I don’t have to reuse the abused and bent ones. Now I will just need to wait for them to arrive this next week.

I did work on my rifle holder supports for the tractor. I need something that can take the abuse of constantly getting beat around and vibrating all of the time. Commercial gun holders are just not built that way. I cut and bent some angle iron and then worked on trying to fill weld the parts were I bent the U shape into the angle iron.

The U shaped pieces would not just fill in with the stick welder. I was only able to get about 50% of the metal back together. But I tried to spread these U-shapes apart after I did get them welded and I was unable to do it. They are solid. I need to get some pipe insulation now to go over these supports and then I just have to mark and drill a hole and I can bolt them back onto the support bar I already have installed on the tractor. I do not believe these will break and I made the high so there is no cross piece necessary. I do not believe the gun will bounce out of the arms now because they are so deep.

Predators 40/ Farm 5

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This is an incredibly stupid problem. I am losing more chickens. I still don’t have the automatic chicken door repaired so after counting chickens this week, there were less than a dozen, I decided that a new automatic chicken door was a must. The new door was supposed to be here on Friday and I even went down near closing to the post office in hope that Amazon was correct. They were not, we got notice in the mail on Saturday that there was a package to pickup at the post office. Too bad our post office is closed on weekends. I wish Amazon would use UPS or FedEx so the package just came directly to our house.

I have been checking the camera system regularly at night after feeding the back door cats and I have not seen any predators since the last killing round. Our 20 year old cat has not been seen in over a week and I think she finally snuck off to die. She usually hung pretty tough to the back door area and used the cat igloo we had next to the old house. I did look inside and make sure she did not crawl in the igloo and die like our other old cat did last year and no she was not in there.

Well Friday night I spotted the two raccoons that had gotten away last time from me. They were out back eating the cat food. I ran out with only one spare clip as I keep losing them. They are dropping out onto the ground when I am out blasting away in the dark. I have yet to find one and have already lost two of them. This does put a serious dent in my ability to fling lead as I simply don’t have enough ammunition. I managed to put one down hard fast right outside the door and then had to chase the other one down as it ran alongside the building then coop then ran towards the barn. I ran out of ammunition. I lost my empty clip and I had the gun jam twice during this operation. I have no choice but to tear apart the pistol Sunday night and give it a thorough cleaning, polishing and dainty lube job so it is back to perfection. I do have to say that I have the whole clearing and back on target in the dark thing down to a fairly automatic routine now. It’s time to get the pistol back to its factory functionality.

I also had no idea of the cost of spare magazines, they are running around $25/each. It’s a good thing I am not paying for chicken food. I am putting all my money into predator control. On top of that the coyotes are starting to move down near the house. I almost had to go out and pop some shotgun rounds off onto the back hillside the other night the coyotes were so close. I need a new rifle with a picatinny rail to mount the thermal scope on for the coyotes but that is going to take some time.

There is still at least one skunk left to eliminate then I will have cleared out all of the known predators. I will keep watching the camera though because I am sure we have a few more raccoons in the area. I am down to getting 1-2 eggs/day only now. This is a stupid problem. At one point this summer I had over 45 chickens! I counted less than a dozen on Friday. I will count them again once the new chicken door is installed and they are stuck in the coop at night.

Trying to winterize

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Wednesday Mr Golfpro came out to help me with the garden. It needs to be winterized. I had planted some black raspberries from a friend at work and they did really well but they were all over the ground. I had never bothered to put a wire for them to grow upright. So we installed two new rows of raspberries. One is the new large great thorned berries and the other are transplanted cuttings from our thornless berries. The screwy part was we still had berries on the bushes! I could not believe it when we got inside the plants and found raspberries. I at the ones we found, they were good! We used the small wooden pecker poles and were able to just drive them in the ground with a post hole driver and not dig a hole. This does require quite a bit of effort but between the two of us we got it done. I did end up with a large blister on each hand that tore open before we were done. I know have bandaids on both hands to cover up the open blisters.

There were about 12’ of Sunchokes that we pulled up and tossed over the fence. The ground is pretty dry so we did not dig any up yet. It is supposed to rain on Thursday and Friday so I will dig them up after that. We disturbed enough of them from pulling up the stalks to fill four large paper bags. I expect to dig up at least six more boxes and this is from a pretty small area. These things are amazing at just growing! We were not able to get all of the garden finished but we did get the netting off of the berries and that is a huge issue so it should be a lot easier now to finish up the trimming and getting every thing tied to the wire. On the raspberries we cut out all of the canes that got trimmed and tied last year and then tie up all of the new growth and cut it to height so it will bear fruit next year. The two new rows we cut at six feet high. I was taught to cut them off at four feet. We will see if there is a difference next year.

Before we could get started on the garden we needed to play Jengo in the machine shed. I needed to park the hay laden trailer under cover so it did not get rained on and the machine shed has a cultivator torn apart in one bay, one bay is tools and welding, one has grain and wood and the other two have equipment and spray. So we put all of the hay equipment in the machine shed near the back. I was able to get the new mini excavator into the first bay so I can work on it. The second bay now has the hay trailer and we moved the cultivator over to the bay with wood and grain so I can finish repairing it. There is also space for both tractors now so they can spend the winter under cover. We had to move the old pickup and I need to see about getting it to the junkyard. We filled up the trash can and moved everything to the appropriate bay. I really need to spend about4-6 hours putting all of the tools away in their appropriate spots so there is some open counter space. I will get to that eventually! It was a good day. We even got all of the tools from the greenhouse assembly put away.

I ordered a new chicken door for the chicken coop. I found another dead chicken and am only getting two eggs per day again. I only counted 10 chickens but it was daytime and they tend to spread out. The door should be here on Friday and it has to be installed so that we at least get enough eggs to feed us through the winter. At the rate the predators are killing them I will not have any chickens.