farm life

It’s Hot

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We came home earlier in the week and were greeted by the big truck sitting in the road. The Gingerman has been working on the truck, has it running and the brakes working on it. He has a few more things to do before we convert it to a fire fighting apparatus for the farm. We are going to put a couple of large totes for water, a pump and a hose reel on it so we can have some fire suppression if we decide to burn. On the off chance we have a fire nearby we can go out and meet it. It would have been handy when I caught the railroad ties on fire. Peeing on them to put out the fire takes a lot of effort.

The truck was blocked it just rolled down into the road, no one is sure how it did it. I could not get it started then the Gingerman told me that the battery was unhooked. I dropped the positive terminal on and smashed it a couple of times with a wrench. It still would not start. I took positive terminal wire off and then told Annmarie we would just need to drive around it for a week. The Gingerman stopped by a few days later and actually installed and tightened the battery post cable and it started up just fine! It is now blocked with some heavy duty tire chocks.

The back creek, Stewart Creek, is no longer running. There are a few spots of water behind our house but they will most likely be dry by the end of the week. The frogs will all move into our garden and tall grass. They can make quite the cacophony. We are so used to it that it is just drift off to sleep noise. The roosters crowing, the frogs serenading, the alpaca fighting , the sheep and lambs hollering, the cows bellowing and the occasional horse whinny it is mostly relaxing.

I picked the garlic today, we turned off the water about three weeks ago. I will let the dirt dry out and tomorrow I will cut off the tops and put it all in a paper sack for storage. I have about four of the largest heads picked out to use as seed for the fall. I also collected a whole bunch of chive seeds. I want to toss random flower seeds into the front flower beds and just see what grows. I am now going out to the apricot tree about every three days and picking up the ripe fruit off the ground. I keep about 75% of it and the rest I toss over the fence to the sheep. Our old ancient apple tree is shedding apples so I spent about thirty minutes cleaning them off the ground and tossing them over to the sheep. They love it. I was only able to pick about four apricots off the tree that were actually ripe. I like to wait until the fruit is full of sugar before picking it. When it is your tree you can wait until the very last minute. Annmarie and I cut and pitted about 12 cups for the freezer. We freeze them in one cup batches so she can use them for her breakfast smoothie. It takes a lot of frozen fruit to make it 365 days! We are going to be able to fill an entire upright freezer full of frozen fruit this year.

Predators 2/ Farm 1

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Well the coyotes are back, we have lost two lambs over the course of the last three weeks. For a while we could not spot them but now they are frequently visible and unfortunately very far away. Four of us have shot at them, some of us repeatedly and so far all we are doing is scaring them to run off. I realize that harassment is a valid tool for getting them to leave the sheep alone it is just not very final. If you don’t keep up the pressure than the predators just come back and start eating more animals.

I have been working on getting the tall fields with cheat grass in them mowed down so there are fewer places to hide for the coyotes. I am making pretty good progress but fields #3 & 4, still need a lot of mowing done. I carried a rifle for two straight days while I was mowing and only spotted one coyote. I missed repeatedly. I could use some practice but at the rate I am shooting at the coyotes I will be getting things dialed in soon.

We have not lost a lamb in the last two weeks. I go on patrol around the entire outside of the farm then drive two sides of the CRP looking for coyotes every couple of days. There is a path on the edge of the CRP now that I mowed in a couple of weeks ago. We need to get the weeds under control in the CRP and the edges are where the weeds are creeping in. I mowed a couple of weeks ago and will spray it this week. We are going for a good kill on the star thistle. The stuff is very nasty.

Once I have the edges of the CRP sprayed then I will work on the hillside and the backside of the field #1. I mowed there on Friday and knocked it back down. This also gives us great visibility for when the coyotes are moving through the fields. Normally coyotes will crawl under a fence but Annmarie spotted one this morning that just leaped over the fence! That is cheating! She was making our bed and spotted it just ambling by on the back hillside.

The Gingerman heard her and leaped out of bed and ran outside with a rifle. It was gone. I am pretty sure that it was the one I shot at up in field #2. I got dressed and went out looking in the pickup right after that to no avail.

Lavender harvest

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Mr Rainman and the mermaid (formerly the Gimp) came out on a Friday to help me harvest some of the lavender. It did not take us long we had about half the patch harvested in two hours with Mr Rainman and I weeding as we went along. By the time we were done harvesting we had the entire patch weeded! I used a little serrated sickle bar and it worked slick. I grabbed a full handful, cut it and then passed it off to the mermaid who rubber banded it together. We filled seven totes/boxes and they took two for helping harvest.

Annmarie posted it on Facebook classifieds and we got zero hits. I had put it all in her office and cranked the air conditioning up so it’s about 62F in her office now. We ended up taking a bunch to work to give away. This was over two weeks ago and another 25% of the lavender patch is ready to be harvested again. The Grosso (type of lavender) still needs another two weeks before it is ready. We are going to use that to redo our wreath we have inside the house. Annmarie puts new flowers on the wreath every year and we hang it up in our dining room.

The garden is starting to produce finally. We have collected almost three full flats of strawberries from a 2×6 foot trough elevated bed. It is amazing how many berries we have been getting. We are freezing them in one cup baggies so Annmarie can use them in her breakfast smoothies. We did have to net the berries this year to prevent the birds from eating all of the berries like last year. The raspberries have just started to turn red so we will be picking them seriously by next weekend.

I really need to get out into the garden with a hoe and clear some weeds. I had done it a couple of weeks ago but it already needs it again.

Just before we left for camp last week, I set up a drip system for all of the fruit trees. Each tree is getting 12-24 gallons of water a day. The plums and apricots were checked today and they have another 1-2 weeks before they are ripe. We will be harvesting everything this year and cutting and prepping the extra for the freezer for Annmarie’s breakfast smoothies.

The wild blackberries are blooming continuously and we should have a bumper crop this year. So between all of the berries and fruit trees we should not have to buy any frozen fruit this next year.

The sunchokes I planted are already two feet high! I am hoping they do really well so I can move them to someplace else in the yard. We have never grown them before so we really did not know what to expect.

Predators 1/ Farm 1

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Well it is that time of year again when the predators decide to come out and play. We had a lamb killed up in field four by the old hand dug well. The lambs are 2-3 months old at this point but still easy pickings for a coyote. We had someone come out with thermals but they only killed one coyote. I have yet to see a coyote in the last three months. Mr Rainman spotted one in field four but did not have a rifle. He sat out watching the area after he grabbed one but the coyote never reappeared.

The cheat grass is horrible this year so we are going to have to push all of the animals down by the schoolhouse. The grass is much better down there. We have had one cow give birth and it is a cute little black calf. Everyone was so tame that Mr Rainman carried the calf across the water and no one cared. After about day four he could not catch the calf, it was too fast! We have five black cows and one brown one. The brown one was the calmest of the bunch we sold off. Now that we only have calm cows we need to get rid of the brown one, it’s too crazy. It is amazing how much your tolerance drops once you have gotten rid of the crazy ones. Placid is perfect.

Needless to say with the coyotes making a reemergence we have started to carry a rifle around. Frank doesn’t seem to mind, he just wants to be fed his bottle. Unfortunately, we are weaning him so he only gets a bottle in the evening now. He is really not onboard with this plan. The lambs head butt the ewes udder to promote milk release. In other words when Frank is standing directly in front of you, pay attention or he will head butt you some place you don’t want and it will not feel good. He did still get his bottle so from his perspective it worked.

We pulled the bull off of the cows before we let them down by the schoolhouse. We still have seven teenagers running around down there and one of them is an unbred heifer. He does not like being separated and has been beating on the gates so we had to make a repair. I remembered why the gate had not been repaired before this, the gates were put on with the last of the hardware I had on hand. I used three different kinds of bolts/screws and they all have a different driver! It took us a half an hour to find all of the right tools and one of the anchor bolts had a custom pattern. We beat it out with a hammer and wrench. Hopefully, the old large bolts we installed will hold up better than the fancy new ones.

Haying completed, for now

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Mr Rainman says I plan vacations around haying season. I took a week off and went and visited old buddies from the military for a week. He ended up having to finish rowing and baling field one. That would not have been too bad but the field is very rough. We need to rig some kind of ground roller up so we can run it over the ground in the spring! We really need to get some of the ridges and bumps out of the field. Having the elk in there every winter is not helping it at all either. They are leaving holes from digging in the snow. On those little tractors it is very bouncy.

Honestly, the best part of my vacation was not having to finish picking up bales from the field! Mr Rainman brought in all of the bales and stacked them into the barn. He is a rockstar. I think if the two of us finish raising the height of the bales in the barn we will be able to get all of the second cutting into the barn.

We still have to move the old hay from two years ago from the old lamb shed into the barn on the overhead walkway. We will use it for bedding for the winter. I used to sell it but I realized eventually that I could just use it for bedding. The new hay is so much nicer that the sheep really just ignore the old stuff and spread it around looking for a couple of wonderful morsels. This way I do not have to buy any straw.

It looks like we may get a second cutting on about 1/3 of field #1 and #2. So I figure around 2-3 tons and I will cut the Naked Gardener’s field for a second time also. He is about two miles away from our house so I just drive over with my small equipment as needed until I get it all done.

He ended up finding a pheasant’s nest and she would not give it up, so he placed two torn up bales on either side of the nest. The hen seemed to think that was plenty of cover and came right back to sit on the nest.

We have decided to spray some more Rejuvra this fall. We are going to go down by the schoolhouse and see if we can get the good grass to spread out. We are also going to spray a section of field #2 and #1. Field #3 and #4 are a waste currently. They are 100% cheat grass. I really need to burn the fields but the fire’s have already started up around us. I am going to plow them. It’s another way to kill the cheat grass seed. It cannot emerge when it is buried under a lot of soil. I am just not sure what will work better.