farm life

Border Terrier logic

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We have a 16 month old border terrier. Annmarie has been working with him and takes him to the hospital to become a therapy dog. He loves everyone and will let anyone pet him. He does not get ruffled, riding elevator, around walkers, canes, wheelchairs, noisy IV pumps, emotional families, emotional patients. He is pretty much a loving rock.

At home he has decided that the yard is his space. We have barn cats that sneak down to eat the porch kitty food and he tends to harass them at bedtime because they are not supposed to be there. Last week we let the dogs outside at bedtime and told them it was bedtime potties. Milo ran around the yard and next thing we know he is barking up a storm. I knocked on the side window to get him to quit barking, it did nothing. I went and opened the small window in the laundry room and hollered at him, no response or let up on the noise. Then he starts doing this weird baying sound and is fighting with something outside the back door.

I grab the spotlight and my pistol and just step out the back door looking for the cat. Milo has a full size raccoon trapped on the cat food ledge and every time it tries to get off the ledge on the front side, Milo drives it back. I call him off and he comes right to me. The raccoon is promptly dispatched. I have friends who say I should live trap and move them. The problem is that everyone else in town live traps them and turns them loose at the edge of our property so there is an endless supply of raccoons (i.e “chicken killers”). I figured out that since we have moved back home I have had over 300 chickens killed by raccoons. A chicken won’t even lay an egg until it’s over 6 months old. That is a time and money commitment. I don’t have any sympathy for the raccoons anymore.

This week our heat pump went out on Sunday night so we ended up sleeping downstairs. It was 2 degrees cooler downstairs than upstairs. Annmarie let Milo outside around Midnight because he woke her up. Normally he sleeps through the entire night upstairs with us. Around 0130 he starts raising a ruckus. I wake up to Annmarie hollering my name and hollering at our big dog to get inside. The border collie keeps trying to run upstairs because she knows if I am running outside in the middle of the night I am armed. I grabbed the spotlight and my pistol and run out onto the front porch. Milo is hollering, growling and some other creature is hollering. I get to the front porch and I can tell that they are down in the water in the ditch under the crossing board. I think Milo has another raccoon pinned into the corner and he is just waiting for me to show up. I get across the hillside and Milo has another raccoon by the throat in the water and mud and is not letting go. I call him off and he just lets go and moves six feet away. The raccoon is dispatched but when I went to take Milo inside the house he is absolutely filthy. In his need to dominate he failed to take into account his surroundings, he was covered in mud and water. He had to sleep on the back porch and then get a shower the next day before he could go back to work.

We are pretty sure no one at work believes us. He is the calmest gentlest dog when he is there. Now every night when we let him out for his bedtime routine he runs the entire length of the fence patrolling to make sure that no raccoon has encroached.

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

Steve Hardin1 Comment

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.