farm life

Sunchokes for the win

Steve HardinLeave a comment

On Sunday Mr Rainman came out again. We are now starting at 0900 so it is a little warmer when we are working. It was quite pleasant, I was able to work with just a long sleeve shirt and a wool cap on my head. There were still a few get ready for winter items to clear up before we could work on the garden and lavender. The plan on Saturday afternoon was to work on the lavender. It needs trimmed up again. But the longer I worked on the berm the more time I had time to think and prioritize. So we went out to the barn first thing and finished setting up all of the chutes and feeders. They were still outside and in the hay rooms from when it was dug out. There are no sheep on the property but we will have to bring them back in three weeks and then they will need to be sorted so I can take some to the livestock auction. We also tossed out food into all of the feeders and then tossed out bedding. The barn is all ready for the sheep. There are a couple of overhead lights that do not work, the ones in the hay rooms being the most needed. The damn raccoons have torn some of the wires out by crawling up and down the walls. I need to put in more zip ties and anchors that I screw into the walls so the wires cannot be pulled. I am not running conduit for those 12v wires. I will add that to my list but honestly it will not happen until I get the raspberries, blackberries and trees all trimmed up. I need about another month for all the leaves to finish falling off of everything before I can do the trimming.

We then filled the feeders for the pregnant cows and the two feeders for the feeder cows down below. We used all of the round bales from the second cutting at the neighbor’s. There were still a couple of moist ones but there was no mold and none of the bales were warm/hot. We managed to get the truly wet ones fed out immediately and the cows just ate them. So in a couple of weeks I will have to actually feed out some of the large bales of hay we purchased. I am super happy that we are not having to touch the purchased hay until mid December. That bodes well for maybe not having to purchase any hay next year for winter.

We now Winter is near when the quail start moving down towards the houses. We feed them during the winter and there are more buildings/shelter down near the houses for them to wait out the bad storms. So there is a large covey hanging around that we see every day. They are super noisy! You can always hear them usually before you can see them.

Once we had all of that done we had to see how our Sunchokes did. I planted them for the first time this summer. I planted about 30 small tubers. The plants got almost twelve feet tall and the sunflower bloomed very late. It was the very last flower we had available for the bees. I am not sure if it was due to the time I planted the tubers or if they are naturally late bloomers. I am unsure but we will know next year. Mr Rainman and I started to dig up the tubers after cutting off the dead stalks. I had read that you needed to be careful with sunchokes as they can turn into a weed and can be very invasive. Wow! We dug up almost 80# of tubers from a single 15 feet row of tubers. I planted one tuber about every six inches initially. It was crazy! We just kept pulling them out of the ground. There was no way we got all of them when we were digging despite going over the area several times. All of the wield small or shovel cut tubers ended up being the ones we replanted into the same row. I sent a three gallon bucket home with Mr Rainman and we put the rest in the root cellar. I did plant a row in the yard near the newly installed side fence. I want to plant a six by six foot patch on the other side of the fence gate but I was running out of steam. I will do that in the spring. I will need to put in a couple of posts and some wire to hold up the tall stalks so they don’t fall onto the house. Annmarie and I have not eaten any of the Sunchokes yet. The plan is this next week to peel and boil a batch and see how they taste. If we like them then we will probably plant some more. I have read online where people mix them in with potatoes to add texture and a nutty flavor to their mashed potatoes.

Once Mr Rainman left I took the Kubota tractor out to work on the culvert crossing in field #4b. The spring ditch is so deep now that you can no longer drive a tractor across it. The back half of the culvert was torn out in the last flood. The reason it got torn out was I did not install a rock wall face on that side. It was one of those things I was going to come back and finish later. The side that had the rock face survived the flood but the other side did not. It took a lot more dirt than I thought it would to get the back half built up. I did bring in two loads of very large rocks to place near the culvert. I need about eight more loads to complete that entire side but my chest was not going to allow it. The nice thing about the weekend was it was the first one in ages where I was able to work the entire weekend without stopping early to rest. Things are improving.

Winter is coming eventually

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I think Winter will show up eventually but it is slow in arriving. We have had a couple of hard freezes and I have actually scraped ice off of the vehicle windshields twice. Mr Rainman came out last weekend for a couple of days to help me. It is nice to have the help and I am still healing up from the pneumonia, a little pericarditis tends to slow you down some. The Winter chores need to get done so we worked on that Saturday. We stripped the garden clean and rearranged the beds so that different vegetables would be planted in different bins in the spring. I dug up the other half of the potato bin. I did decide to leave the beets in the ground that I planted late this fall. The greenery is still intact and has not wilted so I am going to let them grow/hibernate until the greenery dies. I planted one bin three weeks earlier than the other and it is doing much better. We had never planted beets before so it is a great experiment. Once that was done and we had the garden area ready for Winter the bulbs were next.

I had an entire vegetable crisper bin in the fridge full of flower bulbs. It was time to get them planted before the ground froze solid. Since the rock wall is only completed on the right hand side of the bridge I only wanted to plant bulbs on that side. After much contemplation and input from various sources I am going to have to rip out about 15 feet of completed rock wall on the left hand side. When I dug down I found the original base stones and I was using those as they lay. The wall is kicking out the further I get toward the barn. So I need to tear it back and scoot it closer towards the house and keep it in line with the right hand side wall. I may even put up a stake with a string! We tore down the fence and I had to bring over five loads of dirt and a load of rocks to finish getting the flower bed lined and height correct. We opened up the packages and read the planting instructions to determine the height of the final plant. We tossed out the packages based on height then laid out all of the bulbs on the surface of the dirt. Once we had them all laid out we planted them. Surprisingly, there were a lot of bulbs. We ended up planting a bulb almost every six inches throughout the entire flower bed. The tallest flowers are toward the edge of the wall so they will shade the short plants. I realize that appears backwards when you are driving in and walking down the sidewalk but from the house we will see more flowers. Most of the short bulbs are early risers and like partial shade. We will know next year how they do but they are in the ground! Once that was done we laid out the fence over the top of the entire flower bed to keep Chance from digging up the bulbs. So far it has been one week and she has not dug up any bulbs. She has another hole to China started and it is deep enough now that when she goes in it she disappears. This hole is of course in the front yard.

Mr Rainman had to leave after a few hours so I spent the rest of the day on the tractor working on building up our dirt levee over by the old chicken coop. I had extended the hill last year but the cows had torn it down to only about six inches high. This time I piled up the dirt and then proceeded to drive on it every time I went back for another scoop of dirt. This really helped compact it down. Once I had the entire thing done I ran over it again in two directions to compact it one more time. I am only looking for about 16” of berm. Those last two horrible floods could have been diverted back into the stream bed with a 12” berm. I am just trying to get the flood precautions all finished. I have one more thing to do, there is a downed tree in the dry creek bed that is backing up water. I need to cut the middle out of the downed branch so it doesn’t create an artificial dam and flood out field #1. Once I get that done all of the flood precautions that should help if we get another bad flood will be in place. There is no guarantee they will work but honestly, I would rather do all the work, guess and take precautions and never find out if they were necessary! It has taken me years to rebuild all of the stuff torn out, or up or altered by the flooding.

Treasures

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Sunday we went over to a neighbor’s house to finish getting his chicken coop ready for chickens. It now has chicken wire over all the windows and around the entire yard with bird netting over the entire chicken yard. He is all ready for chickens. I will hopefully be getting a few laying hens over there in the next week. He doesn’t want a rooster so I will have to get rid of the third rooster we now have. I usually only keep one rooster but we now have the chickens ranging up past the old chicken coop, behind the barn and up on the back hillside. Both roosters are trying very hard to keep apart and it is leading to a much wider roaming region.

Mr Rainman went over with me and we got our trailer loaded with an old cow feeder, a wind directional feeder, an old grain bin that used to be on a very old combine and an old cook stove. The cow feeder just needed rolled out into the pasture and filled with hay. The wind directional feeder needs a wire bucket installed so the hay will be contained while the horse is eating it. The grain bin is big and should hold a lot of grain but the entire bottom is rusted out. We poked holes in it while we were loading it. We knew this before we loaded it but reality set in when the tractor forks went through the floor. The stove just needs a wire wheel brush and some new stove black paint to get it back in shape.

We are going to put the stove in the gazebo. I will cut a vent hole in the door of the gazebo and make a covered wood pile out next to the corral. We won’t need that much wood and it will all have to be fairly small to fit into the fire box on the stove. The fire box and ash box are in great shape and do not need any repairs. The floor has to go into the gazebo before the stove can be set.

I will need to get some sheet metal to fix the grain bin. I am thinking 1/16” should be plenty thick. I am not sure what gauge of sheet metal that corresponds to, Google will have to tell me. Google says it is almost 14 gauge so I guess 14 gauge is what I will use. I will definitely need to practice first and I suspect the wire feed is going to be the key to my success when working with sheet metal.

The wheat field has gotten enough water to really shoot up and is doing well. The mild temperatures have been allowing it to grow.

Milo the wonder dog

Steve Hardin3 Comments

We picked up a Border Terrier puppy almost a year and a half ago, we named him Milo and he started to go to work with Annmarie as a therapy dog in training since he was 6 months old. He thinks the hospital is his petting zoo and treat mart. Normally he goes to work 2-3 times a week. We always let him pick whether he is going in or not. He has to have a brush and wipe down before work every morning. So if I call him and he hangs out in his bed or the back of the couch and doesn’t come over for grooming then he gets to stay home. If he wants to go to work he will come running over so he can have his pre work beauty session.

Annmarie has been working very hard to train him to be around the chaos and people that are normal in a hospital. He is immune to wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, canes or any contraption present in a hospital. He can ride the elevator and has no trouble with the stairs or automatic doors. This weekend he had to take a certification test to prove that he is ready to be an official therapy dog up until this point he has been in training.

He passed the test with flying colors and is officially a certified therapy dog! We are very happy and lucky that he is such a special trooper.

Sickness cannot halt progress

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Sickness cannot halt production on the farm, it can merely sideline it! I was very ill last week and ended up catching pneumonia. Ever since that first bought of Covid my lungs have not snapped back and I get pneumonia pretty easily now. Of course I got it and finally had to reach out to my PCP when my oxygen saturations started to drop into the mid 80% range. This caused several days of missed work but Mr. Rainman was coming out for the weekend last week and I needed to take advantage of the help. The plan was to get the sand down and compacted in the Gazebo so that we could lay the pavers. There are about 1200 pavers that have to go down to fill up the space. This does seem like a lot but they just have to lay down then we can put special grout down and seal them all in place.

The real problem was we had still not managed to get the compactor to function correctly. We have done multiple things to get it going. We ended up having to change the oil as this model somehow gets fuel into the oil which then causes the motor to kill itself when it gets up to speed. Once we did that it worked but the throttle cable was still not working correctly and Mr Rainman ended up touching the hot exhaust plat and burning a couple of bolt patterns into his palm. We decided that this project was going to have to wait until the spring. We need to fix the throttle cable again and we need some water available to water down the sand as we compact it. I managed to find a throttle cable that is used on a concrete cutter that allows you to set it at various locations and the cable will not retract with vibrations. I have ordered said cable and it should be here this week. I am sure I will have to fabricate some type of holder to hold it in place but if the throttle cable stays in place it will be worth it. I just need to get a tarp and cover up the compactor for the winter. This chewed up five hours trying to get things up and going before we finally just called uncle and gave up. There is a plan in place and we will pick it up in the spring.

I have several other items that need to get done before the ground freezes so I have to pivot my to do list to get these items knocked out soon. If I were not sick they would have been done now but I have been having to rest. Rest is a four word cuss word when you are talking to a farmer/rancher. It is fairly derogatory and tends to get in the way of all progress. It is not one I like to hear in regard to my work output. I have been hearing it a lot lately from a lot of different directions. Ultimately, despite my will I have been forced to rest and recuperate.