farm life

Granary repair

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I was given an old granary this year. It was from a very old combine and had been converted to hold grain for chickens. It had not been used in a very long time and the entire bottom had rusted out. It still had the old pto motor for an auger on the front. It was trashed but it was still there. I have finally gotten around to repairing it. The problem is I have never really attempted a metal project this big before. My one quarter at BMCC with the welding class to learn stick welding did not cover this. Especially since the Gingerman changed the welder to a wire feed system. I have been trying to teach myself to wire weld. It is not quite the same as stick welding.

I have spent a couple weekends cutting out the bottom with a disc cutting wheel on my DeWalt 60v grinder. I have accepted that to work with metal I do actually need to wear some protective gear. I am wearing long pants, long sleeve shirt, leather gloves and eye goggles when I grind or cut anything. I switch out the goggles with a welding helmet and welding gloves when I use the welder. I get popped on the arm or face every once in a while but the important stuff is protected. I needed to buy some sheet metal and when I went to Packy’s the only type they carry is 14 g. I do not have a sheet metal brake. I needed to bend an angle into the sheet metal, both sides. I cut the piece then tried to bend it with a hammer and some clamps. No go. So I then tried to bend it over a piece of angle iron with one piece under and over the bend and beat on it with a heavy hammer. No go. So then I ground. Groove on the bend line and tried again. No go. I then proceeded to cut two inch grooves along the crease line about every six inches, so I cut out about 25% of the material along the bend. I then put it in place, welded one side down and then started to beat on it with a hammer, jump on it and used the forks on the tractor to bend it to my will!! I still ended up with 1/4” air gap in a few places that was painful to fill in with the wire welder. It would have gone faster if I had used the stick welder. But who wants to do the conversion again and then convert it back? I am too lazy for that much swapping around.

I was able to get the first half welded on and welded the gate holder in place. I marked the drill holes for the gate but I think they are wrong. One side looks good but the other looks like I let it slip while I was marking holes. I will just drill one hole. Put the gate on, mark and drill a second hole, insert bolt then I can get the other four in the correct spot. It will most likely be the very last thing I attach and I am going to bolt it on instead of weld it on. I bought a grain gate just for this purpose.

A full sheet of 14 g sheet metal cost roughly $110. So I think I can make it all with this one full sheet, if I piece the other side together. It will be close. I want a second granary, five feet on each side and five feet high. I have been looking to see if there is one out there available. The reason I want that size is I can fill it with the bucket of my tractor. If I get a real tall one I will have to use a grain auger. At this point I may have all the structural material in scrap and would only need maybe 2 pieces of angle iron for the lid and all of the sheet metal. Each side could be done with a full sheet of sheet metal, I would need one for the bottom and one for the top, six full sheets plus the grain door and it would cost $700 in materials, plus $100 in welding wire. I am thinking that this is the way to go to get a second one. An old water tank would be the bomb! I may keep looking, if I mounted the tank on a downhill angle I could just put the gate on the low side, a fill lid on the high side and I would be set!

My welds are improving as the project progresses. I have had to lower the voltage to minimize burn through and I have had to increase the speed of the wire. I had turned it down but had to adjust it faster on three separate occasions. I will need to move over a couple of railroad ties to set it on. Slow and steady progress. Eventually, I would like to have enough storage to be able to go get our wheat truck filled with 3-4 types of grain/peas and then store it on the farm. One wheat truck full would get us through the winter for the sheep and the year for the chickens.

Haying done for now.

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Well we do actually go on vacation occasionally, we spent a week in Cove at Ascension summer camp. I am the nurse and Annmarie is the priest. I spend the week working on my jewelry as I am always too busy at home. I was able to complete three chains that were in various stages of completion. While we were away the Quiet One mowed the entire property again to knock down all the cheat grass a second time. It takes two mowings to get it knocked down. They did all the main fields. I spent one Sunday mowing around the buildings and along the road and up top a single time around the CRP. They had already gone around twice on three sides. This helps keep the weeds from creeping in from the fence lines. I did not see a single rabbit while I was mowing. We did have a second calf born while we were away, it is a little buy and he is already bigger than his three week old sister. He is a beautiful brown color. This is the second boy that has been brown.

I did try and mow on the back side of field #1 but it is tough. I just knocked down the high stuff. There is still a tipping point from the old hole that I did not get completely filled. So you have to be careful with the tractor or it will tip over. I really need to get the Gingerman over here with a dozer and cut a road on the back side so I can fence off the stream-bed. We might even be able to even out the side to the point that I could grow some grass on this side. I might be able to get 1-2 acres planted in grass. It’s a long term goal. It is going to require a dozer. I wouldn’t mind planting a couple of trees back there also.

The chickens have been getting decimated so we decided to upgrade our security. We now have a Ring camera on the backside of the old house and it watches the coop and entire ram pasture/back of barn. We should now be able to see coyotes, raccoons and other predators. It is a lot easier to review footage when it gets marked because something is there.

Our garden is pumping out herbs and we just picked all our fall planted garlic. The nice part was it was free! We saved garlic from last year and planted it in the fall, we will do the same thing again this year. We use an entire large brown paper bag of garlic over the course of a year. Garlic is a root vegetable, not a spice. We are picking raspberries also. We are getting about a quart every day now. Annmarie has started to freeze some for use during the winter. We are not going to get much tree fruit this year. The late freeze killed the buds, plus last year was a bumper crop and the trees like to rest after a great year. But our thornless blackberries and the wild blackberries are incredible this year. I picked almost 25 gallons last year. I will probably have to fill in the missing fruit with blackberries this year so I suspect I will need to pick at least 40 gallons this year. If you equate that to the price of buying fruit we probably save $800-1000 in fresh fruit by freezing our own. Plus, I don’t mind picking blackberries, it is fairly relaxing.

Predators 19/ Farm 0

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We have multiple fires around us so sunsets are now very spectacular.

Monday after work the Quiet One and Annmarie came out and helped me pickup 6 ton of hay from the neighbor’s place. We stacked all of it over by the grain bins then used the new corral pieces to keep the alpaca and deer off of the hay. We picked up another 290 bales. We did have to dump off one bale on the edge of the field. It smelled very bad. I am sure there was some dead animal inside the bale but I never saw anything when I was baling hay. It was so bad there was no way I was going to take it back to the house and unroll it.

At some point I am going to have add it all up to know how much is actually out there but it is enough! I do know that. I will still need to cut the Naked Gardener’s field a second time and that will generate over 2 ton plus I may need to cut field one a second time but that will depend on when I can get the baler rebuilt.

We are going to buy a ton of bagged cattle feed to supplement the grass this winter. We are getting a heck of a price on it. It is very high protein so it will help offset the low protein count in the grass hay.

Our back creek is starting to dry up. It is barely flowing, this is about two weeks early for us.

The chickens are making me crazy. We had 27 hens after all the “Townie” chickens were taken in. They were laying eggs like crazy. Then I got busy haying and kept forgetting to get eggs. Something started to eat all of the eggs. All I would find were shells in the coop. So I had an egg thief. Last week I went out after dark to pickup eggs (don’t want the egg thief to get them) and I actually counted chickens! Holy smokes! There were only 8 hens and 3 roosters. We have lost 19 hens and one rooster. All of the town chickens have succumbed to the farm hazards. Annmarie thinks I need to lock them into the coop yard but after the cows tore into the backside of the enclosure I will need to spend a couple of days of rebuilding the entire chicken yard to make this a reality. I am unwilling to give up two days of farm work for the chickens yet. The chickens are still laying more eggs than our household can use so we are still winning. If we have to buy eggs for ourselves then I count that as a loss. We have not had to do this since I got chickens. The few chicken customers we had are going without again. It is feast or famine around here when it comes to having spare chicken eggs.

We purchased a ring camera to watch the coop and ram pasture. I will get it figured out so an end can be dished out to the offending party. It takes 6-8 months to raise a chicken until it can lay eggs.

Haying again

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I had more haying to do over the weekend. I cut down what looked good at the neighbor’s. The weather was so warm that I had to turn it in 24 hours and was baling it the next day. I did have to finish putting the baler together before I could bale anything. I have decided that I will need to chain up the baler next time I work on it. I need to take both of the support arms off of it so I can get into the internal pickups much easier. I am wasting time trying to squeeze myself into a little area and work in a cramped space. If I chain the front part up so it does not fall then I can just chock the wheels and work on it with nothing in the front. I only need to remove two bolts to get it off.

I took some time on Friday to go over and pickup an old horse arena, some homemade panels and scrap pipe from the Naked Gardener. I think I will use them to circle the hay pile I am putting up next to the grain bins. The four homemade panels are for the spring crossing. I have panels from another horse arena set installed there now and this will allow me to pull all those panels back together to form a circle.

I baled Saturday until it got so hot that the grass would no longer bale. I came back out after dinner and worked until 2330. The grass was baling very well but I was tired after a 16 hour day and was ready for bed. I busted a shear bolt because I was not paying attention to what I was doing, I think I dozed off so the quitting time whistle was blown and I went home, cleaned up and went to bed so I could be out by 0730 and baling again. I needed to bale in the morning before it got too hot. I was able to bale for two hours before I heard a clang and the shear bolt snapped again. I tried to replace the shear bolt but I could not turn the pickups by hand. So I had to move some grass around and I discovered the broken pickup string of three pickups that had broken loose and jammed the works up. I was talking with Mr Rainman and after the baler rebuild last year with all new chain sprockets and new chains we think all of the slop is gone and now the weak point is the old bolts in the pickup area. I had already placed an order for more parts and now I need to wait until they come then order the rest of the parts to change out all of the internal pickup forks and all of the bolts. I have 2-3 bent pickup guides and those will need to be changed out also. A total rebuild of the internal pieces so that all the weak spots go away.

We got some hanging baskets and I installed two hooks on the front porch. We are going to see how the baskets do in the wind before we install more hooks. We would like to have hooks all across the entire front porch with flowers hanging down. It would look very cool!

More priorities

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I was forced to finally tear into the instant hot water propane tank. We had gotten past the decision to run the dishwasher or washing machine; washing machine or shower; shower or washing machine, if you tried to run two at the same time no one gets hot water. I have to do it every 1-2 years. I do run vinegar through it every year to minimize the hard water deposits to prevent the pipes from corroding. However, there is no warning about the flies. The flies come down the exhaust pipe and then die in the squirrel cage fan. They get stuck in the fan and get smeared inside the circular part of the squirrel cage, creating a drag for the air so the heater is not cooled down enough. This causes an error when there is too much demand on the hot water heater. I have to unplug some electrical connections and remove the fan then clean up the fan and then wipe out all of the bug guts from the inside wall of the fan housing. It takes a couple of hours to get it all cleaned and dried. Annmarie was wondering why her hair dryer was out and plugged in upstairs when she got home. I used it to make sure the fan was completely dry before reinstalling it. I only forgot to plug one thing back together and I figured that out when I tried to start it and it threw a code immediately and refused to heat up water. We are now back to unlimited hot water of any quantity!

We had a fire scare last week. Someone had one of their hay stacks catch on fire on the edge of Pilot Rock. The trouble was it was the edge closest to our house and the wind was blowing almost 20 MPH directly towards our house. The state police stopped and gave us a warning to get ready to evacuate. I went out and hooked up the disc to the tractor and started to disc next to the fence and next to the road and around all of the buildings. Normally, we have fires a little later in the season after the wheat field is harvested. They disc in a nice fire break all around the wheat field as soon as they harvest the outside. In a month there would have already been a fire break in place. The Gingerman is working on the brakes of the old truck so we can get it set up to fight fire. I ended up getting very dirty and will be spraying the area in the early spring to kill the vegetation so that it will be easier to disc.

One of our neighbors offered to have me cut one of their fields that had been flooded out in the spring. It had random cheat grass throughout it and it took some driving around with the sickle bar before I figured out what parts of it were worth cutting for hay. Of course before I could even cut anything I had to repair the tractor tire that got punctured while discing for a fire break. Of course, the tire could not be repaired the internal side wall was breaking apart, I am sure it is from moving the large bales. I need to keep more air in the front tires. I had to go in and pickup the tire on Friday.

I had a hard time getting to the sickle bar mower as it was on the tractor with the flat. I got the sickle bar off but had already taken the flat tire off of the tractor. So I just started the tractor, leveled off the bucket, lifted the front tires off the ground and slid forward on the bucket, Clementine did just fine. I did this so I had enough room to squeeze in Juicy behind and hook up the sickle bar. I had to fight, wiggle, cuss and lever the sickle bar to get it hooked up to the new Kubota. The five foot mower is lot for that little tractor. I was able to get the field cut. The next afternoon I turned the hay and it was going to be ready to be baled on Saturday. It is drying out very fast. I just needed to finish reassembly on the baler.