farm life

Barn is now ready for the winter

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The Apprentice came out for a couple of partial days early in the week and got the frost free faucet holes filled in. She stated that she is constantly hurting all of the time due to the laborious nature of the work she is doing on the farm. I stated that it was merely training for her apprenticeship at the end of September. Plus, she keeps returning and working every time I ask. This is a win/win situation for both of us.

I have some extra time off of work so I am playing catch up before winter starts. I have several projects that are on hold, the old house freezer room, the back bridge, bee hive storage room and moving the old lamb shed over near the machine shed. Instead I am working on the barn. It needed to be set back up so we can use it. So on Thursday I cleaned up the house some, then picked two more gallons of thornless blackberries and then the Apprentice came out to do some more work.

We gathered some tools and drug them out to the barn. We needed to install more hooks for the buckets. It’s so much nicer to be able to find a bucket when you need it, so we installed another ten hooks. We installed bungee cords on all of the doors so they auto close now so the sheep cannot get into any area that we forget to use the latch on. We installed the sorting chute and even put some hinge joints into the chute so when we start using the chute panels to block off portions of the barn it will be easier to move the panels. I think we need another six metal pins as there are only two left unused. The door into the momma/baby is always out of commission early as it get stuck open due to the level of the bedding rising quickly. So we raised it another three inches. It cannot go any higher or the lambs will fall under it when they lay next to it. They all lay next to something that will potentially allow them to fall under it. The extra bungees were all placed in the bungee hanging spot and all of the bucket straps were placed on the wall in their appropriate storage spot. We added three more rails in the momma/baby area to hang feeders from. We added two more eyelets for the creep gate so the area under the stairs can be converted to a baby feed fattening area.

The big thing was to put metal support hangers under all of the cross braces holding up the bedding. One of the boards had split and another was cracking. We had to force the broken one back together and install the hanger. Now that they all have a hanger we don’t have to worry about the space above the feeders crashing down onto the unsuspecting sheep dining below. We just need to toss out some straw bales but literally you just toss them down and the sheep will tear them up and spread them around themselves.

Predators 9/Farm 1

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It has been one of those weeks, The Apprentice wanted to keep working all week. The fence building did not deter her. We have two leaky frost free faucets that need to be replaced. Unfortunately, to do that they have to be dug out. This is due to the reducers that had to be added to match the 2” pipe that is original to the farm. I placed some tools on the ground to outline a space and asked her to dig. She knocked out the first hole on day 1. Her only real obstacles were the dogs kept dropping the throw balls onto her head when the hole started to get deep. I imagine she threw the ball all day for both dogs. I am sure they loved it. I saw her on her way out and told her there was another faucet in the back yard that needed dug out but it was near a tree stump and would probably not be as easy. This did not seem to deter her and The Apprentice stated she would be back the next day.

Thursday morning, she texted me around 0930, a late start for sure. I am sure that first hole was causing some physical discomfort. I had messaged her first thing to check on a sheep carcass in the orchard. My mother-in-law had called me at work stating she thought there was a dead sheep in the orchard. The Apprentice confirmed there was indeed a dead ewe, #325, in the orchard with no intestines. I told her to just leave it. She tore into the back faucet with less enthusiasm and more problems. There were tree roots everywhere and she had to keep cutting through them. I knew this was going to be a problem. She had to leave around 1330 and said there was more to dig.

When Annmarie came home she called me at work to tell me there was a dead sheep in the orchard. I had forgotten to tell her. She had spotted it because there was a Golden Eagle feasting on the carcass! I asked if she had gotten a picture of the eagle, nope. We discussed my failure to keep her informed and that the sheep had to now be brought into the barn lot. This means running them through the front yard every night and letting them back out every morning. I opted to leave the carcass in the orchard as I was going to be around the farm all weekend and wanted a crack at the coyote doing this.

Friday morning when Mr Rainman and I went out to fix the gate into the tree orchard area, he hit it with the tractor earlier in the summer. We noticed that the carcass only had the head intact and three legs. One leg was missing and one was off in the pasture about 40 feet from the carcass. It had been stripped down. We found a dig out spot under the fence. This is where the predators have been crawling under the fence to get to the sheep. It was a fresh crawl spot and the dirt was still moist. We ended up planting a wooden post in the field and mounting the electronic eyes on all four sides of the post. They are solar powered with a battery that lasts all night. So they charge all day and then light up and flash at night. It is supposed to look like light reflecting off of eyes. This is supposed to scare the predators off. We got everything mounted but did not turn them on. I went back up to the machine shed and created a snare to place over the hole. We are going to leave the carcass in the orchard for one more night to see if something returns tonight. This meant that the four vultures that showed up today got to fill their bellies all day long. They were pretty satiated. I will move the carcass tomorrow if we don’t catch anything. If we do I will try the snare a second night. Who knows what will happen.

We carried a rifle all day while working on the fence and faucets and did not see a single coyote. It is so painful to have the thing on you most of the day. We finally just put it in the pickup so it was out of the way. We did get the frost free faucets changed out and they work and do not leak. The Apprentice can fill in the holes at a later date. We went up and pounded T posts in on two sides of field #1. The stupid flood buried the woven wire alongside the road in two different places. We will have to cut the wire and splice in new to sit above the dirt. Their is a large drop off so we had to pound the T-posts in by hand alongside the road.

We measured the fence line distance alongside the creek. Each roll of woven wire is 330’. So I decided that instead of trying to wire all the woven wire into one long contiguous piece of wire I would just install them in 312-320’ increments. We marked out a H brace every 312-320 feet. We can install one entire section of fence, tighten it up and then attach the new one and do it again. Their needs to be some H braces interspersed along a long fence anyways and this made perfect sense to me. We marked out all of the H braces and drilled the first holes with the 6” auger. The rain we had earlier in the week and the storm we had today made drilling into the soil very easy. We got 5/100” of rain today. I missed out on measuring the earlier rain storm due to a dead battery in our rain gauge, I fixed it on Wednesday.

I did try and call the animal auction yard today but no one answered and their voicemail was full. I will try an email this weekend. We have 55 lambs that need a new home with only five sold at this time.

Even more fencing on field #1

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Today went a lot better than yesterday. Mr Rainman and I installed the wife’s seat covers in her car. Wow, this is not an intuitive or easy job. It took us 75 minutes with both of us working on it and we never would have gotten it done if Mr Rainman had not taken the time to read the directions! I was gonna wing it! Nope, there are a lot of disconnect this one thing, leave off or detach and then put back after you have fished the straps past. Mr Rainman did bleed on some of the covers but I think I got all of the blood wiped up so wife won’t notice. The underside of the seats have some sharp areas. Since we could not get it in under 60 minutes the wife had to drive my lovely two door color car. Luckily, there were not going to be any passengers as the passenger door handle is still missing. I don’t think I will ever replace that handle, it’s superfluous.

I did order a new inside door handle for the pickup today. It’s just too hard to shut the door with no handle. The handle broke off at both screw attachment locations. I am hoping the $25 replacement will last another ten years. My left thumb is healing up nicely, the divot I took out with the electric shears has filled in and I just have an eraser sized scab left. I was sure I was going to have an upside down U forever on my thumb.

I have not been able to catch or kill a coyote yet. Today, we had the rifle with us the entire time and did not see a coyote. I have started to look into thermal imaging binoculars and scopes but they are expensive. Plus, it looks like the scopes all want to go on a picatinny rail and none of my hunting rifles have that. So I am still looking into it. This is a very dumb problem.

We need to get rid of some sheep. I took some pictures today and posted them for sale on Craigslist. We will see how that goes. I am going to email the auction site. I tried calling but their voicemail was full.

Both of my helpers came out to work on the fence in field #1. We got all of the wooden H brace cross pieces up and got one of the H braces fitted with high tension wire. We ran out of wire from our used stash but Mr Rainman had left with the Kubota tractor and it has the forks on it so we can just slip the full roll of wire onto a pallet fork and hold it in the air. This should make getting a piece off of the appropriate size easy. Instead we switched to installing T-posts with the tractor. The ground is fairly rock free and after two rains the ground is a lot softer than it was earlier in the summer. I only had to pound it about ten posts total with the tractor bucket. The rest I could just push in with the bucket (full of gravel and 150# of steel weights on the driver side of the push bucket. The Apprentice and I kept it up till about 1300. We also got the holes drilled for the gate so it can be installed next. I have learned that there are differing priorities for the Apprentice. When I asked the Apprentice why she was not wearing leather gloves when handling the T-posts and inserting them into the bucket driver I was informed that a weird suntan was appearing around her wrists. She did eventually put on some gloves as the sun heated the T-posts up enough they were too hot to handle. I refrained from commenting. We are still having grip exercise discussions every day she works. I keep telling her she needs to be able to handle tools for 8+ hours a day.

Fencing proceeds despite communication barriers

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Today the plan was to actually get some posts in the ground and get all of the needed materials to their appropriate locations. This proved much harder than one would assume as the day progressed. Both Mr Rainman and the Apprentice came out today to help with fencing. It took us a half an hour to gather tools and the rest of the railroad ties we needed. As the Apprentice and I got to the barn lot and were loading up large cedar posts to be the other half of an H brace with a railroad tie, I realized we needed more tools. I texted Mr Rainman and after the third text I realized that I just needed to walk over to the machine shed and help load more tools. We almost forgot the rifle, varmit getter. We loaded up 12- 16’x2”x8” rough cut boards onto the Kubota forks to use as the cross pieces for the H braces. That was almost too much weight to safely carry down the fields. The tractor back end kept bouncing off the ground when the path got too bumpy.

The plan was for Mr Rainman and I to start setting railroad ties after we drilled out the 12” holes. We had used the 6” auger yesterday to put in all of the holes and the plan was to widen the holes that needed railroad ties today. The field has dirt and not many rocks where we were digging but the ground has a lot of clay in it and can get very hard. Usually the big auger will just sit on top of the dirt and not cut down into it. It’s better since I welded the holder onto the arm and we stack tractor weights on it. We only had to use 100# of weights today.

The plan was to send the Apprentice back to the fence supply pile for a gate, there were three places on the farm she could find extra railroad ties, she needed to grab used T-posts from another spot and then grab the high tension wire that was on the ground near a culvert. I also have blocked off the wheat field access, I just covered it up with woven wire. This proved very problematic. You have to drive all the way down to field #3 to get out into the wheat field road before you can then drive up alongside the fields and get out onto the gravel road. We had to put one railroad tie on that fence alongside the road. She needed to deliver that said post. I thought I had explained the correct path. When she showed up in field #1 with the post and asked me how to get to the hole I had to reiterate all of the instructions, except this time she did not have to find the railroad tie, she had that. The tie got delivered to the correct spot and then she was supposed to get used T posts and the high tension wire.

Mr Rainman and I managed to get almost all of the railroad ties and cedar posts set when I asked him if he could see the Apprentice. Nope, it turns out that she drove past the used pile of T-posts six times and missed them every time. She had to drive down to the house and dig into the used post pile we have behind the grain bins.

Mr Rainman had to run to the house for a break so I asked him to grab a gate behind the grain bins. He comes rattling down the field with this super fancy very nice gate, not the gate from behind the grain bins. He states that I told him to go down to four corners and get that gate. You could not have picked a further spot from where we were fencing! He had to drive back and drop it off and get the gate we needed from behind the grain bins.

The only consistency here is me. I was the one giving instructions. There may have been some ambiguity present that I did not realize was present! The Apprentice and I got four sets of H braces built. She kept after it. As we were putting in the high tension tighteners she was having trouble using the fencing pliers, no grip strength. I gave her shit for not using the grip strengthener exercise I had told her about. She wants to be a farrier and will need to be able to hold onto the tools even when tired. She then voiced that she has been hurting all over her body since starting to work for me! Her hands hurt, her feet, her legs, her arms and her back all hurt all of the time! I laughed and told her mine do also but we still have to get stuff done. Say what you will, but the Apprentice just keeps coming back for more work. She digs in and just works at it until it is completed. You simply cannot ask for more and it is nice knowing she shows up to getter done. In a month, she goes off to school, so I will be keeping her as busy as possible until then.

Big surprise, we did not see a coyote that could be shot at. There was one across the street on the neighbors place but it was gone in about five seconds. I was up at 0115 due to the puppy barking, I went outside with a flashlight, suppressed 22 pistol and two extra clips to check on the ewe carcass we had left in the orchard, nothing there.

Barn Dig out completed

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Last week went fast and slow at the same time. The Apprentice stated that she wanted to work. The barn needs dug out and I have to go to the paying job. This seemed like a match made in heaven, to me. I attempted to teach The Apprentice how to drive the little tractor in and out of the barn. It is a tight fit and you have to watch the rear tires and the front bucket simultaneously so you don’t smash either one into the barn or knock out a roof support. After 20 minutes I realized that the time to just get in and out of the barn was going to be too long. So I had the Apprentice start shoveling the barn in areas the tractor would not go. I used the tractor to break up stuff it could reach and had the Apprentice make a long pile of poop in the center of the barn. She kept digging every day and I had to come home, eat dinner and then go out on the tractor and spend a couple of hours digging out the piles that were made in the center of the barn. She had that entire thing done in four days!

The barn floor is now drying out before we lay down some new bedding. I have to repair three boards that I managed to tear up with the tractor. This is only the second time I have torn up some boards when I was digging out the floor with the tractor. I just have to screw down three 4 foot long boards. It will take the impact driver to get the screws into the ancient wood I reused as the subfloor.

I had the Apprentice attempt to clean up the ground outside the barn with the tractor. The wind was blowing and after she ate about a half a pound of dust and poop she called it a day. I will have to come back later to scrape the ground clean. The Apprentice wanted to keep working but we were headed out of town on Friday so the apprentice agreed to come out early on Saturday and we would start in on the fence around field #1. I need to get that field fence up so the cows and sheep can get in there and eat it down. I have also been spending some time in the evenings picking blackberries. Annmarie uses them in her breakfast smoothies and we freeze them in individual serving portions. I have been picking wild blackberries and our domesticated thornless ones. The domesticated ones are huge in comparison to the wild, but the wild ones are much sweeter. The domesticated ones also have NO thorns, it is so pleasant to pick them. My hands look like I have been dragging them through rose bushes after picking wild berries for a couple of days. I was able to swing a deal with a friend for jam. I pick the blackberries and they make the jam! This way we both get some. They don’t like the hornets. I have not been stung a single time by hornets this year. I have managed to “pick” a couple off the blackberry bushes that I thought were fruit. It’s always a surprise when you go to put it in the bucket. I wash it, measure it and freeze it in known quantities so we can use it for jam and pies later in the year. I need to pick about four more gallons.

12 cups of wild blackberries