farm life

Predators 3/ Farm 0

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well the predators are definitely bold! We lost one lamb in the orchard in late January and we lost two more lambs in the orchard last night! The lambs had not had rigor set in by the early morning and neither were torn up but one was missing its entire abdominal cavity contents. I noticed the magpies fighting out in the orchard on my way to work and messaged Mr Rainman to check when he came out. He is coming out a couple of days a week to help out.

Due to this calamity between the houses we are no longer letting the sheep stay in the orchard overnight. They are getting moved into the barn lot at night. We think its a coyote, both of our dogs sleep in kennels inside at night. We are going to look into some solar motion activated lights. I think there is a solar set of red eyes that you mount on the fence at predator eye height to scare them away. I will need to do more research on that item. The funny thing is I have not seen a coyote this year at all. Our 11 month lambs running around on the back hillside have all survived, only the lambs have been killed. We have woven wire fences already.

I am mowing the yard again with the sheep. It’s just easier and more environmentally friendly! Again, the sheep poop is very wet and slimy due to all of the green grass but they are working on the yard. They like the hillside better as the grass/clover on it is shorter. They like to eat the short grass first before eating the tall grass. It’s pretty weird.

The puppy Chance is doing well when we use her to work the sheep and cows on a lead. I had the sheep in the front yard so the dogs are in the backyard. Our side fence is low and temporary and Chance decided yesterday that jumping the fence and playing with the sheep was fun. It was fun for her but not the sheep. She totally went crazy, running around, running into the herd, biting everything she could touch. She would not listen and would not follow “down” command. There was zero off switch. I had to wait until she grabbed a sheep then grabbed her. She spent the rest of the day on the overhead run. No way to get loose and as long as the sheep stay away she cannot harm anything. We spent a lot of the day going into the “down” command with me across the yard or from the road. There will be a lot more training to teach her that she is to herd the sheep, not chase or bite them.

Cow sorting gone bad

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I was up early, ready to go out and load the steer at 0730. We had kept him in the corral for the last two day so we would not have to sort everyone. Sorting can take 2-3 hours on a good day. We had even kept the dogs in the back yard, otherwise they can get right next to the corral and harass the animals. We had let the sheep back out into our yard for one day and then I pushed them over into our orchard area. The orchard area is getting tall and I did not want them to knock the clover back down. Even though it had already grown about two inches since the last time they had been on it. It grows pretty aggressively when it is grazed on. The yard is a little out of control, the sheep may have to come back in soon so I can be eco friendly and not run the gas powered lawn mower! The trade off is you have to dodge sheep poop on your way to the front door.

The customer came with a horse trailer. It had a solid door on the back that was much wider than the opening of the chute. I figured if we backed up on one corner then got the cow in we could pull forward and quickly shut the gate. I backed him up to the corral and there was about an eight inch gap. Annmarie came out to the yard and the dogs got out, Chance was still pissed about getting rolled two days ago and just started tearing it up, barking and running the length of the corral and trying to get through the fence into the corral. She would not give it up, or listen to us. I had to catch her and Annmarie drug her off by the collar to the back yard. She listens when she is on the lead, but not off when we are around livestock. She will listen off leash now to us but now we have to get her “off” switch wired so she will drop down no matter what is going on around her. This is harder than you think to teach. It means constantly exerting your will over the little things so she learns to just obey on command. It takes time.

Cow top left of picture, me from road on tractor, not where it belongs

I had money in my pocket from the sale and we loaded the cow. It went into the trailer then I shut the chute gate so it would not get out and it spotted the 8” opening. Once it had its head through it was all over! It got stuck twice but just kept bucking and hollering and got through in about 15 seconds. I rearranged the barn lot gates so we could just push it back into the lot and try again. I went and got the tractor to shoo it back toward the now opened gates. It jumped the fence into the fallow wheat field. I had to drive down to the corner then up the road then out into the wheat field. Annmarie had to come out with Chance and open the gate out into the wheat field. I was just going to drive the cow along the fence line to the gate. The crazy cow was not scared of the tractor and I had to keep blocking the fence line with the bucket to keep it from going past me. This worked until it jumped the fence back into the main house area, Chance was involved now and then it eventually jumped the fence again into the small seven acre fallow field, then jumped back into our main pasture area by the school house. I went to go talk to the buyer while she did the chasing into the school house field.

Chance (1 year old puppy) is the white Border Collie, Mouse is the grey/white one

I gave him his money back then we discussed options. I told him that if he called around and could get a carcass cut and wrapped that 243 therapy and assistance in cleaning and skinning would be available but he was going to have to plan on a few hours to do that hard work. Damn cows! He left without a cow and us without any money. He will reach out next week after making some enquiries.

I spent the rest of the day assembling a new bee hive. We purchased it before I knew about someone else wanting to get rid of their two hives. So now we have four full hives and a bunch of extras. I am going to have to clean up an area for all the extra bee supplies. I am thinking about moving the old lamb shed and creating a clean sub room inside it. I can use an old road side billboard sheet. They are fairly inexpensive, line the entire inside of the room, seal the edges and put in an airtight door. I will have to look into this more. I have a lot of extra stuff laying around and if I cobbled it all together I think I could do it fairly cheap.

Beautiful day

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Last week on Sunday was my catchup day. I was able to get the trailer tires loaded into the pickup and ready to go to town to fix all three flats, sitting is bad for tires. I will get them repaired and then reinstalled and the trailer will be ready to go to Lagrande Thursday morning bright and early. This will be my first trip over Cabbage Hill hauling a horse trailer. I know this sounds innocuous, hauling a horse trailer, but for those that do not know Cabbage Hill is the steepest and longest grade west of the Mississippi. The length is what gets most people, especially semi trucks. It is also a major thoroughfare for crossing the upper part of the United States when traveling from Coast to Coast. After having two overloaded trailers almost flip me in the pickup I am getting a little gun shy about traveling long distances with a heavy load.

I went out to work on doing my part of the spraying. Mr Rainman has been making great progress. The weather was perfect and I sometimes forget how nice it is to just go around in circles in a green field on a sunny cool day. It was amazing. I noticed that the sprayer boom was bouncing around quite a bit. The arms are designed to bounce up and break away backwards if you hit something. I thought I had better look at it. I stopped spraying and noticed that the nozzles were tilted. Turns out the steel tabs holding the boom had broken on one side of the drilled hole.

I decided that it was going to fail soon and needed to be fixed. This meant breaking out the welder! I passed the class at the local community college with a B (an A for all written tests and C for all actual welding). After much practice and discussion with the welding instructor it was determined that I just needed to be able to weld a strong weld on the farm and beauty was going to be nonexistent. I am okay with that as long as the weld holds. So I went back to the machine shed, laid out all the tools and found a piece of scrap iron. I cleaned up the area with a wire wheel grinder. Cut two triangles out of steel and the proceeded to weld on a cross vibration support and welded the breaks on both sides. Not sure when they designed it why they did not do that initially. It needs it if you plan on using it to spray 30-50 acres 2-3/year. I even shot some paint on it when I was done to slow down the rust.

Resting sorta

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well things did not go as planned after my concussion last week. I ended up getting a head CT and going to the concussion clinic. They put me on some turmeric and fish oil supplements and I am to rest and relax. I am allowed to do what I can but not to over do anything that makes my head symptoms worse. Plus, I am off work for a week. This is not going to help my head next week when I have to catch up but right now I have a nonstop headache. On top of all of that I have to listen to a lot of awkward jokes about leading with my head, how did you do that and you need a hard hat all of the time. I did capitulate after a few days on the hard hat idea. I really don’t like this laying around and since I wear a hat all the time when I am outside anyways it didn’t seem like a stretch to just wear a hard hat all the time when I am outside on the farm. So I have a OSHA approved vented carbon fiber hard hat on its way to the farm. I will be getting rid of all of my hats in the laundry room so that there will only be one choice when I head outside, the hard hat! I normally hit my head several times a year hard enough to give me wounds on top of my head so I am looking forward to not having those anymore either. Plus, I don’t get headaches and I particularly don’t have the patience or tolerance for them. Muscle aches, yeah I am used to that but not the headaches.

Mr Rainman is back in the area and has agreed to help me out this summer. I won’t be doing half the amount of hay I did last year and my only big project is the back bridge. We are going on a vacation to Scotland soon so that has limited the projects that will occur this summer. We have the grain bin outdoor cafeteria building still to put put but I am having reservations about putting it in the front yard as it will block the view of the barn. It’s not a priority but my brain is spinning on how to do it so I made Annmarie talk me through it’s location again. We decided on the front corner of the hillside by the corral. The grass never grows there anyways. It only needs to be leveled by about 18” so it should not be too bad of an area to prep. The only concession I will need to make is a set of gates on it to prevent the cows and sheep from going into it when we are running them through the yard.

Mr Rainman and I walked the entire property to see how things were going. We spotted our first calf of the year! It is one of the new black ones we just purchased a few months ago. Every one else should start having their babies soon as we planned for May births. So next week we will be sorting cows as I need to take five to Lagrande to the butcher. We are going to create two new herds, new mommas and expectant mommas and everyone else. I will move the new bull into Alcatraz as soon as I take our old bull to the sale. He needs to not go into the herd until the end of July. So we can then have calves nine months later in the spring.

The upper seven acre field was covered with late grass last year and I never mowed it or did the second hay cutting. It looks like only about half the field came back. This just means that I hay what is there and in the fall we plant the rest of the field in true orchard grass. It maintains it’s protein status better than most grasses throughout its later life cycle so I don’t have to be as picky as to when it is converted into hay. The other upper fields looked good but the cows are eating on all of them but upper seven acres (it needs new fencing around it to make it animal safe). We outlined a plan for spraying all of the fields and he started cleaning up the corral, old rotten hay bales to the burn pile. The Kubota got cleaned and greased. A few hours later Annmarie texts me our bull is in with the neighbors cows. It is not our old bull as he is now in Alcatraz for this exact reason. So we went down and spent 45 minutes chasing the two bulls back into our pasture. They had to fight for 20 minutes at the neighbors before we could get them to go back through the culvert. Once back through we had to fix the crossing again. We ended up patching a couple of fence spots, reinstalling the gate down by the schoolhouse and driving back to the house via the upper hillside. The irrigation ditch was flowing outside its channel making a mess through the lower field. I thought we could dig the blocked spot and get it back into the channel. We ended up digging about a 75’ section with the tractor to get it contained. The upper hillside section I planted in the fall is not growing the grass I wanted. It is a lot smoother, it is not growing sage and the grass that normally grows on the hillside is coming in nicely. I then laid around for four days doing nothing and sleeping a lot.

Spring really is coming

Steve Hardin1 Comment

We have finally given up on the sheep having any more babies. So we tossed the last five ewes in with the rest of the main herd. It is a lot easier tracking one herd than two. There is a third (now second) herd down below. They are the eating ones of which we already have nine sold. We know spring is here as I have commenced the inaugural lawn mowing of our front yard with the sheep. It takes 2-3 days for the sheep to tear the lawn down. They like the shortest grass so clumps of tall grass tend to standout. I had just tossed out a pound of clover seed on the hillside before letting the sheep out to graze. They will push the seed down into the ground. The clover also does great with trying to stay alive after getting eaten so it will spring back twice as thick as it was before the sheep grazed on it. We are finally starting to get some clover all over the hillside now. Due to the clover we have now given up chemical weed control on the hillside. All thistles and stinging nettle are removed with a shovel. I spent a couple of hours this weekend digging weeds.

Since the bees have survived the winter I dug up a couple of patches of dirt and planted flowers on the hillside. I will need to add a small fence around them to keep the dogs out but we should have blooming flowers in 45 days. We are going to use our circle planters in the back yard to plant marigolds in and around our garden. We are hoping the marigolds will help with insect control. We are trying to get more flowers growing for the honey bees. I have a couple of other spots I want to toss out some flower seed on.

Saturday, Meathead and I worked on getting the five new half wine barrels ready for herbs. I drilled holes in the sides so that water could drain and then she filled each barrel with five gallons of gravel to cover the bottom. I would like to say she carried a full bucket of gravel but that is not really realistic. She carried it in two half filled buckets. We had a long discussion about me using the tractor to scoop it up and drive it around but by the time we go through all of the gates and still carry it the final way in a five gallon bucket we have not saved any time so she got to carry gravel in buckets. It takes four buckets of soil to fill the barrel the rest of the way. We have a big tote with gardening soil in it that we are using to fill them.

I took chance out with me to put the sheep in and she did great! The picture of her above is in the lamb shed when we were feeding the ram and bull. She kept them from coming into the shed when I opened the door to feed. She did so well after everyone was put away I let her off the 30’ lead. Huge mistake, she took off running and would not listen to me. I may have gotten upset and hollered repeatedly which caused her to look at me, come within six feet and stay out of reach. I finally calmed down, bent down on one knee and called her, she came running and got hugs and licks in. She is too smart for her own good. It turns out that Annmarie had tried to use Chance to get the sheep out of the yard earlier in the day but only had her on a a six foot leash. The puppy did well enough that Annmarie let her go and then Chance dove for a lamb and would not let it up. This incurred the wrath of Mom which may explain why she was so good working the animals with me later in the evening. Once I got her back onto the lead I used the alpaca as training fodder. This works for the dog and me and the alpaca don’t really care for the dogs so it gives Chance a shot at moving a difficult animal. She did really good.

Our second bee hive arrived, I just need to assemble it. We are going to keep them in the lavender patch. I was out working today and had 4-5 honeybees land on me. I am unsure what they were looking for and as long as you just ignore them and don’t accidentally squish them they are harmless. It takes a while to get used to ignoring them.