farm life

Catch up

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Last weekend was utilized as catchup time. After being gone for a couple of weeks we still had more things to complete to get ready for summer. Annmarie went and got two huge pots for our front entrance. We have a few volunteer lavender plants coming up in our patch and wanted a place for them. We are also going to put a wooden post in the pots so we can hold open the porch gates. We really only need them closed when the sheep are in the yard. Both dogs know how to open them both ways! So they are not a deterrent to them when it comes to getting on the front porch. The planters were heavy and did not provide a great spot to grab onto when moving them.

On Friday I drove over to LaGrande and picked up our second ram (Remie). I just put the animal pickup enclosure on and he rode in that. We want the sheep to lamb in a timely fashion and believe that if there is competition then all of the ewes will get impregnated in a single cycle. So we will have 2 rams and 45 ewes. We put both rams in the corral for about 36 hours to make sure they would cohabitate nicely. There was a lot of butt sniffing but they never fought. We let them out with the ewes and they are doing just fine. I cannot see that they are doing their job but we will know in five months if they are.

Saturday was spent cleaning up around the farm. The footings for the bridge were started. They have to be dug out first then I can build the concrete wooden footings and put some metal in the hole then it can be filled with concrete. We are going to use my small electric concrete mixer when we do it. It will only mix about 200# of sackrete at a time. It’s going to take a while to get the footings poured.

The sprayer had to be cleaned out and set back up on the tractor. Mr Rainman worked on that. We had a couple of plugged nozzles from the last usage and he went through the entire setup and got it all cleaned up. He also greased and filled all tractor fluids on both tractors. Mr Flow is going to work on cutting thistles down along the back creek. It’s not glorious work but it needs to be done. Once the thistles are knocked down then he can clean out the chicken coop.

I was pretty sure we had a chicken predator as I could only find five chickens once we got back from vacation and was only getting one egg a day. So on Sunday, Mr Rainman and I worked on skirting the old house. I crawled under it first to make sure there were no dead animal carcasses. Lo and behold there was a passel of live chickens. We chased them out by me tossing rocks and Mr Rainman beating on the outside skirting. Otherwise, I would have been crawling and chasing chickens under the building. Once the chickens were out we locked them up in the coop and proceeded to skirt the building. We also built an enclosure around the laser vent fan to keep the weather off of it. Once that was done we built a rain lean to over the fan enclosure and outlet to prevent water from getting on any of it. This was supposed to happen a while ago but got put on the back burner.

I have started working on the freezer room floor. I need to cut diagonal floor supports to make the floor level. The only problem was I burned up the table saw blade and I have multiple replacements for the radial arm saw and hand skilsaw, but none for the table saw! I need to cut five more and we can then shim the floor level and get it down. This is the next big thing for the old house remodel. Once the floor is in I can slap up the wall from scrap plywood I have saved for this purpose. I can then move all three freezers and install some shelves into the room. Once that is done its onto my room! I think I have enough wood scraps for the walls to be sheeted so its pretty much installing two doors and finish the wiring and insulate two walls. I expect it to take me a year or more to finish my side. I really need to just focus on getting all of the switches and outlets installed.

Due to the heat I had to come up with a way to keep water and Gatorade cold. The front spring is 40F year round so I took an old broken bucket and placed it in the ditch and filled it with drinks. It doesn’t keep them ice cold but they are cool and easy to drink plus its free.

Lavender and bees

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Well, we missed the lavender harvest again! We really needed to harvest the food grade about ten days ago while we were on vacation. So now the lavender is feeding the honeybees and they seem to love it. Our oil lavender is just getting ready to bloom.

Annmarie and I went out this morning to refresh our lavender wreath. We have had a very nice wreath on the wall in the dining room for last 2-3 years and even dried out it was very nice but most of the smell had vanished. So we decided to try and redo it with our own lavender. I did the lavender harvesting and Annmarie did the wreath building. It took a lot longer than I anticipated to harvest the lavender. I was cutting it a single stalk at a time! The honeybees were everywhere and we just ignored each other. The hardest part of having bees is just learning to ignore them. If you ignore them they just tend to do their own thing and all is hunky dory. I had to reach out to the expert afterwards about how to harvest lavender efficiently. He said to use a hand sickle and sent me a little video on how to harvest it. This was very helpful and I have already ordered the hand harvesting tool! We persevered and harvested enough for the wreath. It is a little lopsided but we are going to keep it for a year and try again next year! We decided to mix colors in ours this time and I cut lavender from four different types of plants which I think affected the uniformity as I kept moving to different types of plants and Annmarie built the wreath as I was cutting flowers. If I had precut all of the flowers we could have mixed all of the types together initially and our uniformity issue would have been solved. It smells amazing. We have a vase of lavender in each bathroom now also.

Annmarie and I have been doing more research on farm camping hosting. We would like to do it up the creek next to the wheat field. It would be fairly primitive. Power would be 12V solar for lights only, some form of composting toilet setup (these vary dramatically so more research is needed), solar shower, canvas tent of some sort and all of it built on an elevated deck next to the rock outcropping. It would go in a place that we cannot use currently. So we would not be losing any land. This would require us to move some fencing so the animals will stay out. You would have to walk in to the site about 125 yards, no vehicle access. We would provide drinking water in 1/2 gallon glass jugs. There would be an outside kitchen with a single propane burner and propane grill. I want to put in a spot to hang two hammocks on the deck also. We are still doing a lot of planning before we do any real work. There are several projects on the farm that have to get done before we work on this.

I bounce

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Haying is still going on every day and night. I am able to crawl on the tractor in the evening and work into the night to get the hay cut or turned. Mr Rainman comes out and does the actual baling during the day and I am able to do all the prep work after the paying job. It does make for some long days. Of course since we are haying it has decided to rain some more. It never fails, if I want it to rain I just need to cut some hay and get it on the ground.

It of course rained today delaying the baling process for a few hours. Mr Rainman tried to get the wrapped hay into the barn to get it out of the rain. So when I came home tonight we used the moisture tester to sort out the dried bales from the damp bales and moved the damp ones out of the barn to sit upright outside to dry. I decided we needed to go to the ceiling with the next batch of hay. Mr Rainman did not want to walk on the edge of the leaning bales. So I climbed up on top of the bales and started to stack the pile higher. It was time to get down off the pile and Mr Rainman was outside getting more bales off of the trailer when I decided to get down. This was a good and needed decision, except my method of getting down is fairly questionable. I decided that jumping off of a seven foot high pile to land on a 18 inch wide bale. I was able to land on top of the bale then it promptly squirted out the side and I hit my right elbow, left arm, middle of back and right hip. I did NOT hit my head! I did make a fairly impressive thumping sound as I hit the floor and bounced off. Mr Rainman came running hoping I did not hurt anything. He was afraid of all the flack he would catch if I injured myself. The wife stated later she would not blame him for anything I did on the farm. She figures I will have done something to deserve it.

I am going to hurt in the morning. I can already feel all of the muscles tightening all over my back, right arm and side. I hope I can get to sleep tonight easily.

Sheep sorting again, ram time

Steve Hardin5 Comments

Yesterday was sheep sorting day. We have a bunch of skinny mommas and we need to wean off the lambs that are old enough, we need to worm everyone, create two herds (edible, keep) and turn the Ram loose in with the mommas (keep). This seems simple enough on the surface but nothing is ever simple when you are working with animals that have not been touched in three months. Most of the lambs have only been touched once in their entire life which makes them the most difficult group to handle. We started by having to dig trenches in the barn to be able to move the panels around and create chutes and three large pens in the barn. Once that was done I found the oral drenching tool and our wormer. I did not have enough oral drench so Annmarie volunteered to go to town and get more while we tagged and banded. I had about a 1/3 of a bottle so we could start while she was in transit. Mr Rainman and I then attempted to push the sheep into the barn. Nope, they would not go, no matter what we did, they kept breaking free of the pile and would not go into the chute into the barn.

Mr Rainman went and got Chance, border collie puppy, and he attempted to get her to move the sheep into the barn while she was on a lead. She would not really listen to him and since she is learning you have to be patient and strict at the same time. I took over and she was baling them up well but they would not go into the barn. She would be within four feet of them and they would not budge. One broke loose and she dived for it, I had a hold of the lead rope with just my hands, no gloves. I had to clamp down and grab rope to jerk her back for a correction. I ended up with a two inch rope burn on my middle finger! But I did get the puppy stopped and corrected. We had to go get Mouse also and squeeze the sheep from both sides and push them into the barn with the dogs. They just would not go on their own, and before that would work we had to open up the barn so they could just go through the door, once in the barn we pushed them to the far end so we could run them through the chute. We were still having trouble getting them into the chute so Mr Rainman started to just catch the little ones and then I could tag and band them. We had about ten lambs that needed tagged and banded still. On one of his snags he caught a pink tagged big lamb that was a ram! So it got banded, which was not easy as the testicles were so big I had to pop them through the bander opening one at a time. I have not made this mistake in years, so it was a great catch by Mr Rainman.

We used the oral drenched but the little clip that holds the bottle to the belt does not work so I tie it upside down under the belt with a piece of cord then it will work. It’s fairly redneck but it does the job and using the drencher hand pump is so much faster than having to measure out a syringe every time you need to dose a sheep. Once we had two groups of sheep we had to run them through the chute again to count them! Here are the final numbers: 46 ewes, 10 babies (too young to wean) , 1 ram in the first group and 40 lambs, 1 cull ewe, 13 eating size in second group for a total of 111 sheep. We are going to be taking the eating size ones to sale soon to see how they do. The ram is now in with the momma herd and we are keeping them in the orchard for now so he doesn’t have to chase them all over. We are bringing both groups into the barn lot every night to keep the predators at bay. One group in the front side and one group on the back side. They can see each other but not mix. There is an amazing amount of noise for the first few days once we separate off the lambs.

I hooked up the sickle mower onto the Kubota and tried to cut the orchard but the space is full of trees and metal rings around the trees. I did not even make it around the field once before I hit a cow panel and popped off a tooth from the bar. So I had to go put that sickle bar up and put the rake on the Kubota and set up the smaller sickle bar on the John Deere. We did not use it last year so I had to make some adjustments and get it all greased up. The Italians that designed it put one essential grease zirk where it is near impossible to access. It took me 30 minutes to get the thing into a spot where I could access it with a small grease gun and a 90 degree elbow. It is of course exactly where the bolt fails every time so it has to be done. I can pop the other mower apart and redo the rivets but that will take time. So it will be something I need to do after hay season. I had to pull the break away bar from the mower and beat on it with an eight pound sledge hammer to get it back into some semblance of shape and function. It’s not perfect but it is much improved. I am now ready to cut more hay today. The plan is to cut 1/3 of the leftover ground today and turn it on Tuesday. Then bale it on Wednesday. I will cut more hay on Tuesday, another 1/3. We have managed to bale 346/900 needed bales and 252/900 are in the barn. I was able to scavenge another 20 bales yesterday from the leftovers.

Predators 5/ Farm 0

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It’s been a long week and when I start haying every evening and weekend I get behind on the blog. I am tired when I come inside after long day, eat and shower and I am too sleepy to do the blog. So now I make little paper notes to myself so when I do find the time to blog I can remember and keep everything accurate.

We have our first set of live, raised on the farm cow twins! Annmarie got a great picture of her and yes, she is skinny, she is feeding two calves and they are not very old so she has not had a chance to really recover from the birth process. The calves are doing great! So far this year we have five calves. I think there may be one more pending but I am not sure.

The predators killed another lamb, this is four for the year so far. We have definitely had an uptick in predator kills the last few years. We know there is a big coyote living somewhere near and we think we may have a bobcat living nearby. Their preferred snack seems to be an occasional lamb. The coyote has only been spotted once this year but we have them all around us every night. This week when I went outside at bed time to get the dogs there was a coyote on the top of the hill barking at the cows and sheep. I hollered but it did not stop. It was just dark enough I could not see the top of the hill. I ended up going inside and grabbing the 22 pistol and shooting three rounds into the dirt next to the yard to just scare it off with the noise. It did not stick around after that.

The predators got one of the chickens from the first batch I let loose in the coop, there are only 11 of 12 now. The 12 in chick Fort Knox are still alive. So 23 of 24 is pretty good, I usually have one of the chicks just up and die but not this year. It is still a couple of more months before the first batch will start laying eggs.

I have come to realize that predators are just part of living out here in the country and having animals. We do try to keep them down but they just keep coming,

We have six calves from last year for sale in the spring. They hang out all together but since it is a bunch of teenagers, they are crazy, hot headed and full of piss and vinegar.