farm life

Mailbox upgrade

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Friday was my first day of vacation that I actually did not have to go into my paying job. I have been on PTO since Wednesday on paper, reality is not always the same. This allowed me to play catch up on some things.

I went hunting and managed to spot the little spike buck that has been in the wheat field every morning. I went by him and thought he was a doe. On the way back to the house I stopped one last time and looked at all the does and spotted the horns. My paper deer tag covered up the horns. He will be very good eating, I was able to pick him up and carry him to the cooler without any help. I would like to think that after moving ten ton of hay this last week that its pure muscle strength, but since I felt every bale I am not sure that is the correct answer. When we first moved here a neighbor made custom mailboxes for us out of old gears. The paint has started to flake off and show rust so we had decided that it was time to take them over to Hermiston and get them bead blasted and powder coated so they would last for another 20-30 years. Unfortunately, we still need our mail so I used a bunch of pallets to create a temporary holder. I plan on dropping these off in Hermiston next week.

Thursday we got the last six tons of hay into the machine shed. I only ended up with three blisters and only one of those tore open. I definitely don’t have farmer hands. I still take care to minimize the calluses on my hands so it doesn’t affect my paying job. I need those baby smooth hands for a reason.

I had a friend message me as we loaded the lasts two tons onto the trailer that she wanted to borrow my trailer. Great timing! I said come over ASAP as I need to unload the last two tons into the machine shed. They showed up 10 minutes after I finished unloading the last bale and closing the gate.

I picked up 4 sheets of plywood to lie on top of the hay so that main beam can be replaced. I will be laying it out this week and wrestling the beam up onto the hay. I will cut it on top of the hay. The beam weighs 165#, I asked when I picked it up. There are two other boards to replace also.

The alpaca think they are starving and have been hanging out and eating the alfalfa scraps. They are even ignoring the green grass for an opportunity to eat alfalfa leaves. They dig through and pick out just the leaves before eating anything else. We are taking bets on which color of alpaca is the next to be bullied to death. We did separate them for a couple of weeks, it is supposed to help as it throws off the group dynamics but it seems like they just fight more when they get back together.

It was a day of finding missing items. I had misplaced the Bluetooth speaker that normally lives in the bathroom. No music during the shower was killing me! I have been looking all over the place and spotted it yesterday when I was eyeing the dog tag maker. It was sitting on the corner of the maker blending in with the color. I will be moving the dog tag maker into our master bedroom this week hopefully. I just need to talk my nephews into helping move a 300# chunk of iron 30 feet. We are getting felt pads for the floor today.

I was out in the old house tossing the cardboard boxes from our beef onto the “to be burned” pile stored out of the weather when I looked over at my waders and spotted my good pocket knife hanging from the chest of the waders. This had been missing for six weeks. I still need to find my Sawzall though…

It rained!! First measurable rain in over 65 days. First good rain for over 90 days! I am now under the gun to get the grass hay planted. I will be working those fields one more time. We ordered a chest mounted seed spreader that will hold 20# of seed at a time from Amazon yesterday. I will be walking the field to seed it. If that works well we are going to start tearing up and reseeding all of the bottoms to increase our feed capacity. If I can get them good enough we may even hay a few of them in the spring.

I learned something new that I should have known on Thursday, sheep only have a gestation of 5 months not 6. This would explain many of my issues with predicting when the sheep are going to have babies! I have thought for the last 8 years that it was 6 months not 5.

Hay is the gift that keeps on giving

Steve HardinLeave a comment

After the dry summer and having to feed for 6 weeks we needed more hay. I found another 10 ton local and started to pick it up on Wednesday. This is not as easy as it sounds as we had to load it manually and unload it again by hand. The bales weigh 100# each on average and those heavy ones are twice as heavy as the rest. Luckily I had help from the Hay Man. He came over and unloaded with me. He stacked the stack higher with the old bales as they were lighter then we stacked the new ones into the machine shed. The stack is high enough now I can throw some plywood on top of it and fix the broken beam. I have the new beam now and it needs to go up this week so that it doesn’t warp.

Hay Man and I then went and looked at the upper fields and discussed the grass and hay plans. I had no idea that you needed to bales the hay with dew on the row. Plus you have to have the moisture content of the bale correct or they rot or catch on fire! This is going to further complicate things. I had to call a halt so that I did not die from moving the hay. We will do another four ton and then I will unload the last two ton myself. The days of being able to do ten ton in a single day are over. Now if the hay elevator worked we probably could have done 10 ton but it needs to be welded first. I have begun the welding class at the college but it is going to take all quarter for me to learn how to do it passably. I spent 2.5 hours last week one night and still could not do four simple welds. So now I am behind and need to play catchup.

My mother-in-law and wife conspired against me this week to get me to feed the cows again. I believe the cows are fine, I do know that there is zero green in the pasture below and it looks like they could be starving but its not winter yet. This is my go to line when we talk about feeding before it gets cold. I never win and end up feeding the animals but I feel like I should always voice my issue. It doesn’t change anything in the long run but I like to take a stance, even if it is futile. So I pushed down another large bale of grain hay. No one came running, not the cows or the sheep who were 100 feet away. They had already eaten down the first bale to nothing so they must not be starving. Most starving animals will mob me when I bring out hay or at least run over when they hear the tractor. Not this time, I did notice that the next day they are all camped out around the easy meal.

It was opening deer season this Saturday and I expected to spend my normal two hours hunting for a little buck. No joy at all, I have spent almost 7 hours this weekend and have not fired a single shot yet. There is a little tiny spike buck that keeps showing up in the wheat field but he is super spooked and when I get out of the vehicle he starts running away full out. I had a nice shot this morning but there was a doe standing directly on the other side of him so I had to wait for either one of them to move and then it was too late. Luckily, I have vacation this week, a nice happy accident, and I will work on getting some venison on the table later in the week. These hawks are all over the place and I managed to follow this one until I got a nice shot of it flying, not too shabby considering I was using my cell phone camera.

There are a lot of pheasants this year, but the odd part is they normally jump when you are wishing 50-75 yards of them so you can never get a shot off. This year they are holding tight and they are everywhere. We counted 25 in one morning but had 15 other times and that is without beating the bushes. Some pheasant hunters are going to be pleased.

Almost ready to plant

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I had to go buy another piece of equipment to work the fields. We now have an arena groomer. It has a harrow on the front, an adjustable bar to press down on the soil and a rolling compactor wheel of bars behind that. It is really helping compact and leveling the fields. I am almost done with the two middle fields totaling 14 acres. I should get them finished today. I was going to do it yesterday but got called away on a long EMS call and we had plans for dinner so instead I spent almost 2.5 hours attempting to clean out the craft room downstairs. I had stacked all kinds of stuff this winter when I did the floor then I used it as a painting area when I repainted the downstairs. I have only mounted three things on the wall since painting. We are going to thin out about 60% of the items we had up on the walls. Some of them we have had a long time and we had a bunch of wildlife prints that are going to go. Annmarie wants to keep one of them.

To make room for the items in the craft room I had to go up and empty the upstairs bathroom area. I tossed a lot more stuff into the trash. I now have managed to clean out a wall in the craft room. This will be the future home of the sewing table from our master bedroom. Once the sewing desk is moved downstairs I will clean that corner of our master bedroom and get help to move the dog tag stamper into our bedroom. I need to get it away from my plants on the breeze porch. The humidity is causing it to surface rust more than it was. I am still gaining ground on the dirt and rust but I don’t like losing progress. This will keep it away from the humidity and I will make a plastic tent for it with a desiccant container under it. I also found the glass shelves for one of our display cases! They have been missing for 11 years. I attempted to put said shelves into the cabinet but it has a skeleton key lock on it and I cannot find the key now! I tried all our ones stashed in the house and did not get a fit. I also bent a metal hanger and attempted to trip the lock with that. I was very unsuccessful, this does not bode well for my safecracking endeavor. We will now need to find the correct key, some days you just cannot win.

I now have two books on how to crack a safe and a suction cup microphone to attach to the safe. I hope I can hear the tumblers as I attempt to crack the four digit code. If not I have been researching oscilloscope apps for my phone that will display the sound as a waveform that I can watch. I still have a $200 reward for anyone who can crack the code without damaging the safe and they must give me the working code.

On Friday I managed to dispose of all the old chemicals that had been in the machine shop for a very long time. I loaded up about 50 gallons of liquids. I had about 12 gallons that were unknown and of those three gallons were in glass jugs. I double bagged and taped them all up and placed them in boxes and laid down plastic. Everything they wanted done to safely transport them to the pickup spot. I wanted to thank the Oregon Department of Transportation for sponsoring the disposal and paying for all agricultural disposals. I may have been able to use some but I have learned that keeping hazardous old stuff is not beneficial in the long run. I now just need to pull all three fuel tanks out of the machine shed, build some storage shelves and tear out the platform in the one bay and we will have a super usable space. I will drag the dirt floor with the tractor and get all the loose dust out and then backfill with gravel. I figure it will take me at least forty yards of 3/4 minus gravel to cover the floor. The gravel will help make it much cleaner.

The deer decided to come down near the house and eat some green grass. There is not very much green around our place. There are four deer in the picture. I just found out yesterday that deer season starts next weekend! I need to go buy my tag this week so I can spend the 2-3 hours hunting it will take me to shoot a little spike buck.

Fresh beef coming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have been busy and am having a hard time working on the blog daily. I have gone to the weekends as I can carve out the time. It allows me to think about the work that has been done and see how we are moving forward. I still like the daily blogs but after dragging myself in and cleaning up, I am tired and it is proven that I don’t write very well when I am tired. Annmarie says it is possible to read my emotions when reading the blog. Sometimes I am short and factual but other times I see it. I am still not convinced but I have come to enjoy writing about something I love. It’s not always glamorous, its not always humorous but it is honest. It’s the real trials and tribulations that happen on a farm. We have worked hard to learn about what went on and why things were done by the families that lived on this farm before us. A diary of the farm would have been a treasure trove of information. I guess in a way this is my dairy and contribution to future generations of the Gilliland Century Farm. This is our part of the story and I want those families to love it as much as we do. We work every day to make this place our own, we work every day to repair and build onto the work done over the last 114 years. It is a daunting thought to think that it really has been that long and we are continuing the tradition. Every year we try to become a little closer to self sustaining. I think we will make it in the next three years. I am going to boldly proclaim this goal!! Because, honestly, its just words for now, the real work will be documented here in this blog.

The butcher is coming to the farm soon and we needed to sort cows. We had kept the four boys off of the main herd of cows but Donna had spotted a new calf. Annmarie and I spotted it when we came home from our coast visitation/vacation/restacation. This means we need to run in the cows, and deal with the new calf. On the last calf we waited too long and the nephew and I could hardly hold him down while we tag and banded him. We now have large banding pliers with oversized bands that will fit a calf up to 250#. I personally do not want to wrestle with a 250# calf in an open pen with no rope and only two men.

We do have a real roping rope and we have a real short chunk of rope to tie the legs. We watched a YouTube video on how to tie up a goat and I have forgotten about 80% of what we learned. I find that to really cement a YouTube lesson one must watch it, then go out the same day or next and practice it for real then go back and watch it again. I did not do that. I figure that if I can learn to shear, trim feet and teeth on an alpaca from YouTube I can lean almost any animal husbandry from it. I do realize that YouTube is not an expert but if you are careful you can find good information. Trial and error is the best teacher.

We had to run the four boy cows into the corral first then sorted off the 8 month old to leave in the corral. He gets to rejoin the main herd and the other three got pushed into the upper prime field. They get to have a butcher visitation next week. We have already sold all three live animals.

We took the dogs with us and I even remembered to grab the 30 foot lead rope in case a dog got super exuberant when we worked the cows. I set the lead down on the corral while working the first set and did not remember it until we were on the back hillside headed down to get the main herd. I never manage to actually bring the lead when needed. The cows were down by the school house, farthest distance from the house possible as usual. I took Zeke down and rounded the cows up while Annmarie stayed on the hillside with Mouse. Mouse did not like this arrangement and ran down to me. We really needed the lead rope. The calf was fairly young, probably only a few days old. We are guessing this because it was still very curious. We had a hard time herding it as it kept wanting to come see us or the dogs which caused the momma cow and the bull to get agitated. Eventually we ended up getting the cows into the barn lot. Annmarie and Zeke pushed the sheep out of the barn lot then we pushed the cow herd into the corral. This was not too bad, the green ear tag cow did not want to go, she never does. We have at least three more cows that are super pregnant and should have more calves in the next two months. The summer births are way better for the calves with this breed of cow. We got the cow and calf isolated to one pen and then got the momma into the chute so we could touch the calf without her being able to touch us. I asked Annmarie to film us but she was irritated as I did not have all the tools ready and had to make a barn run. It went very smoothly, I got two testicles and I used the right color of ear tag and I even remembered to tag the calf in the right ear as we will be selling it. Keepers get a tag in the left ear. We then put pour over fly medicine on the cows. The flies should be going away as soon as the weather turns.

We discovered that last year we missed a steer. I realized this seems near impossible, but it is easier than you think. So we sorted off another cow for the butcher. We will be stocking our freezer this year with beef it seems.

We managed to do all of this in under two hours. This is very good and the dogs made it all that much easier. Zeke had snuck off while we were in the corral the first time working the cows but as we headed down to the school house he appeared down by the pumping station. Mouse was a good boy and waited for us.

I have been trying to get the two upper pastures disced and knock down the weeds. I seem to be tracking in a small bucket of dust every time I get on the tractor. I am closing in and hope to be done this weekend. I spent about 14 hours at the beginning of the week going around in circles. I change it up occasionally by going in a rectangular pattern and if I am feeling adventurous or in an odd spot I will even go in a figure 8 pattern. Its not very riveting but I have found that a book on tape is the best thing for this kind of work. Its way better than music for keeping my brain engaged. The mistress is no worse for the wear. Not a single new dent or scratch from the tip over. I really need to take a few hours this month and give her a bath, repaint the hood as the horses took another bite out of her. I may even take a hammer and see if I cannot beat the dent out of the hood. The hood latch is very hard to work and I may need to do some adjusting but that probably won’t happen as long as I can make it work. The roll bar lights on the right side are missing and need to be replaced. I suspect I will need new tires in a year or two. I am pretty happy with my little John Deere tractor. It has made my life a lot easier and I would recommend a small tractor for any small farm. It is a must.

It was bound to happen sooner or later

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It was merely a matter of time before the Mistress and I had a little spat. I had a little more time off and decided that I needed to get our upper fields disced up and weed free. I hooked the disc set up directly onto the 2.5 inch ball setup on the back of the mistress. I had been going around in circles for about an hour, when I decided I needed to get the ditch area. The right side of the ditch is elevated and I had the tractor bucket way up in the air with 300# of tractor weights in it. I started up the ditch then felt the tractor tipping to the left side. I knew it was going to go over onto its side and there was nothing I could do. I had enough time to consider bailing off of it but I had the seatbelt on and cinched down. I could have released it and attempted a dismount. I decided against it then started reaching for the dirt as it approached before realizing that I just needed to ride it out. I pulled my hands up and just held onto the steering wheel until the roll bar smacked into the ground. I was not hurt and now had to figure out how to get the tractor upright.

I hoofed it down to the house and grabbed the pickup. I had two chains with the Mistress and I was hoping the pickup could pull the tractor upright. I hooked onto a bar by the front tire and onto the roll bar with separate chains and then pulled them tight and hooked them to the stinger on the pickup. The pickup had no trouble uprighting the Mistress. I kept the tractor chained to the pickup and jockeyed the tractor back and forth using the chains to move forward in an arc and not tip back over until I got out of the ditch. I then spent another six hours knocking down weeds. The mistress and I no worse for the wear.

The baby chickens are going to lay green eggs, we had ten in the coop over the last four days. I need to get about 8 green ones a day to truly justify their expense. Let’s hope it actually happens.