fencing

Needed Rain

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The weather forecast was for rain all weekend. I figured I had better get the 50 bags of soil out of the back of the pickup before they absorb any more water! I loaded them all up last week alone and they were not that heavy when I put them in there. I was able to get the four new blueberry bins filled and ready for plants. I had to refill our regular bins. Every couple of years they each need a bag of soil to top them off again. I added one new bin to our herb area and think we can get another 3-4 bins squeezed in there. I am not sure we will fill them all with herbs but we can put in low growing veggies. I was also able to fill in a new six footer bin we purchased last year for strawberries.

We had two more new bins in the berry area. One is a new asparagus bin. I cut the bottom of the bin out, it was rusted out, to allow the plants to dig down further into the ground if they want. This bin we are not going to over plant with any strawberries. The strawberries tried to choke out our asparagus in the first bin we planted. The asparagus is still alive but we were just able to keep the plants alive last year. We did not get any asparagus from it. The plan is to just plant a straight asparagus only bin. Once the asparagus is well established I might look into some type of flower that is compatible that will just grow on the surface and is a low to the ground and a late bloomer.

The six foot bin was for more strawberries. I had planted some in the garden area in with the squash as we had more plants than space. So I transplanted them to the new bin and I expect them to fill in the entire bin by the end of the summer. They are pretty aggressive. We did get a lot of strawberries last year! I really need to build a little arbor around them so I can hang bird netting from it and it will be much easier to move out of the way when picking.

After fifty bags I was ready to be done! I am not as young as I used to be and I can feel it these days. For some reason my knee started to bother me. I think I was crouching down in the gravel and forgot I was old. The rain held off on Friday until I got back from town.

I needed to protect the wild rose bushes in the driveway and was going to buy 8 foot T-posts and some horse fencing. But by the time I priced it I was going to need $400 worth of fencing and posts to circle three wild rose bushes. We have to protect the rose bushes from the alpaca. They love eating rose bushes. They will eat rose bushes before anything else. I ended up buying four 16’ cow panels at $33/each instead. I set them up in a square like shape and they are standing up by themselves currently. I had to turn them upside down so the large openings were on the ground. This lets the quail and pheasants crawl through the fence to hide and eat from the quail block. I will probably toss in some old trimmed tree limbs into the enclosure to create a hiding spot. We have been working on creating more habitat for the quail all over the farm and it is paying off. We have a native population of about 150-200 quail now.

I was able to get eight bags of Sackcrete mixed by hand and poured into the hole I dug by the concrete weir. When you back the water up by the pump, the water was leaking out of the dirt berm. I am hopeful this will stop that. If not then we will line the pond with a liner to allow us to fill it up with water for irrigation. I cannot move the irrigation pump alone, it is just too heavy. I need to get the pump out of the way so I can pull the wooden supports out and then jump down into the concrete weir and dig out all of the mud! I have not cleaned it out for a long time and it has about a foot of mud built up in it. All of that has to come out so I don’t have to fight mud and grit on the sprinkler end of the irrigation. I went to town again as I needed a figure 8 Clevis so that I can pull the new plow. I want to plow those two fields I sprayed. I of course could not find the one I know I own somewhere. It was raining by the time I got back from town.

On Sunday the Gingerman helped me move the old irrigation pump and I was able to pull the boards off the weir. I am going to have to get some all thread and drill through the boards to pull them all back together. I had sandwiched eight 2×4 together in two bunches to make a platform for the pump. They are starting to come apart. After that we went over to the Gingerman’s place so that I could crawl into an old water tank. I needed to install a plug so that we can get the tank ready for our fire suppression truck. We just need to get the tank up on the truck, clean it out and get everything hooked up. We have most of the pieces already.

Overall it rained over 0.27” this weekend as of publication time.

Juggling Multiple projects already

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It looks like I am just going to have to squeeze in an update whenever I can. Last week I worked on getting the garden area all sprayed with Roundup. I am just waiting to see how much it killed before deciding to hit it with anything else. If you get the broadleaf plants when they are small sometimes the Roundup will kill them even though it is not designed for them. Our driveway and the fence lines are finally starting to turn brown. I have a couple of small spots in the driveway I missed. I will need to do some touch up spraying to get everything. I need to spray a lot more around the gazebo. I have to kill the hillside so I can cover it with rocks. I need to make sure the pad does not shift.

I sprayed the two fields down by the old water pump and it got a great kill. I need to hit it with the plow soon. My plan is to keep killing it all summer to knock down the cheatgrass seed. But to do that I will need to add some water to it this summer so the cheatgrass can keep sprouting.

We have someone coming out now and working on our yard. This is great as it will free me up to work on the farm, Mr Golfpro. He made sure and taped up his fingers the first time to ensure he did not get any blisters, he had a golf game the next day. He is excited to be able to get out and about. I even showed him how to use the tractor to fill in the dog’s new hole to China. It was another impressive feat by the border collie and border terrier.

I spent most of last weekend working on the rock wall. I am trying to spend 2-3 hours during the week after work working on the wall. My goal is to get it finished this month. It is getting easier but I still come inside soaked in sweat after an hour or two on the wall. It makes that mini excavator look better and better. Unfortunately, I will be done soon!

I did spend Easter weekend working on the fence down by the cattle guard. My mother-in-law has been buying quail blocks and trying to drop them over the fence. In an effort to not have to cut her out of the fence I decided to shift the fence and open up the dead area in the corner of the field. This way she can just set the quail block down near the rose bushes. It took me two days of solid work to get the fence corners installed, wooden posts reset and all of the T posts hand pounded into the ground before I could move the fence and then retighten the road side. It has been a long time since I built fence all alone. It takes a lot longer when there is only one of you.

I went in and bought 100 cubic feet of soil for the elevated garden beds. I just need to get it out of the back of the pickup and into the beds! This will take a few hours. I can only get close with the tractor then I will have to hand carry them to get them into the garden. This will have to be this upcoming weekend. I also have to purge and circulate vinegar through our instant hot water tank on Friday. When it gets too much buildup it starts overheating. I will clean it first and if that does not fix it then I will have to tear it apart and clean out the bugs out of the fan but that was just done last year. It made it four years before that was needed so I am sure it just needs descaled.

Auction wins

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Blame Gingerman, he sent me a link to a local farm auction out of Hermiston and I needed a lot of stuff they had. It turns out that I did not need it as bad as other local people because I went from spending almost $6500 to only $1500 in the last thirty minutes of the auction! He had told me that everyone waits until the last minute to bid and he was not wrong. I really had my heart set on a mini-excavator! It was brand new with only 0.3 hours on it. Knew it would cost about $6k, I quit bidding after $3k and it sold for $3.5k. If I had kept bidding I suspect the price would have kept increasing.

I ended up with two, eight foot tall orchard ladders, two old round water troughs that cannot hold water, one new small tall water trough, a couple of hundred feet of brand new lay flat hose with irrigation fittings already on them and two self contained gates. The hose was the most expensive thing in the pile. We are going to cut the bottom out of the two large round troughs and use them in the garden area. The larger one is going to be solely for the growing of asparagus! We want the bottom cut out so the plants can dig down into the ground if they want. I am not sure what we are putting in the other one. The small one will go in with our backyard garden collection. It will get something edible planted in it. The two gates were necessary to get the barn lot set up correctly. The cows and sheep always go down to the spring area and hole up and refuse to come out. It is painful to get them through the gate. We have talked about a fence across the mouth of that area for years. So I installed two gates, both six feet on either end of the opening and made a large removable wire gate. So the entire middle of the fence can be moved for vehicle access. We can also just put the horse over there when we are sorting and she won’t be able to “help”. I spent Saturday morning getting the fence installed and the gates adjusted. The Gingerman helped me put a temporary repair on the back hillside gate so that it is a solid fence. This way the alpaca cannot get out and the sheep can wander around on the lower part of the hill and not sneak out. They would have found the hole, guaranteed.

We then had to drive over to Hermiston and take down the temporary fence we have to install on the decorative fence so the sheep will actually stay in the pasture. It’s Redbrand woven four foot fencing and a full roll weighs about 220#. It is hard to load safely in the back of the pickup alone, at least for me. It took us about 20 minutes and we will save the two precut sections for next year again. We attach it with zip ties so they can just be cut to remove it.

I had to feed the sheep as they had eaten everything in the barn and they are still a little jumpy. So I spent about 20 minutes sitting on a bale of hay talking to them. We always talk to them when we are out in the barn. It helps get them accustomed to humans and more specifically to us. In a month they will only associate us with food and all will be right. They get so pushy that we have to push them out of the barn, shut the door, feed then open the door so they can rush in and beat their neighbor to the good stuff. By Christmas we will be locking them up every night which means someone has to go out first thing in the morning and check for lambs and let them out of the barn.

We ate our Sunchokes for the first time this weekend. It is easy to see why they are a potato substitute. I added them to a stew with meat, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes, yellow potatoes and sunchokes. It tasted very good. We will try a different version next time we eat them.

It’s Hot

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We came home earlier in the week and were greeted by the big truck sitting in the road. The Gingerman has been working on the truck, has it running and the brakes working on it. He has a few more things to do before we convert it to a fire fighting apparatus for the farm. We are going to put a couple of large totes for water, a pump and a hose reel on it so we can have some fire suppression if we decide to burn. On the off chance we have a fire nearby we can go out and meet it. It would have been handy when I caught the railroad ties on fire. Peeing on them to put out the fire takes a lot of effort.

The truck was blocked it just rolled down into the road, no one is sure how it did it. I could not get it started then the Gingerman told me that the battery was unhooked. I dropped the positive terminal on and smashed it a couple of times with a wrench. It still would not start. I took positive terminal wire off and then told Annmarie we would just need to drive around it for a week. The Gingerman stopped by a few days later and actually installed and tightened the battery post cable and it started up just fine! It is now blocked with some heavy duty tire chocks.

The back creek, Stewart Creek, is no longer running. There are a few spots of water behind our house but they will most likely be dry by the end of the week. The frogs will all move into our garden and tall grass. They can make quite the cacophony. We are so used to it that it is just drift off to sleep noise. The roosters crowing, the frogs serenading, the alpaca fighting , the sheep and lambs hollering, the cows bellowing and the occasional horse whinny it is mostly relaxing.

I picked the garlic today, we turned off the water about three weeks ago. I will let the dirt dry out and tomorrow I will cut off the tops and put it all in a paper sack for storage. I have about four of the largest heads picked out to use as seed for the fall. I also collected a whole bunch of chive seeds. I want to toss random flower seeds into the front flower beds and just see what grows. I am now going out to the apricot tree about every three days and picking up the ripe fruit off the ground. I keep about 75% of it and the rest I toss over the fence to the sheep. Our old ancient apple tree is shedding apples so I spent about thirty minutes cleaning them off the ground and tossing them over to the sheep. They love it. I was only able to pick about four apricots off the tree that were actually ripe. I like to wait until the fruit is full of sugar before picking it. When it is your tree you can wait until the very last minute. Annmarie and I cut and pitted about 12 cups for the freezer. We freeze them in one cup batches so she can use them for her breakfast smoothie. It takes a lot of frozen fruit to make it 365 days! We are going to be able to fill an entire upright freezer full of frozen fruit this year.

Summer is here

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I had promised the better half that I would spend part of Saturday doing some things for her. So Mr Rainman and I drove over to Milton Freewater and repaired a couple of items on the outside of the church that required a 30’ ladder. No one was injured. I did notice that I now actually pay attention to where I am putting my feet as I go up and down the very tall ladder. I used to just scramble up it without a care in the world. I am getting a little older every year.

We had picked up a “farmer pack” of 2×4 boards from Tum a Lum. They were warped boards of various lengths that they just bundle together and sell as a unit. We needed to make branch props for the fruit trees and $3/board seemed like the right price, considering they were just going to be out in the weather getting warped. We cut notches in one end and went out and propped up branches on our little plum tree. It is sagging horribly. I used a couple on the apricot tree also. This is the first year we have had apricots. We have had that tree for over seven years and I always thought it was decorative. This spring Annmarie was out working on the bees and told me to just cut the tree down as we were not getting any fruit and suddenly we have fruit!

After we had that done, Mr Rainman went home and I went out to attempt to repair our grain cracker. It had one too many rocks go through it earlier and the auger portion kept getting jammed. I needed to weld the ridge back on top of the auger, the three feed windings needed to be raised. The trouble is that Mr Gingerman converted the welder from a stick welder to a flux core wire feed. I did not take the second half of the welding class where we were taught how to weld with a wire fed machine. I had tried the day before to get an arc without any success. I gave up and then that night while talking to the Gingerman at dinner he figured out I was not pulling the trigger! You don’t have a trigger when you are stick welding! I was able to get the welder working and to get some material built up so I can make the auger work correctly. I did have to hit it with the grinder when I was done but the grain cracker is back in business! It won’t do as fine as it used to but if I can milk it along for another year it will have been a solid investment. We have already saved over $1000 on feed for a $200 purchase. It has really worked out well and the chickens love it.

On Sunday we worked on getting a temporary fence up in the front yard. This is so we can bring the animals onto the front hillside to knock it down. Milo got three pieces of cheat grass in his ears and had to go to the vet on Fourth of July, Ugh. So now the plan is for the animals to take it down to a couple of inches. We have been watering it so with this heat and water the clover should just snap right back nice and strong. The fence took about three hours to get in place and situated. Our border collie, Chance does not like it. We put it close enough to the rock wall that it is an eight foot leap for her to jump it. Even with the animals on the hillside she has not tried to scale the fence.