fencing

Final fall Mowing

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I am still trying to get ready for winter. I should be ready, I guess I am ready if you count having enough food for all the animals. The nice thing about Winter is it waits for no man! Once it is here I will be done prepping regardless of how many things are left on the list. This morning after I went out to let the sheep out of the barn I unhooked the hoses and shut off the outside fire hydrant spigots. I had two of them still open with Y splitters and hoses still attached. Annmarie caught me unhooking these hoses. She said I got lucky as we have had three freezing nights this last week. I like to think of it as good timing, no break, no foul.

I decided to rake the leaves in the yard and do the final mowing. My heart is really not in the task and I have lots of other things to do so I cheated. I closed off gates so that the only place the sheep could go to get real food was our front yard. I am hoping the sheep will eat the leaves along with the grass. I had to keep the dogs inside all day which they did not appreciate but hopefully with a couple of days of no dog time the sheep can make a dent in the yard.

Annmarie wants us to create a chute that goes from the barn to the bull/ram corral. She doesn’t want us to create a mean ram by pinning him up against a wall, tying on a halter and dragging him across the barn lot. We were suppose to go out and calmly talk about needed changes to the fence and I was supposed to listen not throw up road blocks to change. She doesn’t want any more of my mammoth rock cribs. We need a rock crib to keep the fence from leaning over courtesy of the horses. She wanted a gate in the side of the fence. I managed to pull the fence out of alignment and add in a four foot gate bolted to the large corner rock crib. The fence is still leaning and I will need some type of rock crib I am just unsure what kind I will construct.

I managed to get the rest of the cow panels up inside the fence to stop the sheep from jumping through the feeder panels. I also found all the tools and picked them up. I found an impact driver and two 3.0 amp batteries and about 12 fastenal anchor bolts in the lamb shed hidden! This is a major score as I needed those 12 fasteners to finish the last of the wooden rails over behind the lean to. Once those four boards are in the corral will be officially completed. I still have to fix the low side of the lamb shed as the sheep have punched out about 4 boards and can now get out of the barn. Tomorrow the plan is those four boards and hopefully get the lamb barn completed. I put both batteries on the charger and should be good to go in the morning.

We had ordered a white mail box for our repainted stand but the new box was smaller than the one my Mother-in-law purchased. So then we had to buy another mailbox that was the same size. I put the numbers on today and cut wooden platforms that I screwed onto the stands. The platforms allowed us to then screw the boxes to the entire stand creating a completed official mailbox. I had already brought gravel down to the road and created a flat spot for the mailboxes a few weeks ago. I love our new red and white mailbox. Since the gates are open for the sheep the dogs cannot hang outside. At night they want to terrorize the entire front yard so I put a stop to that. I placed a flashing light on everyone’s collar and was able to stand on the front porch and holler at everyone in the dark. It is even better than trying to keep track of them during the day!

Corral and barn lot blues

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It has been a great weekend! Annmarie and I sat down and created a list of things that need to happen before snow flies. Now I realize that it should have already been done but I have been busy. So now that the prediction is for a wet and warm winter I can pile on more outside work. So there are only 18 things on the list, my full time plus job and 6 hours a week of college to juggle to get it all done.

I had started a burn pile in the barn lot when we cleaned up the corral area. So I lit it on fire Saturday and started dragging all the burnable materials onto it. I had three other piles of scrap wood that the animals had made into not piles that needed to be picked up. If a flame could clean it up I tossed it on. I went through the entire barn lot and tossed all the scrap wood onto the fire. I also picked up all the rocks in the barn lot and tossed them next to the lamb shed to fill in the runoff channel that the water was creating from running off the metal roof. I even managed to drag the entire barn lot clean of horse poop and straw from the barn.

Today I concentrated on attempting to finish up the bull/ram corral. I needed to finish the space between the lean to and the lamb shed. I also had a gate that needed to be installed. The problem was the railroad tie needed to be tied into the lean to before I could hang the gate on the post. The gate is beat up so I knew there would need to be some necessary latch adjustments.

There is no power out near the lamb shed so I used my battery operated sawzall to cut the lumber. I ran out of heavy wood anchor bolts and I still need about 10 more. I have four more boards to install and three more panels to remove before the corral is done. I am going to have to order some more online. Through Amazon they are about 40% cheaper than I can get locally. I just have to plan better so that I have them on hand before I actually need them. I had to finish cleaning out the corral and remove all the panels I had laying around. I found enough to go across one side of the barn lot. I have to install one more gate in my quick fence and we will have an area blocked off for the cows and horses. It’s not sheep proof yet and I think I really need to install a fence with three more rock cribs to hold everything in place. Maybe next year, or the year after that if I get time. You can kind of see it below with the opening on the left side of the picture.

I even managed to get all the horse and sheep poop drug out of the old lamb shed and I spread out one of the compost piles in the barn lot. I will hit it with the corral rake this week and smooth it all out then toss on some seed.

We are putting the sheep into the barn every night now after I had to get up and scare off the coyotes with the 22 pistol. We are also putting the horses in so they don’t continue eating new green grass 24/7.

I sprayed our door stops with clear coat today and installed both of our bathroom ones. They keep the door knobs from hitting the walls and making dents. Annmarie put screw holes in them so I don’t have to glue them onto the wall anymore. Now we can take them down if needed. I had to zoom into get a close up so you can actually see the design. Annmarie prints them on our 3D printer then we spray them with black paint, then she appliqués some brown paint onto them with a sponge and then we hit them with clear coat. They turned out very nice.

Bull corral eventually

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This is gonna be dinner in just a few months. He just doesn’t know it yet. There are 3-6 bucks living on the place now and they make a circuit every day. My nephew and I both drew buck tags this year. We have been scoping out the deer. They won’t be huge animals but they will be good eating.

The wheat is harvested now and it came in at 42 bushels to the acre. This is the best it has been since we got back. It looked amazing. The largest problem we were told was that the deer had made huge trails and snacking points throughout the entire field.

I had to drop off the raccoon carcass on the boneyard so I snagged the old tractor rim that was buried up there. I am going to turn it into a fire pit in the ram pasture. I may even try and figure out how to build a spit for it.

Between a few hours here and there I have managed to get the bull corral operational. I still need to put up four rails in one spot over the woven fence and I need to figure out a latch for the gate that cannot be undone. We got all the scrap wood and scrap metal out of the enclosure and created a flat spot for the water trough. The trough will hold 265 gallons of water. Annmarie drug a hose out there from our house, about 250 feet and it took an hour to fill it. The horses are now living in it and we are feeding them twice daily. They were getting very fat and needed to come off the all you can eat buffet that was the upper prime field. They do not appreciate the genius and ingenuity it took to make the corral.

I need to drag out the lamb shed with the tractor. It is ankle deep in horse and sheep poop. I have some old windows in there from when my parents changed out their windows ten years ago. I am going to build a platform on the end of the barn so the large window can be installed. I am going to build 2×8 foot platforms like a set of steps twelve feet off the ground. So five separate steps covered with 1/2 inch plywood sheets. I am going to use the leftover tamarack railing. Once that is in place then I can climb up and install the window casings and we will be ready to man handle the window into place. I will probably get rid of the other windows. I have used a couple of them in various locations. I may look at the old chicken coop before I toss them. I may be able to glass in the open portion of the chicken coop.

We have decided to not expand the barn. We have only had one person call about our Craigslist ad. They only wanted to buy ten sheep not 40. So I wrote their information down just in case. I am now going to advertise in the surrounding area Craigslist towns. See if I cannot garner some more attention. If that doesn’t work then we are going to look at the small animal sale in La Grande. I am just unsure about the auction as you just never know what the final price will be. I certainly don’t want them sold for $30 an animal.

I have four left over panels that were not used in the corral. They will cover 32 feet. I think I need to bridge almost 55 feet to create another wall. So I am actually going to have to break out a tape measure and some spray paint and lay out another fence. This will make getting any animal into the sorting corral very easy.

Two men = no balls

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It has been another long week. Annmarie kept telling me to slow down or I was going to make myself sick. I spent all day on the couch today sleeping cause I am sick. I am not sure if her words were prophetic or a curse, lets just poll all married men to get a final answer.

I did take it easy one night! I have started to work on cleaning my dog tag maker! I only used water, cotton rag and some 320 grit wet/dry sand paper to clean it up. There are some very precise rails, tracks and flat stops that need to be polished. I spent two hours working on it and barely touched it. I also realized some tools are required. I really need to take each piece off and clean it then reattach it. Luckily, it is so old I only need a standard screw driver, and an open end wrench. The trouble is I need a stubby screwdriver or an angled one and the same on the open end wrench. So I ordered special tools on Amazon and they are here except for my special open end wrenches. Those should be here next week. I will attack it again when I have all the tools. I am going to try and add up all the hours it takes me to just clean it up and get it functional. At this point I am going to estimate a 100 hours and I already have 2 hours into it.

The Expert came out to look at our predator problem. We had a very good discussion and I will call him after the wheat has been harvested. He is going to set up some traps and get a predator contract resigned. The farm used to have one so we will get a new one signed. So our farm will be added to the arial shooting plan. All in all I was very happy with the interaction. He remembered Ted and Tom and all their sheep. He also loves lamb, states it is the best meat of any animal. I agree with this statement.

The momma cow and baby stayed in the corral and milk barn area for three days. We fed them and used our 35 gallon water trough. It was incredibly hot but the cow would go in the barn if she wanted shade. I had to wait for help to get that calf tagged and banded. I went over and took out some alfalfa hay for them and fed 1/3 bale and set the other outside the corral so she could not get at it. I also moved the last of the hay from winter into the barn lot for the soon to be food cows to eat extra on. This was what the lazy alpaca were eating on instead of foraging. So the slugs found my stash of hay for the cow and started eating on it! You know they are lazy when they have to lay down to eat.

My nephew came over on Tuesday and we went out to deal with the calf. Annmarie was going to film us but we didn’t really give her time and had the calf pinned pretty fast. The nephew went for the all hands on deck approach and just jumped in and tried to grab a front and back leg and drop it on its side. He ended up on the ground and holding one back leg with the calf near a gate and a corner. I jumped on it and pinned it down then he climbed on top of it. We were right next to the gate hinges. This is important because I had a hard time finding two testicles. So I kept asking him to move the calf around a little bit to ease the abdominal muscle tension. There was a yellow jacket nest in the end of the gate. He got stung twice in the ear before we finally just grabbed the calf and slid him three feet away from the gate. It took me about five minutes to find both testicles and get them into a rubber band. The calf is a little old and you have to pull the scrotum through then kinda pop each testicle past the rubber band. I got them both so in a few weeks the calf will have no testicles. We tagged him in the right ear also. I did verify i had the right color tag this time but just in case all our cull animals will be tagged in the right ear if we are selling them. So even if I mess up gender the ear will tell us which ones to get rid of. I need to look but I think its number 13 or 14.

We then had to chase them out onto the back hillside and out with the other cows. Our no nutter bull has torn up our fence in front of the barn to get near her so he needs to be two fences away from her. She ran to the top of the hill so our nephew went up and chased her down while I opened all the gates ahead of her to get her out with everyone else. I really like the picture that Annmarie took below.

We then went over and finished working on the bull corral. We got the last four posts set in gravel and put up all the used feeder panels. The panels are heavy so we used the tractor to drag them over to the post line. We also had to use the tractor to lift sections of the panels so we could hook in the next section. The only thing left to do is to add the cow panels and chain everything to the wooden posts. I do need to finish filling the last rock crib and put up four wooden boards. After that I need to clean out the old wood scraps and all the old fence materials. I also have about four fence holes to fill in. I also need to drag the ground and level the area out. Once that is done I need to install the water trough. I may need to put In a couple of gold fish in the tank to keep it clean. I am at 85% completion! In three hours I could have the fence done the rest is to make it safe and provide a spot for water. The water trough will hold 235 gallons of water and we are not going to use a pump. I will be hand dipping water from the spring into the trough. I just thought up a bucket arrangement I can attach to a railroad tie that has a hose attached to the bottom that I can just bucket into it and then the water will flow into the trough so I don’t have to try and throw the water through the fence. That will make a mess.

Death knocketh at the door

Steve Hardin2 Comments

It’s been a long week. I would have posted this three days ago, but we are having internet issues again. The sad reality is we have no choice but to accept our poor access. We live in rural hilly region of America and cannot get any other service than high speed internet of 1.5 Mbs through the phone line. This service is spotty as all get out and we had to call and complain again to the internet provider as the service did not work at all. They sent us a new modem and it works again. This is our third router in a year and the provider won’t let us use an off brand version due to “lack of support”. Since their service is so spotty we never know if its on the providers side or our modem and if we have an off brand modem they will always blame it. So I am having to drive into town and piggyback onto our daughter’s internet signal. Bubba has been working on the barn a few hours a day. I managed to get the tractor inside and in two hours we got about 60% of the barn torn up and near a door ready to be shoveled outside. The smell is very bad! All this heat and the moisture getting trapped is causing a faster than normal breakdown of the compost material. It is even causing a bad smell out by the cars when the wind blows toward the house. I am hoping to be done with the barn in a few more days. After he gets the barn all dug out and cleaned the chicken coop needs its annual cleaning also! The fun never ends at StewartCreekSomethings! We need the barn to sort the sheep one more time before putting the ram in with everyone. We need to sort off the sheep we are culling or selling before turning in the ram so that they don’t get pregnant. This needs to happen in July so that lambs are born in January. Doing that will allow us to have two sets of lambs born in 2019.

We are still feeding the barn cats but almost never see them. The cat food keeps vanishing and we spot the occasional cat running around the barn lot that we know is from our summer release program.

We are having predator issues again, but not with the chickens. We have only lost a few sheep over the last ten years but we have lost two this week and they were only a 200 yards from our house. After I spotted the last dead one Annmarie made an executive decision that we had to bring the animals into the barn lot every night. The next evening when she went out she found another carcass. It was an older ewe who had been gutted about 150 feet from the first kill. This was Monday evening. At 0400 the coyotes were in our upper pasture raising a ruckus and they woke me up. It was pitch black so I just ran out into the front yard and popped off a couple of 22 rounds into the ground to scare them off. If you live in the country this endeavor is best done in the nude. This did scare off the coyotes and no one was injured in the barn lot. I was woken up again Wednesday night at 0200 by a large group of coyotes hollering at each other on top of the hill. I repeated my rural scare tactic with my Walther P22 and tortured the ground yet again with three rounds this time. This seems to run them off but it is not fixing the problem. The problem is with food being this abundant they should not be attacking our sheep. We don’t think it is a cat as the carcass is just left on the ground and there are lots of trees right by the kill site so it would be easy to hide or stash a body up in the trees.

On a plus side after three evenings of running in the cows, the sheep and the two horses everyone is just putting themselves in the barn lot now. We just have to go out and shut the gate. We are hypothesizing that the animals feel more protected so that is why they come in at night or they are just learning a routine. It is now officially summer in Eastern Oregon. The back creek is dry, the wheat is supposed to be harvested next week, the summer weeds are flourishing and its hot!

My nephew and I have been working in the evenings for a couple of hours a night in an attempt to get the bull enclosure done. It is coming along but I have way too much wood! I ordered enough to do the entire corral in wood and with the metal panels I don’t need as much. I am sure we have enough wood to do the entire barn addition even enough to side the addition. But the wood is warping so i need to do it soon. Just one more thing to add to the list. Zeke got to work the cows the first couple of days as Mouse is injured. He got a large splinter and torn toenail on one foot. The vet had to fix it and while he was there they pulled out a couple of foxtail from one ear. This was not a bonus find as we paid for that removal also. So he is now $220 ahead of Zeke in vet bills. He won the most expensive dog category last year also so he is off to an early lead.