fencing

Predators 11/ Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Sunday morning we went out to do more fencing. The Apprentice just keeps coming back for more, which is a good thing. On the way out to field #1 we passed two dead lambs! Both kills occurred in field #4 near the barn lot, one near the old well and one near the dry creek bed. The one near the well was about 2/3 eaten and the other one was barely touched. After some righteous anger outbursts, now there are only 50 lambs to sell, we continued on to field #1 to fence. I did text the person who was supposed to come buy lambs on Monday. They eventually texted back and had some issues of their own and will not be able to come get lambs until Saturday. So we need to keep all 50 alive for one more week.

When we were installing the H braces we used a rolling measuring wheel to mark out 315’ approximately as each roll of woven wire is 330’. The plan was to be able to tighten one roll of wire at a time. A single roll weighs 185# so tying more than one together and trying to get it tight is brutal. It’s hard enough trying to get 185# of wire to stand upright using a hand tightener. I made sure and brought along a four foot section of pipe to use as a cheater bar when the tightener got too hard for me to tighten by hand. This allowed me to get another 6-12 inches of tightening.

On Saturday the black walnut tree was fine (see pictures from previous post) and then this morning the thing had split in half! It looks like there was a natural wishbone and the amount of walnuts caused the tree to just split in half. We are going to let it see if it can live by spending half its time on the ground. Who knows, maybe it will survive and do well. The turkeys roost in the tree also so maybe we should blame them instead of the huge number of walnuts.

We fixed the H brace and then tightened the fence to it. Once that was done then all of the T post clips had to be installed. I showed the Apprentice how to do this but it takes quite a bit of practice to be fast at it. I am doing about 2/3 of the fence. But I have had a lot of practice! We then did the wooden stays. This really makes the fence look good and it keeps the animals from pressing down on the smooth wire. We then rolled out another roll of fencing and got it up! Due to to curved nature of this fence we had to go on the outside of the railroad tie H braces in two spots. We clipped and stayed that section and then rolled out another 330’ of fence and called it a day. We are both getting very tired and sore.

I opted to do coyote patrol that evening and night. We don’t own a spotlight yet (it’s on order 300k candle power). But the moon was supposed to be out and I lined the pickup headlights to cover the area and used a powerful flashlight. I stayed out there from 1800-0000, 6 hours and never saw a single predator. Honestly, this is the most stupid problem ever. I am looking into a thermal scope and a flat shooting rifle. What we really need is a drone with a thermal camera on it that can be auto launched, flown over the farm then allow it to auto land back at it’s starting point. This way I would know whether to go out and deal with the predators. I am also looking into some thermal binoculars. The thermal binoculars and the spotlight with a good scope might just be enough. I have done the math, a protection dog costs about $1600 a year by the time you count for food and vet costs. This is a cost that continues year to year. A rifle and binocular cost is a one time event.

Fencing field #1 again

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Saturday was dedicated to more fencing. The goal is to get enough fence up around field #1 to let the animals into it. So the Apprentice and I loaded up the pickup and Kubota and headed out to get some actual fence installed. We rolled out the first 55 feet of fence, stretched it, put the T post clips on and then needed to install the wooden stays. I let the Apprentice use the DeWalt fence stapler and after she pulled the trigger a couple of times she said “that has some kick” and did not really want to staple anything with it. So when she held the first wooden stay and I ran the stapler she complained of pain and stinging from the stapler (it hurts). So she found a large old wooden fence post and she leaned that against the wooden stay then put her body weight onto the wooden buffer and had no more problems. She rolled out 330’ of woven wire along side the T posts and when we got to the next H brace we realized that it had not been completed. There was no X of tightened smooth wire in place. We left the smooth wire at the house because we thought we had done all of the X’s.

This necessitated a change in tasks so we went to installing T posts with the tractor. We did pretty good until we got near the end and then we started to bend the posts into a U shape. We fixed this by clearing the grass debris away from the post insertion site and I used a pounding technique with the bucket instead of a steady downward pressure. This got all of the T posts into the ground.

I decided to call it a day and we headed out of field #1, but when we got to the gate I realized that not having a direct gate into the field from the wheat field side is just horrible. It makes for this long convoluted route to get into field #1. So I stopped, had the Apprentice go grab one of the unused gates and three railroad ties to bring back, it took a couple of trips and some finagling on her part but she got all of the stuff to the needed spot. I took the John Deere tractor and tried to drill three large 12” holes into the gate opening I had fenced off. I managed it eventually but each hole took 10-15 minutes to drill out. I also realized that the hydraulic fluid leak is worse than I had guessed as the auger got stuck down into the hole with the 150# weight I had on the auger. I added three old tractor weights to the top arch and it makes the auger work even when the ground is hard. So I had to remove said weights to get the auger to come out of the hole. On a plus note, at least we dug out the main batch of holes with the six inch auger first. This saved us a bunch of time. So now the holes are dug and we just need to clean them out, set some posts, put in some wire X supports and then hang a gate. I was so glad to be done for the day.

Predators 9/Farm 1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It has been one of those weeks, The Apprentice wanted to keep working all week. The fence building did not deter her. We have two leaky frost free faucets that need to be replaced. Unfortunately, to do that they have to be dug out. This is due to the reducers that had to be added to match the 2” pipe that is original to the farm. I placed some tools on the ground to outline a space and asked her to dig. She knocked out the first hole on day 1. Her only real obstacles were the dogs kept dropping the throw balls onto her head when the hole started to get deep. I imagine she threw the ball all day for both dogs. I am sure they loved it. I saw her on her way out and told her there was another faucet in the back yard that needed dug out but it was near a tree stump and would probably not be as easy. This did not seem to deter her and The Apprentice stated she would be back the next day.

Thursday morning, she texted me around 0930, a late start for sure. I am sure that first hole was causing some physical discomfort. I had messaged her first thing to check on a sheep carcass in the orchard. My mother-in-law had called me at work stating she thought there was a dead sheep in the orchard. The Apprentice confirmed there was indeed a dead ewe, #325, in the orchard with no intestines. I told her to just leave it. She tore into the back faucet with less enthusiasm and more problems. There were tree roots everywhere and she had to keep cutting through them. I knew this was going to be a problem. She had to leave around 1330 and said there was more to dig.

When Annmarie came home she called me at work to tell me there was a dead sheep in the orchard. I had forgotten to tell her. She had spotted it because there was a Golden Eagle feasting on the carcass! I asked if she had gotten a picture of the eagle, nope. We discussed my failure to keep her informed and that the sheep had to now be brought into the barn lot. This means running them through the front yard every night and letting them back out every morning. I opted to leave the carcass in the orchard as I was going to be around the farm all weekend and wanted a crack at the coyote doing this.

Friday morning when Mr Rainman and I went out to fix the gate into the tree orchard area, he hit it with the tractor earlier in the summer. We noticed that the carcass only had the head intact and three legs. One leg was missing and one was off in the pasture about 40 feet from the carcass. It had been stripped down. We found a dig out spot under the fence. This is where the predators have been crawling under the fence to get to the sheep. It was a fresh crawl spot and the dirt was still moist. We ended up planting a wooden post in the field and mounting the electronic eyes on all four sides of the post. They are solar powered with a battery that lasts all night. So they charge all day and then light up and flash at night. It is supposed to look like light reflecting off of eyes. This is supposed to scare the predators off. We got everything mounted but did not turn them on. I went back up to the machine shed and created a snare to place over the hole. We are going to leave the carcass in the orchard for one more night to see if something returns tonight. This meant that the four vultures that showed up today got to fill their bellies all day long. They were pretty satiated. I will move the carcass tomorrow if we don’t catch anything. If we do I will try the snare a second night. Who knows what will happen.

We carried a rifle all day while working on the fence and faucets and did not see a single coyote. It is so painful to have the thing on you most of the day. We finally just put it in the pickup so it was out of the way. We did get the frost free faucets changed out and they work and do not leak. The Apprentice can fill in the holes at a later date. We went up and pounded T posts in on two sides of field #1. The stupid flood buried the woven wire alongside the road in two different places. We will have to cut the wire and splice in new to sit above the dirt. Their is a large drop off so we had to pound the T-posts in by hand alongside the road.

We measured the fence line distance alongside the creek. Each roll of woven wire is 330’. So I decided that instead of trying to wire all the woven wire into one long contiguous piece of wire I would just install them in 312-320’ increments. We marked out a H brace every 312-320 feet. We can install one entire section of fence, tighten it up and then attach the new one and do it again. Their needs to be some H braces interspersed along a long fence anyways and this made perfect sense to me. We marked out all of the H braces and drilled the first holes with the 6” auger. The rain we had earlier in the week and the storm we had today made drilling into the soil very easy. We got 5/100” of rain today. I missed out on measuring the earlier rain storm due to a dead battery in our rain gauge, I fixed it on Wednesday.

I did try and call the animal auction yard today but no one answered and their voicemail was full. I will try an email this weekend. We have 55 lambs that need a new home with only five sold at this time.

Even more fencing on field #1

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Today went a lot better than yesterday. Mr Rainman and I installed the wife’s seat covers in her car. Wow, this is not an intuitive or easy job. It took us 75 minutes with both of us working on it and we never would have gotten it done if Mr Rainman had not taken the time to read the directions! I was gonna wing it! Nope, there are a lot of disconnect this one thing, leave off or detach and then put back after you have fished the straps past. Mr Rainman did bleed on some of the covers but I think I got all of the blood wiped up so wife won’t notice. The underside of the seats have some sharp areas. Since we could not get it in under 60 minutes the wife had to drive my lovely two door color car. Luckily, there were not going to be any passengers as the passenger door handle is still missing. I don’t think I will ever replace that handle, it’s superfluous.

I did order a new inside door handle for the pickup today. It’s just too hard to shut the door with no handle. The handle broke off at both screw attachment locations. I am hoping the $25 replacement will last another ten years. My left thumb is healing up nicely, the divot I took out with the electric shears has filled in and I just have an eraser sized scab left. I was sure I was going to have an upside down U forever on my thumb.

I have not been able to catch or kill a coyote yet. Today, we had the rifle with us the entire time and did not see a coyote. I have started to look into thermal imaging binoculars and scopes but they are expensive. Plus, it looks like the scopes all want to go on a picatinny rail and none of my hunting rifles have that. So I am still looking into it. This is a very dumb problem.

We need to get rid of some sheep. I took some pictures today and posted them for sale on Craigslist. We will see how that goes. I am going to email the auction site. I tried calling but their voicemail was full.

Both of my helpers came out to work on the fence in field #1. We got all of the wooden H brace cross pieces up and got one of the H braces fitted with high tension wire. We ran out of wire from our used stash but Mr Rainman had left with the Kubota tractor and it has the forks on it so we can just slip the full roll of wire onto a pallet fork and hold it in the air. This should make getting a piece off of the appropriate size easy. Instead we switched to installing T-posts with the tractor. The ground is fairly rock free and after two rains the ground is a lot softer than it was earlier in the summer. I only had to pound it about ten posts total with the tractor bucket. The rest I could just push in with the bucket (full of gravel and 150# of steel weights on the driver side of the push bucket. The Apprentice and I kept it up till about 1300. We also got the holes drilled for the gate so it can be installed next. I have learned that there are differing priorities for the Apprentice. When I asked the Apprentice why she was not wearing leather gloves when handling the T-posts and inserting them into the bucket driver I was informed that a weird suntan was appearing around her wrists. She did eventually put on some gloves as the sun heated the T-posts up enough they were too hot to handle. I refrained from commenting. We are still having grip exercise discussions every day she works. I keep telling her she needs to be able to handle tools for 8+ hours a day.

Fencing proceeds despite communication barriers

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Today the plan was to actually get some posts in the ground and get all of the needed materials to their appropriate locations. This proved much harder than one would assume as the day progressed. Both Mr Rainman and the Apprentice came out today to help with fencing. It took us a half an hour to gather tools and the rest of the railroad ties we needed. As the Apprentice and I got to the barn lot and were loading up large cedar posts to be the other half of an H brace with a railroad tie, I realized we needed more tools. I texted Mr Rainman and after the third text I realized that I just needed to walk over to the machine shed and help load more tools. We almost forgot the rifle, varmit getter. We loaded up 12- 16’x2”x8” rough cut boards onto the Kubota forks to use as the cross pieces for the H braces. That was almost too much weight to safely carry down the fields. The tractor back end kept bouncing off the ground when the path got too bumpy.

The plan was for Mr Rainman and I to start setting railroad ties after we drilled out the 12” holes. We had used the 6” auger yesterday to put in all of the holes and the plan was to widen the holes that needed railroad ties today. The field has dirt and not many rocks where we were digging but the ground has a lot of clay in it and can get very hard. Usually the big auger will just sit on top of the dirt and not cut down into it. It’s better since I welded the holder onto the arm and we stack tractor weights on it. We only had to use 100# of weights today.

The plan was to send the Apprentice back to the fence supply pile for a gate, there were three places on the farm she could find extra railroad ties, she needed to grab used T-posts from another spot and then grab the high tension wire that was on the ground near a culvert. I also have blocked off the wheat field access, I just covered it up with woven wire. This proved very problematic. You have to drive all the way down to field #3 to get out into the wheat field road before you can then drive up alongside the fields and get out onto the gravel road. We had to put one railroad tie on that fence alongside the road. She needed to deliver that said post. I thought I had explained the correct path. When she showed up in field #1 with the post and asked me how to get to the hole I had to reiterate all of the instructions, except this time she did not have to find the railroad tie, she had that. The tie got delivered to the correct spot and then she was supposed to get used T posts and the high tension wire.

Mr Rainman and I managed to get almost all of the railroad ties and cedar posts set when I asked him if he could see the Apprentice. Nope, it turns out that she drove past the used pile of T-posts six times and missed them every time. She had to drive down to the house and dig into the used post pile we have behind the grain bins.

Mr Rainman had to run to the house for a break so I asked him to grab a gate behind the grain bins. He comes rattling down the field with this super fancy very nice gate, not the gate from behind the grain bins. He states that I told him to go down to four corners and get that gate. You could not have picked a further spot from where we were fencing! He had to drive back and drop it off and get the gate we needed from behind the grain bins.

The only consistency here is me. I was the one giving instructions. There may have been some ambiguity present that I did not realize was present! The Apprentice and I got four sets of H braces built. She kept after it. As we were putting in the high tension tighteners she was having trouble using the fencing pliers, no grip strength. I gave her shit for not using the grip strengthener exercise I had told her about. She wants to be a farrier and will need to be able to hold onto the tools even when tired. She then voiced that she has been hurting all over her body since starting to work for me! Her hands hurt, her feet, her legs, her arms and her back all hurt all of the time! I laughed and told her mine do also but we still have to get stuff done. Say what you will, but the Apprentice just keeps coming back for more work. She digs in and just works at it until it is completed. You simply cannot ask for more and it is nice knowing she shows up to getter done. In a month, she goes off to school, so I will be keeping her as busy as possible until then.

Big surprise, we did not see a coyote that could be shot at. There was one across the street on the neighbors place but it was gone in about five seconds. I was up at 0115 due to the puppy barking, I went outside with a flashlight, suppressed 22 pistol and two extra clips to check on the ewe carcass we had left in the orchard, nothing there.