fencing

Fence completed for 4a

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It was a long week last week and I kind of made it that way. Mr Rainman and Mr Tex came out last Sunday to help me finish up the fence in 4A. I ended up having Mr Rainman work on our yard, he finished trimming all of the lavender plants and trimmed out all of the old raspberry canes and tied up the new ones and trimmed them. He also tied up our thornless blackberries, he even managed to plant a few new plants that had self started by rooting the tips of runners. So hopefully by the end of next year we will have the entire row filled in with blackberry plants. This was work that was going to take a while and needed to be done.

Mr Tex went down to work on the fence in field 4A and Mr Rainman and I went to the barn to tag and band lambs and to rearrange the barn to hold more mommas & babys. I went down to help Mr Tex finish the fence and It turned out very nice. On our way back to the house we ended up fixing the fence in 4B all alongside Stewart Creek, which is currently dry. I had not tightened or repaired that fence in many years. It looks much better now and no animal should be able to get out, this is not a definitive won’t get out. I have learned over the years that if they want to get out they will. I snapped the high tension wire and had my hand down on the tightener when it happened, my poor right hand thumb took a beating and has been bothering me for over a week now, I am hopeful it will get well soon.

We had another set of twins born. We keep hoping that they will just hurry up and start having babies all at once. So far this has not happened. I will get the numbers together soon for our lambing season. So far it has been good other than incredibly protracted. On the way past the barn I noticed our fat orange barn cat laying up in the window area soaking up some heat rays from the sun. He is incredibly fat! I am unsure how many mice he eats but I have not found a single mouse in the hay yet so the barn cats get to stay and someone is doing their job.

Weather is so weird

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The weather is definitely changing. This could be for the good, who knows, but it is definitely different. It is November 14 and today the temperature outside was 66 degrees F. I was able to work in a long sleeve shirt only and if I had kept doing manual labor nonstop could of done it in a tshirt. I had to work at the paying job on Friday as Annmarie and I left town for Veteran’s day. It was the third time we have left the farm in the last two years. I am told that is not very often when one is counting. So I had Mr Rainman come out on Saturday and Sunday to help me build fence. I am trying to get #4 field split in half with a fence so I have a 4A and 4B. 4A is already planted and I want to be able to keep the cows off of it so it can grow undisturbed.

Friday evening when I went out to take care of the sheep and put them in for the night I found a pleasant surprise, three new lambs! I was even more surprised when I put them in under the stairs and discovered that one ewe had all three babies, triplets! I fed and watered them and then ran all the rest of the sheep inside. I ran the other sheep past 3-4 times to make sure no one had a bloody backside and was missing a lamb. Nope, they were really a set of triplets and the mother looked like she could feed them all. Saturday morning they were all up and walking around and Annmarie went out and dosed them all with some selenium supplement. They are doing great and the mother is able to feed all three. Of course no one else had any babies all weekend long. Saturday we set up three partial pens so in the morning if Annmarie needs a pen she can just add one wall quickly and be done with it.

Mind you there are other projects that need to be done also but I had my heart set on fencing. We had to fuel and grease up both tractors then I was talking about building a platform for the new calf table on top of a pallet so I could just move the table with the new tractor forks. We ended up doing that Saturday morning. The calf table needed to be moved before January which is when our cows go to the butcher and I will need to be able to load them up through the chute. We built a platform on top of the pallet out of pressure treated 2” thick wood and even had to add another 14” to one side and add a 4×6 pressure treated board underneath. We bolted the calf table down to the pallet through the new covering boards after we anchored all of the new boards to the pallet. This project needed to happen, so we did it.

The fencing went fairly smooth. The fence is going into bottom land so it is much easier to drill in and that extra 150# of weight on top of the auger arm is the bomb! When the ground is not rock hard it just goes into the ground, I have a hole in a couple of minutes! It is so nice. Using the high tension wire and the cam tighteners is the perfect way to build a H-brace. It is super easy and now that I know what I am doing it is super easy to adjust. We have all of the T-posts and stays all laid out along the fence route. Three more H braces to finish and then press the T-posts into the ground with the tractor and we will be done with that in no time. We did have a piece of high tension wire pop and break today. Mr Rainman was putting too much muscle into use. I am now tightening the high tension line. We also converted a 50 gallon drum to ride on the 3 point attachment and its filled with metal horse shoes. The counter balance is great when moving big bales. The trouble is it drags on the ground a little and I did not realize how thin walled the barrels were. Depending on how things go I may need to think up something more permanent. I am hopeful we can get done in one day next week.

Farmer Approved

Steve Hardin1 Comment

It has been a very productive two days! I had Mr Rainman come out for Friday and of course it rained for a few hours. We cleaned up the machine shed, I worked on welding the weight holder for the three point auger. The soil is only moist for about the first two inches and then its very dry and our dirt has quite a bit of clay. The auger would not go down into the dirt. I had this idea to add 150# by welding on a tractor weight holder so we could put some weight on the auger. Since I had tried the auger for 30 minutes and was getting nowhere we opted to go back to the shop and do some welding. I just keep digging around in the old burn pile and the pile of scrap that keeps coming out of the ground. I have a pile started outside the machine shed and I just dig through it looking for something that will work. If you cover it all up with paint after you are done it covers up a lot of mistakes. I have learned to hit it hard with a hammer afterwards to just make sure it holds. We still had to dig out a small center part of the hole in three of the six holes as we could not get the auger to dig down without it, but it went fairly smooth after that. We were able to do 2 of 6 holes without doing anything. The first day we set the railroad ties in gravel and then used the Mistress (John Deere) to drive in the T-posts. I did have to fill the bucket with gravel and then throw on an extra 150# of tractor weights into the bucket to get enough weight to push in the T-posts. I still had to use the bucket as a driver on three T-posts. It is not elegant but with the bolt on T-post driver I have it does the job. We called it a day after that as I did not have any splicing tubes so I needed to go to town. Annmarie and I went shopping then had dinner afterwards. It was nice.

Saturday we did not have to fight the rain, just the cold! It was 40 degrees and the sun would not come out of the clouds. I felt like an a decrepit old soul trying to get out of bed this morning. I had a hard time sleeping as my entire back and upper arms felt like they were on fire all night long. I started out slow by doing more welding and Mr Rainman, cleaned out the machine shed some more and made the mower ramp for my mother-in-law for her new shed. He also moved the old John Deere baler over to the tractor tool area and away from the machine shed, therefore opening up another bay in the machine shed. I welded some gate latches out of scraps laying around or dug out of the ground. I had to clean the parts up a little bit with the grinder first as I could not get a good spark through all of the corrosion. Some of my later pieces look better than the early ones. Maybe if I keep this up I may be able to do some not so ugly welding.

The wind was blowing and with the cold spell the trees have finally started to drop leaves. My solution to leaves is the same as mowing the grass, I put the sheep in the front yard! I did it first thing this morning and will do it all day tomorrow also. The dogs go on the run so they cannot harass the sheep and the sheep know to stay away from the dogs. They also know the dogs cannot get at them, how they know that I do not know.

I had to run back to town to get the right size splices, the one I picked up the day before was too small. We got all of the wire up, attached and the gates hung in about four hours. The new battery powered fence stapler is the bomb!! It just slams through driving staples. We had all the wooden stays up in under ten minutes, push, hold the trigger, machine whines then slams a staple into the stay. I love using the high tension wire and tighteners now to make H-braces. It keeps them taut and if they get loose at all they are incredibly easy to tighten. Which is not true when you use wooden stays and smooth wire twisted together.

I even managed to sell our old ram as ground mutton this week! He will be going to a good home that will appreciate what he has to offer. I think I still have one cow left to sell.

Escape artists

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I had a plan today, it was going to be hay day. Well honestly, that was my second plan, my first plan was supposed to be cow day. Instead it turned into Fence day as my third plan. My first plan was good but when I woke up this morning there was going to be change because I could not do cows. I was way too sore to be working the cows. So since I was not going to be doing cows then my second plan was going into effect, Hay day. I need to move the old bales out of the machine shed and store them over by the grain bins. But to keep the alpaca off of them I need to move the round horse corral out to use as a fence. Then I need to clean out the hay area and move some plywood out of the way. But just as I was leaving the house Mr Rainman tells me that a calf is out again. We had one get out earlier in the week and I found a large hole in the fence down by four corners. So knowing there is a problem and believing that it has repeated itself we went to the third plan which was Fencing day.

Mr Professional was going to come out later and work on the porch railing a little later. Mr Rainman loaded up the bucket on the new tractor, “Companion” with fencing tools. He spotted the bunny! We had not seen it in over a week. We went down to four corners and proceeded to fix the hole in the fence. We ended up cutting all of the willow trees back and then I crossed the fence and cut them back about 6 feet back from the fence. We tightened the entire fence and then went in and hammered in new staples into the wooden stays and added the broken T-clips back onto the fence. It looked like a brand new fence. Mr Rainman was mistaken, the calf was not out of the outer fence enclosure, he just was not inside the fence with his momma. He was going to have to walk down to the open gate to get past the fence.

We then drove up to the top of the hill and then went down to the schoolhouse field to patch the woven fence that the cow jumped through last year. We ended up retightening the entire thing and pulling the top two wires together to remove several inches of slack from the fence. I decided that the only way to stop this from happening again was to add in T posts. I think this was the plan two years ago but I thought the all wooden fence would be aesthetically pleasing and the cows would respect it for this reason, I was wrong. We unloaded all the tools there since we were going to be coming back. We stopped at the ditch and reopened the ditch to flood irrigate the schoolhouse pasture. I was able to dig down and get it running. We then went back to the house, small stop to fill the tractor bucket with large rocks as we were going to come off of the rocky hillside to get T-posts anyways. We did not want to move an empty tractor. The rocks were moved to the front yard for the rock wall that needs to be completed. We grabbed more supplies and went back, installed the T-posts and then had to install the clips onto the posts. This seems like an easy job. If you have never applied fencing clips before you would think its easy and you would be wrong. Mr Rainman was given a tutorial and cut loose. In the time it took him to complete four posts I had 17 posts done! He ended up getting terminated from that task and went back to load up the tractor with tools. We got all of the obvious fence corrected. The top CRP fence really needs to be repaired and rebuilt.

Is it Spring or not?

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I had plans to finish the bathroom over the weekend, that did not happen. I was reminded that we needed to sort the cows and sheep so we could get the ram in with the ewes and the small bull away from his mother as he is now 7 months old. To do this effectively we had talked about installing a gate in the yard fence so we could push the cows from the orchard pasture into the corral across the front yard hillside. So Mr Professional and I spent about 5 hours and got the side gate installed, we had to level the area, dig down and then clean up around the garbage shack. We leveled the whole area with gravel. My hope is the dogs won’t try and dig down. If they do then we will bury concrete blocks to prevent it but we are not going to go to the effort unless the dogs dig.

Once that was done we sorted the sheep. We peeled off 13 lambs that were older than 3 months and our oldest ewe “old brown” to move over into the orchard pasture. This way the ram won’t impregnate any of the young ewes and the ewes will put on weight faster as they are not nursing big lambs. The fat ram followed a bucket of sweet feed from the bull enclosure into the barn. He is such a push over for food. He has been in with the sheep for four days and we have yet to see him mount any thing. He better get to work soon, we will give him another three weeks. Luckily, we already had plans to go down and get another ram for competition. It may be that we are getting his replacement, time will tell.

I had to work that night so Mr Professional came out with a chainsaw and started to cut down all of the volunteer trees that were growing in the orchard pasture. We had talked about it and after he was done it sure made the area look a lot nicer. We are probably going to keep it this way for a while. He cleaned up the whole area also. When I got up we hung the new gate, he had just painted that day, down by the old apple tree. This is one of the heavy duty custom welded gates that the bull cannot tear apart. Once we had it up we did a little touch up painting and added a few boards to fill in the gap and drilled a locking receptacle hole. The gate fits like it was made for the opening. We took the bent one and drove over it with the tractor to straighten it out then installed it in the alleyway in the orchard pasture. We just need to pound In a T-post and add a panel onto the end. This will keep the animals from darting down this narrow pathway and getting stuck. Most of the time it will be open and doing nothing. The gate was not going to be used in a high traffic area due to being too lightweight to contain the bull.

We did not move the cows. I was beat, the covid is dragging me down again and starting to cause chest pain and shortness of breath. The cardiologist says I have pericarditis and need to take high dose NSAIDS for three months. I will see how I feel in four months.