field prep

Ready I think

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I am focused on getting the upper fields ready for planting. I finished the discing yesterday. I now have to get an expert opinion out to look at the fields and tell me what to do next. I want to get the alfalfa fields planted this month. After they are planted then we will start working on getting financing arranged to buy our haying equipment.

I ordered the wood to fix the roof in the machine shed. I broke a couple of boards last year when I was trying to move the large bales in and out. So I should be able to fix the damage soon. I want to bolt the new beam in place so the upper wall cannot pull apart. I may even bolt the upper beams at the front and back of the opening so it is done in three places. We will need to line the walls with plywood or use 2×4 fir strips every 12 inches so the new small bales don’t push on the outside boards covering the buildings.

Mouse was being a good boy and listening. We were waiting for Annmarie to push the sheep past us. We were in place to keep them from circling around the barn lot instead of going out the gate and out onto the upper hillside. Once the sheep spotted Mouse they turned and went out the gate, without him they would have just ran right by me.

I always wear a hat when I am outside but sitting on the tractor can make for a dusty experience. I don’t like the dust masks so don’t use them much. It seems like every time I look at myself I have less hair on top of my head! I am not sure why my mother says I need a haircut every 2-3 weeks. It may be time for a beard trim though… I asked Annmarie if I would look younger if my beard was all brown. She told me to just dye it. I cannot bring myself to do it. I would rather have custom done coffee beans before spending a dime on personal appearance grooming things. I could get a free haircut every 2-3 weeks and still manage to hold off 2-3 months before getting one. I guess I am just not very stylish. I asked the puppy his opinion and he didn’t care one way or another. So I guess I will keep it this way.

Field prep area

Steve Hardin3 Comments

I was unable to get out and work on the farm on Friday as I ended up covering at work but I had high hopes for Saturday! The bull corral is usable, so in Steve speak this means I am about 90% complete and have moved onto a new project. I still need to put up four rails, attach about 8 upright sandwich boards to get the woven wire locked into place on the wooden boards and I need to put away a few more tools. I also need to move all the lumber out of weather and into the barn. That moving job is going to be a bigger deal. I may end up moving most of the lumber to the old chicken coop, so functionally done.

I need to get the two upper fields ready for alfalfa which means knocking down weeds again. I have the new disc set I just needed tot get it working. I figured this would be an easy endeavor on a Saturday morning. It took me almost two hours to get the discs working correctly. There is no instruction manual and the seller was in and out in under 10 minutes after he delivered them. There is a handle missing that controls a release arm to let tension off of the locking mechanism to get the back set of discs to swing out. I tried pushing on the discs. I tried backing up and jerking them forward to get them loose. I had to use an old dog leash to hold the arm locking mechanism open. I figured that part out early. After hooking onto the back set of discs with a chain and pulling and jerking from various angles I gave it some more attention and started to figure out every single little mechanism and discovered the locking arm was missing its handle but I could turn the pipe manually. Once I had that disengaged I got the arm to pop loose with WD40 and more tractor manipulation. Then I had to drag it around in circles to figure out how to adjust it and where it needed to be to get me maximum effect without bogging down the tractor. I also had to gas up the tractor and blow out the radiator so dirt and weeds didn’t cause me to overheat her.

So two hours later I was able to start discing the upper prime field. This is very monotonous. Around and around and around you go. It is a must that you wear your seatbelt as tight as you can get it across your thighs. The tractor is constantly jumping around due to ruts and bumps and dirt clots and it starts to wear on your back and shoulders. After 8 hours with a seatbelt my back was starting to holler at me for doing it so long.

I refused to come in for lunch and just kept after it. There are deer absolutely every where in the upper fields and harvested wheat field. There must be at least 50 living on the property now. The amazing part is even with no rain and 100+ degree temperatures I was able to find dark brown moist soil in several areas of the field. This is very good news for our dryland alfalfa experiment we are doing next year.

My chickens hate the heat and are only laying 3-4 eggs a day now. The babies have not started to lay yet with any consistency.

My practice area below, I am going to toss out some dryland grass seed and hope it takes in the spring. The big win was I managed to even out the small area. It had a bunch of different holes and has been needing some attention.

We have killed one badger so far and no coyotes.

More of the same

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Sunday I was back at the field. This time it only took 30 minutes to get the tractor ready and get up to the field. We are getting ready to love us some high speed fiberoptic transmitted internet! Here you see the fiberoptic cable coiled up and ready to go to our house. Annmarie tells me that in one week we will have it up and running in our house! It could have been sooner but we opted to have them bury the cable in our yard and install two routers inside our house with direct hard wire to the fiberoptic line. It will be amazing. We have even heard rumors that some of our neighbors are inquiring about having it added to their house now. I spent another 8 hours on the tractor again. It would have been a straight shot but a couple of hours into it Zeke showed up to the upper field. He loves eating voles but its not safe for the dogs to be up there currently. So I walked him back to the house and discovered that he had pushed on the panel going into the ram pasture. The bungee had broke and he figured it out causing an opening to near the top. I closed it and tied it shut. But no Mouse or Gizmo anywhere in the yard. I figured they had used the same hole but when I walked up to the front fence I discovered that Annmarie had not latched the gate into the corral and Mouse had pushed on the gate and opened it up. The other two dogs used that opportunity to sneak down to Grandma’s house and ate cat food. I pulled weeds on the front hillside and hollered for the dogs occasionally. Mouse came back first and Gizmo showed up about ten minutes later. Once everyone was back in the yard I went back out and started to go around in circles. I managed to get one field completed and started in the next one. There was an old hay elevator parked up there that I grabbed with the tractor and pulled back to the house. The two flat tires were no match for my mistress! The elevator is an old pto belt driven thing probably from the 1950’s. I need Annmarie to tell me scrap or front yard decoration. There is still some 4 inch mainline irrigation pipe buried alongside the fence in the upper 7 acre field. It will have to be dug out by hand. It is resting nicely where it is for now.

We have been feeding the sheep for about 2 weeks now and they have all put on weight. The pasture we were keeping them on had no nutrition. We have not let them out on the back hillside because of the coyotes. Losing three of them has made us cautious of just letting them roam free. If we do that then we still have to bring them in every night. So for now we are having to feed hay. This is cutting into our winter feed stockpile and I am going to have to buy another four tons of hay to get us through the winter.

50% complete

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The bull enclosure is progressing faster than I anticipated but not fast enough. Annmarie walked into the old house yesterday to look for some string and just about could not get around. I have tools, boxes and various buckets full of tools and items laying all over the floor. It’s quite the maze. She feels like this is unacceptable and needs to be neater. I make a point to do it 1-2 times a year. The more projects I do the worse it gets. An alternate solution is for me to do no projects and it would stay clean. I am pretty sure that option is not on the table. I need to get the bull enclosure done and the barn dug out then I can take a solid day and dig out the old house. When I dig it out I can cut the shelves for the coat closet inside the house at the same time. This will make the day feel more productive. The bull enclosure is done all the way down to the water. I have the gate hung and woven wire behind the wooden rails and cow panels over the powder river panels. If I don’t do this the sheep will get in and out of the enclosure and we want to put the ram in there occasionally also.
This will give us a dual purpose area and it will make sorting animals easier. We are going to fix a fence on the back side and install another gate making it impossible to run around the barn lot in a circle. This is a favorite move of the sheep and cows when we are trying to get them into the barn or the corral. We may even add one more small segregation fence next year depending on how the animals sort this year. We are doing everything we can to make an easy sorting and handling process. We are not getting any younger and if it is not easy we won’t be able to keep doing it after we retire.

I will have to take the tractor and dig down about four inches on the barn side of the new gate. It won’t swing both ways and I need it to swing over to the other gate so that they can be latched together to allow access to the sheep barn. This may have to wait until we get a few days of rain which could be a while.

I found out that Bubba is looking forward to digging out the barn and not moving rocks for cribs. Trumping his fear of snakes is an even bigger scare of spiders. There are far more spiders under the rocks then snakes. I wonder sometimes how the next generation will survive.

Sarah and I spotted our very first grasshopper of the year this week. It really looks like a stick. I know there is a special name for this type of grasshopper but I cannot remember what it is. So I will call it a “twighopper”. It was very patient and let me get right next to it with the camera. Its the only one we have seen all summer. I did end up with a baby prying mantis on my hand while weeding the elevated garden beds. It was less than one inch long. This one did not bite me! Usually the adult mantis try and take a chunk out of my hand.

We scoped out the orchard yesterday and looked at the fruit trees. This is their third year and they are looking good. I will have to trim them this winter and try and get them raised up off the ground further and to bush out higher off the ground. Otherwise the sheep are going to be eating all the leaves when we remove the surrounding protective fence. Each tree has a cow panel wrapped around it with a 2 foot extension on top to keep the alpaca and horse from going over the top. We thinned out the Asian pears and there is a bumper crop of them for such a little tree. The tree ripened pears are so much better than the ones in the store. Next year we want to get another five fruit trees. We would like to get a couple more plum trees and a couple of apricot trees. Another apple or two and I would love to grow a couple of nut trees and some Nanking cherries and a few other things, maybe even some cranberry bushes!

The nephew spotted a honey bee hive in our walnut tree this year. They have had a hive here once before and died out a few years ago. We spotted several bees going in and out and you can see the wax and honey glaze to the wood here. For some reason the bees did not winter in this location well. I hope they do better this year. We really want to get a bee hive but we have to create a little more bee friendly atmosphere. I am working on 2-3 locations to grow wildflowers in for the bees. The real problem is they need water and it needs to be fenced off so the sheep cannot get in and eat the flowers. I have a couple of locations picked out now and just need to build some more fence for it.

We have looked into alfalfa and yep it’s going to cost us. To plant dryland Round Up ready alfalfa I am told it is $400/50#bag and you need to plant 20#/acre. I went up yesterday with my cell phone and used a cool app called AGRIplot that lets you put in boundaries and way points and it uses your phone GPS to calculate acreage. We have 20 acres that we need to plant. I had thought it was 22 acres. This $4 app just saved me $400! So basically, the seed alone will cost us $3200. This does seem steep but we only have to plant every 7 years minimum if we seed correctly. Plus, our chemical expenses will be minimal. In the long run we will come out ahead, everyone I talk to who planted alfalfa and chose not to use Round Up ready due to expenses has said that it would have been cheaper and easier to maintain in the long run if they had just paid the money up front.

I went up there and the weeds are coming back so in the evenings this week I will be spraying. I kept chasing a pair of twin whitetail fawns all over the field. They would not run very far and their mom just kept wandering around the field. I did have to let the upper prime pasture cattle have access to the barn lot yesterday. The water coming up from those two springs has dried up and is no longer running. the only water coming up from the ground now is the main spring in the barn lot and a few little springs down by the schoolhouse that dump into Stewart creek. Those springs are not enough to make Stewart creek run just enough to make pools here and there. I found a dead sheep in the upper prime pasture. It had been torn apart and was probably only about four months old. The carcass is dried and it was in the tall grass but it is from this year. Most likely a coyote as we have not seen any stray dogs this year. We are getting ready to sort the cows and sheep again to make two herds. We are going to put the ram in with the sheep so will have to pull off the female lambs we don’t want impregnated and put them with the heifer we don’t want impregnated. We will toss in one of the steers to be with the heifer so she is not alone. The sheep and cows don’t like to be alone.

Sorting sheep

Steve Hardin1 Comment

The sorted ewes waiting for us to be done. Today was sort sheep day and our daughter came out to help. The day started out good, coffee and breakfast with the wife. It went downhill after that. I took the dogs to go out and get the sheep. They had squeezed through the gap in the upper prime pasture and were in with the cows. The trouble with this is even on the way out to the sheep the dogs did not want to listen. It went downhill from there. I had no voice by the time I got the sheep into the barn lot. No one would listen, each dog thought he knew best and chose to just ignore me. We had to choke down the dogs several times as dominance was the issue. It was excruciating to be around, probably the worst day in the last year. Usually when one dog is off its game the other will work but today neither one wanted to step up to the plate and play ball. Annmarie and Sarah got the sheep into the barn and started to sort them. I really felt like a third wheel as there was not really anything for me to do. I did end up catching a boy that got into the girls and a girl that got sorted into the boys.

The boys waiting to go to the orchard. They will be the companions for the new ram we are getting on Saturday. We are going to keep the ram off of the herd for at least a month.

Our chute system is so nice! It was expensive but in all reality it is super efficient with two people but one person could do it. We sorted 101 sheep in an hour using the chute system. We even managed to snag the new baby and it was a girl so I only had to put a tag into its ear. We have had around 400 lambs born on the farm since we have moved here. I just keep ordering higher number tags so we can keep a running tally.

Annmarie took these pictures while they were sorting the sheep and I love how they turned out! I had to add them to the blog. Sarah did a great job helping us today.

After the whethers got moved to the orchard, this involved the two noncompliant dogs and a lot of yelling and swearing. I went out to mow some more grass and weeds.

I had not been to the upper pastures for the last two weeks. The weather and rain has been good for the weeds! Some of the weeds are over 6 feet high and very thick. I tried to mow next to the channel I dug in the upper prime squared pasture but I was just guessing where the channel was. I was doing pretty good until I got to the part where I had dug in a side channel. I tipped the tractor onto its side and had to stop it from rolling with the front bucket, which caused the water to dam up. I had to walk back to the house and get Annmarie and the pickup. I gave directions to her while she drove through the field that she cannot tell where the ditch or fence or anything is located. She did not like this. I chained up to the back of the tractor and ran the chain over the top of the mower so when she pulled my back upper wheel was pulled down into the dirt. This took three tries to let me get the bucket and the mower rearranged after each attempt until she pulled me out. She was a little hesitant to drive out but I assured her that if she went in a straight line back to the gate she would be okay. She made it without any difficulties. I kept mowing for another 3 hours. I have a good 8 hours more of mowing to do to get all the weeds knocked down. After two weeks I will then spray the fields and kill all the weeds and grass that are growing. After that I will hit it with the discs again.

Annmarie texted me that dinner was ready so I started to make my way back to the house. Just along the fence by where we store the fencing and gate supplies the weed were growing well. I thought I would get in there with the tractor and clean it up. Now I was unable to burn this this year as my nephew did not move his trailer and I didn’t want to burn with it that close to the fence so there are still a lot of dead tumbleweeds alongside the fence. I didn’t know I was in trouble until the tractor slid down the embankment and into the fence. The mower is caught behind the wooden fence post and I cannot get out again! I am going to have to go out, disconnect the mower and cut the fence in half so I can just drive the tractor out. I am pushing on the wire almost a foot now I just cannot get it out. So now I will need to fix the fence directly after retrieving the tractor so the alpaca don’t get out. If its any consolation dinner was excellent.