flood damage

Sunchokes for the win

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On Sunday Mr Rainman came out again. We are now starting at 0900 so it is a little warmer when we are working. It was quite pleasant, I was able to work with just a long sleeve shirt and a wool cap on my head. There were still a few get ready for winter items to clear up before we could work on the garden and lavender. The plan on Saturday afternoon was to work on the lavender. It needs trimmed up again. But the longer I worked on the berm the more time I had time to think and prioritize. So we went out to the barn first thing and finished setting up all of the chutes and feeders. They were still outside and in the hay rooms from when it was dug out. There are no sheep on the property but we will have to bring them back in three weeks and then they will need to be sorted so I can take some to the livestock auction. We also tossed out food into all of the feeders and then tossed out bedding. The barn is all ready for the sheep. There are a couple of overhead lights that do not work, the ones in the hay rooms being the most needed. The damn raccoons have torn some of the wires out by crawling up and down the walls. I need to put in more zip ties and anchors that I screw into the walls so the wires cannot be pulled. I am not running conduit for those 12v wires. I will add that to my list but honestly it will not happen until I get the raspberries, blackberries and trees all trimmed up. I need about another month for all the leaves to finish falling off of everything before I can do the trimming.

We then filled the feeders for the pregnant cows and the two feeders for the feeder cows down below. We used all of the round bales from the second cutting at the neighbor’s. There were still a couple of moist ones but there was no mold and none of the bales were warm/hot. We managed to get the truly wet ones fed out immediately and the cows just ate them. So in a couple of weeks I will have to actually feed out some of the large bales of hay we purchased. I am super happy that we are not having to touch the purchased hay until mid December. That bodes well for maybe not having to purchase any hay next year for winter.

We now Winter is near when the quail start moving down towards the houses. We feed them during the winter and there are more buildings/shelter down near the houses for them to wait out the bad storms. So there is a large covey hanging around that we see every day. They are super noisy! You can always hear them usually before you can see them.

Once we had all of that done we had to see how our Sunchokes did. I planted them for the first time this summer. I planted about 30 small tubers. The plants got almost twelve feet tall and the sunflower bloomed very late. It was the very last flower we had available for the bees. I am not sure if it was due to the time I planted the tubers or if they are naturally late bloomers. I am unsure but we will know next year. Mr Rainman and I started to dig up the tubers after cutting off the dead stalks. I had read that you needed to be careful with sunchokes as they can turn into a weed and can be very invasive. Wow! We dug up almost 80# of tubers from a single 15 feet row of tubers. I planted one tuber about every six inches initially. It was crazy! We just kept pulling them out of the ground. There was no way we got all of them when we were digging despite going over the area several times. All of the wield small or shovel cut tubers ended up being the ones we replanted into the same row. I sent a three gallon bucket home with Mr Rainman and we put the rest in the root cellar. I did plant a row in the yard near the newly installed side fence. I want to plant a six by six foot patch on the other side of the fence gate but I was running out of steam. I will do that in the spring. I will need to put in a couple of posts and some wire to hold up the tall stalks so they don’t fall onto the house. Annmarie and I have not eaten any of the Sunchokes yet. The plan is this next week to peel and boil a batch and see how they taste. If we like them then we will probably plant some more. I have read online where people mix them in with potatoes to add texture and a nutty flavor to their mashed potatoes.

Once Mr Rainman left I took the Kubota tractor out to work on the culvert crossing in field #4b. The spring ditch is so deep now that you can no longer drive a tractor across it. The back half of the culvert was torn out in the last flood. The reason it got torn out was I did not install a rock wall face on that side. It was one of those things I was going to come back and finish later. The side that had the rock face survived the flood but the other side did not. It took a lot more dirt than I thought it would to get the back half built up. I did bring in two loads of very large rocks to place near the culvert. I need about eight more loads to complete that entire side but my chest was not going to allow it. The nice thing about the weekend was it was the first one in ages where I was able to work the entire weekend without stopping early to rest. Things are improving.

Winter is coming eventually

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I think Winter will show up eventually but it is slow in arriving. We have had a couple of hard freezes and I have actually scraped ice off of the vehicle windshields twice. Mr Rainman came out last weekend for a couple of days to help me. It is nice to have the help and I am still healing up from the pneumonia, a little pericarditis tends to slow you down some. The Winter chores need to get done so we worked on that Saturday. We stripped the garden clean and rearranged the beds so that different vegetables would be planted in different bins in the spring. I dug up the other half of the potato bin. I did decide to leave the beets in the ground that I planted late this fall. The greenery is still intact and has not wilted so I am going to let them grow/hibernate until the greenery dies. I planted one bin three weeks earlier than the other and it is doing much better. We had never planted beets before so it is a great experiment. Once that was done and we had the garden area ready for Winter the bulbs were next.

I had an entire vegetable crisper bin in the fridge full of flower bulbs. It was time to get them planted before the ground froze solid. Since the rock wall is only completed on the right hand side of the bridge I only wanted to plant bulbs on that side. After much contemplation and input from various sources I am going to have to rip out about 15 feet of completed rock wall on the left hand side. When I dug down I found the original base stones and I was using those as they lay. The wall is kicking out the further I get toward the barn. So I need to tear it back and scoot it closer towards the house and keep it in line with the right hand side wall. I may even put up a stake with a string! We tore down the fence and I had to bring over five loads of dirt and a load of rocks to finish getting the flower bed lined and height correct. We opened up the packages and read the planting instructions to determine the height of the final plant. We tossed out the packages based on height then laid out all of the bulbs on the surface of the dirt. Once we had them all laid out we planted them. Surprisingly, there were a lot of bulbs. We ended up planting a bulb almost every six inches throughout the entire flower bed. The tallest flowers are toward the edge of the wall so they will shade the short plants. I realize that appears backwards when you are driving in and walking down the sidewalk but from the house we will see more flowers. Most of the short bulbs are early risers and like partial shade. We will know next year how they do but they are in the ground! Once that was done we laid out the fence over the top of the entire flower bed to keep Chance from digging up the bulbs. So far it has been one week and she has not dug up any bulbs. She has another hole to China started and it is deep enough now that when she goes in it she disappears. This hole is of course in the front yard.

Mr Rainman had to leave after a few hours so I spent the rest of the day on the tractor working on building up our dirt levee over by the old chicken coop. I had extended the hill last year but the cows had torn it down to only about six inches high. This time I piled up the dirt and then proceeded to drive on it every time I went back for another scoop of dirt. This really helped compact it down. Once I had the entire thing done I ran over it again in two directions to compact it one more time. I am only looking for about 16” of berm. Those last two horrible floods could have been diverted back into the stream bed with a 12” berm. I am just trying to get the flood precautions all finished. I have one more thing to do, there is a downed tree in the dry creek bed that is backing up water. I need to cut the middle out of the downed branch so it doesn’t create an artificial dam and flood out field #1. Once I get that done all of the flood precautions that should help if we get another bad flood will be in place. There is no guarantee they will work but honestly, I would rather do all the work, guess and take precautions and never find out if they were necessary! It has taken me years to rebuild all of the stuff torn out, or up or altered by the flooding.

Prepping for bathroom supplies and trying to finish old items

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I had Mr Rainman come out this week to try and finish up some projects we had already started. He was able to shove both burn piles back together so they are ready for a second burn. After that he worked on cleaning out the spring channel. We still had a lot of flood related branches and brambles clogging up the waterway even though it has been a few years. We have not been able to really find the time to do this cleanup but since we are burning we decided that adding to the burn pile was a necessity. There is still some cleanup to be done but it is a ton better than it was.

That same flood caused a tunnel to form under one of the culverts. It’s the only culvert we have over the spring. Mr Rainman is convinced that the ground around it is going to cave in any second. He brought in two loads of rocks and put them in the holes appearing around the culvert. He had to do it again the next day. I figure if he does it one or two times more he will have filled in the tunnel next to the culvert and we should be good. He is saving his “I told you so” for when the tractor falls in the hole. We have agreed to disagree and he has the “I told you so” ready.

He was able to finish moving the last of the black walnut from the old chicken coop to the grain bin. Once he did that he proceeded to clean up the old chicken coop. I was pretty surprised by how much dirt and debris he was able to get out of the coop. I cleaned it up a decade ago. The plan was to create space so we can move the tools and bins from the old house out to the old chicken coop.

He also ended up moving things around so we had a clear side. This will work great for the move out of the old house. We will tackle the move this weekend when there are two of us. Some of the cabinets are very heavy and I needed to go through all of the items.

Office progress made with minimal interruptions

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Monday I wanted to really make progress on the office. There was no way we were going to be doing anything outside. We did walk around the farm to see how much damage was inflicted by the water and surprisingly, not a lot. The breakaway sections we built two years ago will need to be reassembled and much weaker clips used so they will actually break away this time. The posts and anchors we installed all held!! This was the plan and the reason we put so much work into getting the anchor points installed. Unfortunately, it will take more than a week for the upper fields to dry out due to the amount of water that was on them. Of course it is scheduled to rain again on Thursday or Friday. This summer we are going to have to clean out the willow areas down by the schoolhouse. A huge lake was created due to the amount of debris backing up in the trees.

Mr Professional wanted to look at the pickup and see if we could get it out of the ram pasture and back out to the front driveway. We had to fix the hydraulic leak that did not get repaired and it would barely engage into gear. We managed to milk it along until we got to the front parking lot and parked it. I am not sure how I am going to pick up the windows this week without it. Hopefully, the windows will fit in Annmarie’s car.

I really wanted to get on the office so we went back at it. It would have gone much smoother if the guy cutting the angles could get it right, five hours of cutting and I would get about one out of four pieces right. I got so frustrated I just wanted to hang it up for the day. Mr Professional just kept badgering me and we just kept cutting more boards. It is mighty hard to get those warped, misshapen and cracked boards up on the ceiling. We joked that it we had to pay extra for character. The problem is that is exactly right! The ceiling is coming together and it doesn’t look like a plain old wooden ceiling. It does have character, it will be unique and it will elicit oohs and ahhs. We almost made it to the halfway mark, I think another five hours and the ceiling will be done. We have one more idea that is going to be tricky but its a surprise for the wife.

Plans interrupted, second 100 year flood commencing

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Sunday was the day we were gonna really get cranking on the office. It was supposed to rain most of the day so working outside was just not going to be an option. Since we had the new door installed on the new office we could turn on the little heater and get it fairly comfortable inside. I had decided that working on the ceiling was going to be our project for the day. Our rain indicator showed that in the last 24 hours we have gotten 1.96” of rain and the back runoff creek Stewart Creek was running muddy and starting to finally rapidly rise. It was still contained in the banks so I was not too worried. Mr Professional came out and we started our discussion on how the ceiling was going to be installed. It turns out that the Juniper wood we purchased from a local mill has a lot of knot holes and cracks in it. This means there are gaps and holes so we needed the intact old intact ceiling to be able to use the new wood. The best part is the old ceiling will peak through the new ceiling. I wanted to just install it in horizontal rows, while this is fairly boring it is the quickest install. Mr Professional talked me into going across the ceiling in a 45 degree angle. We managed to get about five boards installed when my daughter came out and asked us if we had seen the front spring?

We had not but holy moly! The entire front spring was now a raging torrent. The only way this happens is if the creek has diverted upstream and is flowing down all of the hay fields. Mr Professional and I put on waterproof clothing and started going upstream and cutting the panels loose. The metal clips were supposed to break under pressure of the water. This did not happen, the 500# rated clips were holding back a few feet of raging water. We started cutting the cables and clips or grinding through them to release the water and pressure on the fence. This was done blindly sometimes as the water was very muddy. Luckily, earlier in the week after moving hay I had trouble keeping my glasses on due to all of the sweat. I put on these little silicone wings that grab the ear pieces and wrap a piece of silicone around the bottom of each ear. This was essential to me keeping my glasses during the storm. I cut a panel loose and it scratched across the left side of my face and ripped my glasses off of that side of my face. The only thing that kept my glasses on my head was the silicone piece on the right ear! Mr Professional hollered across the water that I was bleeding. There was a short discussion about the known saying ”all bleeding stops eventually!” The bleeding did stop so we continued on and continued to release the breakpoints in the fence the entire length of the property. There was 8-12” of water across the entire bottom grass fields with three feet of grass, by the time I got to the far end of the field, I was utterly exhausted. Mr Professional had gone back to get the side by side so I could ride back and not walk.

The side by side has some major issues and we have known this. It sounded rougher than normal but I concentrated on drinking water and getting back to the house. Annmarie hollered when we got down to the end of the driveway. It turns out that Star, our only white stripped cow had lain her baby down on the wrong side of the raging torrent of water. We ended up catching the calf, who did not like this and were going to just take the side by side up and around the hill and drop off the calf with her mother. The side by side gave its final cough and died as soon as we got to the driveway. It is dead! It will need some major engine work or a new engine to correct its current state. Now the calf is stuck in the side by side with me waiting for a ride. The pickup transmission problem has it trapped in the ram pasture and it is now pinned between two raging water torrents.

So Mr Professional and Annmarie went to obtain her Subaru all wheel drive vehicle. Clear plastic was tossed in the back of the car, I crawled in and held onto the calf while Annmarie drove us up on the back hillside. I let the calf out and it promptly ran in the wrong direction. Annmarie went out and chased the calf down. It was reunited with its mother and all was well.

I was exhausted. A shower was had, 16 ounces of dip and chips consumed and an hour long nap on the couch was needed. As soon as I woke up I talked the wife into driving into Pendleton to “check on the reservoir level” but as soon as we got to Pendleton we went to Dairy Queen so I could eat a banana split!! I wolfed it down, we went home and it was bed time! Not exactly power food but it sure was comfortable and well received. I was supposed to eat some real food in there somewhere. My scratch got scrubbed clean and bacitracin ointment applied. If It scars then I will have a cool ”pirate” wound.