Gardens

It’s Hot

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We came home earlier in the week and were greeted by the big truck sitting in the road. The Gingerman has been working on the truck, has it running and the brakes working on it. He has a few more things to do before we convert it to a fire fighting apparatus for the farm. We are going to put a couple of large totes for water, a pump and a hose reel on it so we can have some fire suppression if we decide to burn. On the off chance we have a fire nearby we can go out and meet it. It would have been handy when I caught the railroad ties on fire. Peeing on them to put out the fire takes a lot of effort.

The truck was blocked it just rolled down into the road, no one is sure how it did it. I could not get it started then the Gingerman told me that the battery was unhooked. I dropped the positive terminal on and smashed it a couple of times with a wrench. It still would not start. I took positive terminal wire off and then told Annmarie we would just need to drive around it for a week. The Gingerman stopped by a few days later and actually installed and tightened the battery post cable and it started up just fine! It is now blocked with some heavy duty tire chocks.

The back creek, Stewart Creek, is no longer running. There are a few spots of water behind our house but they will most likely be dry by the end of the week. The frogs will all move into our garden and tall grass. They can make quite the cacophony. We are so used to it that it is just drift off to sleep noise. The roosters crowing, the frogs serenading, the alpaca fighting , the sheep and lambs hollering, the cows bellowing and the occasional horse whinny it is mostly relaxing.

I picked the garlic today, we turned off the water about three weeks ago. I will let the dirt dry out and tomorrow I will cut off the tops and put it all in a paper sack for storage. I have about four of the largest heads picked out to use as seed for the fall. I also collected a whole bunch of chive seeds. I want to toss random flower seeds into the front flower beds and just see what grows. I am now going out to the apricot tree about every three days and picking up the ripe fruit off the ground. I keep about 75% of it and the rest I toss over the fence to the sheep. Our old ancient apple tree is shedding apples so I spent about thirty minutes cleaning them off the ground and tossing them over to the sheep. They love it. I was only able to pick about four apricots off the tree that were actually ripe. I like to wait until the fruit is full of sugar before picking it. When it is your tree you can wait until the very last minute. Annmarie and I cut and pitted about 12 cups for the freezer. We freeze them in one cup batches so she can use them for her breakfast smoothie. It takes a lot of frozen fruit to make it 365 days! We are going to be able to fill an entire upright freezer full of frozen fruit this year.

Summer catch up

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Hay season always puts things on hold. I have not worked on the bathroom for two weeks now in an attempt to get all of the hay done. I have finally had to resort to doing my own mechanical work. I am capable but it is not my favorite thing in the world. Mostly, as soon as you tear into something you find two more things that need to be repaired. I still refuse to do any serious work on the tractors. I take them in and have the dealer do all of the real work on them. The hay equipment is from Italy, so there is no one to work on it so by default I have to do it.

I did manage to actually mow the lawn with the actual lawn mower today. I really need to get the rock wall and metal fence up before I let the sheep back into the yard.

Annmarie got rid of all of her old dirty alpaca fiber. She posted it on Facebook for free and she had someone call her within fifteen minutes and that person was out to the house 30 minutes later to pick it up. She went through it all and found one that had moths in it, we tossed it, and ended up loading up eight bags into her vehicle and driving off with all of it. It was from all over the farm, Mr Rainman and I went to three different locations to find it all. Now she is only keeping the saddle portion of the alpaca that are being sheared before the organic matter and dust is embedded into the alpaca. It think if I can find a time to do it in April it will be in the best shape. She has a new setup to wash it while standing up and then she lets it dry in a netted herb bag with five shelves and a zipper that totally encloses it. This way the fiber can air dry and no matter how much wind we get no fiber disappears. Once it is all cleaned then she has to do two more processes on it before it can be spun into yarn. She has used or given away all that she had made into yarn.

I bought some sun chokes this year to see if we can grow them. Supposedly, they will grow anywhere and can become so prolific that they are problematic. I just put them into the ground in the place we are going to add a third row of raspberries. I am unsure if they are going to survive or not but it will not be for lack of water.

We had two different sets of friends come out Friday evening and Saturday morning to feed Frank/Francine. They both have young children and wanted to see and feed him. We were showing them around the house and spotted a break in the watering system in the lavender. This was causing our strawberries to not get enough water. Hopefully, we caught it in time as the strawberries are just putting on berries now. I am going to go find some netting so we can cover the strawberries so we actually get some this year. Last year the robins ate every single red berry, so all of the strawberries and raspberries. We are hoping to get some for ourselves and freeze them for use in the wintertime.

Bounty shelves

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Sunday I was going to go out to the barn and finish the three strings of lights that have wire ran to them. I still need to wait for the fourth roll of wire I had to order to arrive. I am not sure why I thought three rolls would be sufficient. I used the pending arrival of said wire roll as the reason to not go to the barn and instead decided to work on the new shelves in the laundry room. Our counters are getting crowded with all of the containers of dried herbs, vegetables and plums so I figured it was time to get on the shelves. The supports had come in a couple of weeks ago and The Apprentice and I had brought down the wood so it was just a matter of sanding it down and cutting it to shape.

Yeah, all I had to do was sand down a black walnut slab that was only one inch thick and had been drying for four years. Needless to say it was not flat. Even with 40 grit sandpaper and an 18” belt sander it still took me almost four hours to sand down those two shelves! I really needed a hand planer. I have never really used one before but this is the perfect use for one. I may have to learn how to use it as there are a whole bunch of black walnut boards out in the old chicken coop.

I sanded both sides with belt sander and after I got to 80 grit with the belt sander I switched to an orbital sander and started with 50 grit again. Of course about three hours into the sanding it started to rain and I had to move everything into the old house and wear an N95 for the After four hours I figured it was just time to cut the board and go with what I had. I cut the shelves, added the supports and then mounted them on the walls. I, of course, had to make two trips out to the old house to get screws that did not come with the supports.

All in all it turned out pretty good and the wife was happy. We now have a space to store the bounty of our garden harvest. I still have to wire the barn but I can do that in the rain.

Spring catchup and yard improvements

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We are working on getting everything caught up and ready to go before our vacation. The yard is getting watered and all of the hoses are getting repaired and we are going to try and get the ram pasture back in shape and get some actual grass length on it. The sheep use it as a pass through spot and always eat it down to nothing every year. I am surprised it comes back annually, Mr Rainman has been cleaning up the garden area, he cleaned off the old house porch and burned both slash piles we created over the winter. We still have a bunch of dead branches down by the spring head that need cleaned out and tossed on the slash pile.

He brought a bunch of compost (sheep manure and straw) over to the lavender patch to fill the horse trough. We are going to plant strawberry plants in the trough so they don’t take over the entire patch of ground. All of the hoses got laid out and connected to automatic timers. Annmarie will program the lavender and berry timers. She has been working on the garden every weekend. It is all planted as of this weekend. The elevated beds have vegetables and all of the wine barrel halves have herbs in them. We are also going to plant marigolds in planters between all of the elevated beds. We are hopeful that they will help with the bug issues and keep them away. If nothing else they are more flowers for the honeybees. We also seeded wildflower seed over three spots in an attempt to get more flowers up and going for the bees.

I was able to offload the side by side today. I just need to run the wiring for the machine shed across two more bays so it is out of the way. I will now have room to easily park both tractors under cover. I also cleaned up in front of the machine shed and beside it. I moved a lot of alpaca poop and some piles of dirt. I want to bring the old lamb shed up next to the machine shed. As of right now I could start using it to store all of the scrap metal I use for welding repairs and the fencing tools. I can build some racks and shelves for the metal. This will let me move three more pallets out of the machine shed. My mother-in-law wants me to move the old Dinky tractor, the very first brand new tractor ever purchased for the farm, into that corner spot. It is currently hidden across our driveway in and amongst a lot of other stuff. Everyone would be able to see the tractor when they come over to visit in the new location. It will just depend on how hard it is going to be to move the old lamb shed.

The entrance driveway is over 1/4 mile long and was starting to get pretty rutted. I spent a few hours yesterday with the John Deere tractor and tore up the road with the box blade hooks until I had broken up the surface pretty good then raised the hooks and used the box portion to spread out the gravel evenly. I usually do this right after a rain storm but the little tractor was at my mother’s house last time it rained. The road is very smooth now and won’t need any attention for a few months.

Horse trailer wired!

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Finally, something has gone my way this month. It has been a long month and a lot has happened, most of it not great. My new hard hat came and after three of us tried to adjust the straps to lower it on my head, Meathead figured it out. I wore it when I was wiring the trailer! I will definitely need to wear a cloth rag on my head when I wear the hard hat. I was sweating. I complained to Annmarie about the heat and she pointed out that it was 84 F. This would explain why I though it was so hot, that is the highest we have been this year. I managed to get the entire horse trailer wired, added a small internal light and taped up all the future wear spots to protect them. I was worried that I would spend all that time and something would not work, that problem is very hard to fix if you think you did it right the first time. Everything worked perfectly, I was truly amazed. I did not even blow the fuse in the pickup. I had three spares just in case I needed to do some trouble shooting.

Now I need to get the tire off and replaced. I will take the tire off today and get it replaced tomorrow. I will also probably pickup a second spare tire. I will also get the spare tire for the flat bed trailer fixed. Might as well get it all taken care of at the same time. Unfortunately, the pickup tires need replacing soon also. I have to take five cows over to Lagrande this week to get slaughtered.

Mr Rainman worked on spraying around the house and the garden area had a nice kill rate. In a few days we will be able to clean up the dead grass and weeds. Field #1 & 2 are sprayed with 2-4-d and Milestone. I am hopeful I can get out and spray #3 this afternoon. He also got the lavender spot sprayed and started spot spraying the orchard. As soon as we get the spraying done we are going to spread some fertilizer. This will be the first year I have ever tried to fertilize. I am hopeful it makes a difference. The real test will be to see if the value added is worth the cost.

Annmarie has been working on the garden watering system. She added all of the wine barrels onto a new line and they will be growing our herbs. We kept some dried herbs to use throughout the winter and found that they were way better than the store bought ones. So we are going to put up more herbs this year.

We are going to get more bee hives. Mr Rainman made three concrete block spots out in the orchard for the hives to live on. I am going to add two posts and then we will hold them in place with a 2x8x16’ board across the top. I will use eye hooks and clips on the post and ends of the board to keep the hives from getting blown over in the wind like last year. The bee hives don’t do well in 80 mph winds. We are hoping to have the same success this year that we did last year.

Our back runoff creek has stayed amazingly quite this year. It is running clear and only about eight inches deep. No four foot mud wave roaring behind the house. This bodes well for not getting the upper fields flooded out this year. I need to do a little more ditch digging and cut down 1-2 trees and we will be ready for another flood level stream height.

The sheep may be done now. We have had a set of twins and a set of triplets in the last week. I need to catch them and tag and band them still. I will get the final stats done in a couple of weeks. I need to make sure there are not any more stragglers.