Gardens

Weekend, all better, maybe

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I did have to do a few things this weekend. On Friday I went out and cleaned up the baby chick area in the chicken coop. I have a separated 4’x4’ section that is in my main coop that I use for babies until they are fully feathered about three months old. This lets the adult chickens get used to them and it means I don’t need another building for the babies. The chicks were too big to stay inside anymore. I got the new bedding in, big hanging feeder and hanging nipple waterer all set then put the 12 chicks into their next two month home. I had to use a heat lamp and this time I zip tied it into place in two separate locations so the chicks cannot knock it off its holder. No more fires allowed in the coop. We have another 25 chicks coming in the next month. So by this fall we will have a very nice egg production rate.

Annmarie ordered a Bluetooth controlled single outlet. You plug it into a preexisting outlet then you can program or control on/off with your cellphone. It was only $15 and she uses it now for her laser exhaust fan. So she can leave a job printing in the office and then just program or manually turn off the fan from the house instead of having to walk back out to the office. My chicken light controller burnt out a couple of months ago and I am going to go with this same item for the coop! It’s a great idea and it remembers your last program even if Wi-Fi access goes away.

I fed the last two large bales of alfalfa, one to the sheep and one to the cows. The cows really are not interested as there is plenty of fresh new grass. The sheep have eaten all of the grass in the barn lot so they liked it better. I even locked the cows up into field 4A & 4B and the alleyway only. This will let the upper fields grow so that they can be turned into hay. I spent the rest of the day resting.

Saturday Annmarie worked on the garden. I cut 4×4’ cow panel wire sections for her to use in the garden as trellis. We had to order in garlic and I ordered two Carolina Allspice bushes. Those are now out in the berry area, we will see if we can keep them from dying in the winters. We are going to plant garlic and potato in laundry baskets. She managed to get the carrot seeds planted. I went out and worked on wiring the horse trailer. I worked on the trailer for three hours. It was too much. I spent all of Sunday doing nothing and had to take a nap. So I will be pacing myself better for the next couple of weeks. I think I can get the horse trailer done in another three hours. It needs to be functional to take the cows to Lagrande on May 4.

The honey bees are finding lots of pollen! In the picture you can see the pollen stores on their legs. We got a second hive, I still need to assemble it and I have found a third for sale and we are contemplating getting it. We are going to move the hives out into the orchard but I need to make some concrete block risers to keep the weeds away from the hives. I am hoping we get a lot more honey this year.

Winterizing still and office run

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Mr Rainman came out today! He agreed to come out and help me get caught up on the office for a few days. He brought a helper who is willing to help finish winterizing the place. I have dubbed him Mr BeardMePlease! He needs a lot of work to get that beard to fill in. He dug right in and got the gooseneck hitch installed in the pickup and got the raspberries and blackberries trimmed and tied up for the winter. The pickup kept dying, but it has not really even been driven for almost two months. I need to rotate rigs driven to work on a more regular basis. Each vehicle should not go more than two weeks without getting driven.

Mr Rainman and I worked on the office. The plan was to get the East wall completed today. Unfortunately, this did not occur. We had a hard time getting the two top boards in place. There was much hammering and cussing. We ended up having to sand the board in place over the door opening. This took quite a bit of time. I worked on building a window box for the casing. My lack of attention to detail caused the pieces to be cut three different times and I had to tear the box apart once due to a piece going in wrong side out. I did finally manage to get the box constructed and installed. Once I had the frame in place and nailed in tight Mr Rainman decided that I needed to use squirt in foam around the window to get a good seal. We are out of optimum usage temperatures but I did it anyway. This meant it was going to take forever to dry. We ended up plugging in a heater and closing up the room.

The black walnut tree I went and picked up this summer got cut up into lumber today. Mr Rainman and I went over and picked it up. There was more wood there than I realized when we dropped off the tree. Unfortunately, there was not room in the old chicken coop for the wood to dry out there. We ended up putting it in the barn! This meant that we could not set it up so that we could band the boards together. We got it all snickered and laid out flat and tomorrow we will pull down some of the long boards stored in the barn and pile them on top of the walnut. I figure a few hundred pounds of weight on top of the pile should help keep everything straightened out. All of the boards are cut to 1.5” thick.

They took the pickup home with them and hopefully will come out tomorrow with an excavator. I want to get the new ditch in field #1 finished before the ground freezes hard. Mr BeardMePlease will be cutting up all of the fallen tree branches in our yard and cleaning up the yard. Once that is done then the back bridge to the wood shed can be cut up so it doesn’t get washed away in the spring rains. I will reinstall it after the spring runoff. Hopefully, we can get the East wall done in the office and the second window installed.

The puppy, Chance, looks cute but she can be a terror. We are still working on potty training her. She has not been easy.

Honey do list

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I tried to start the pickup yesterday without success. Since it rained an inch and I had the windows rolled down on the pickup and it had a dead battery there was quite a bit of water inside the cab. Not horrible but I was glad I did not have to sit on the seat. So I added drive to town to my list yesterday. I went out to the machine shed and worked on an alpaca fiber cleaner (sorta tumbler). We had purchased the items several weeks ago and I just needed to assemble them. The top pops off, you toss the fiber in, you hang it up, start it spinning and hit it with the leaf blower to get the dust and debris out of the alpaca fiber so it can be spun into something. I ruined a great new large plastic bucket to make this. Annmarie has been wanting this since spring. I figured since I was going to town I should get new bolts for harrow/seeder. This turned out to be near impossible. The bolt is metric size 10x40mm with fine machine threads that happen to have a 1.25 pitch. I could not find anything with a nylon lock nut for this size bolt. It needs a lock nut and it cannot have a widened flange on the bolt as it sits down and locks into place so you can screw in the bolt without a second wrench. No way to fit a second wrench of any kind up where that nut lives. So I am going to look online and if that doesn’t work then I will order it from the tractor company who will have to order it from Italy, ugh. I cannot find a partially threaded bolt M10x40mm without a flanged head or flanged nut and nut needs to be locking, fine threads and 1.25 pitch on the internet, mind you I only spent 15 minutes looking for one bolt and gave up. Io amo I’Italia!

I was able to buy a new battery for the pickup. As soon as I had it installed I rolled the windows up! We topped off the night by Annmarie cutting an open front box for the safe and a upright for the far side on her laser cutter. The box joints are so tight it took me about 15 minutes with a nylon hammer and some assembly/disassembly machinations to get it together. I got it all installed in the old safe. Today we slipped a note and a dime from 2022 under the new carpet we installed so 50 years from now someone will know how we got the safe! The thing is still hard to get into, it only took me three tries to get it open! On average I would say it takes us about 20 minutes to get it open, it is not something you get in on a regular basis. But since we have all of our legal paperwork stuff in there and our passports the 20 minute time is a concession we are willing to pay. The top shelf is original and we added the new carpet and bottom box and right hand support. It looks cool!

I brought in all of the sheep feeders into the barn yesterday. I need to shorten them for Annmarie and the ground is wet so it was a perfect time to cut the metal outside. The problem was I could not find the right grinder. I found one but discovered I had managed to lose a piece that is necessary to hold a cutting blade in place. I had taken it off to attach a metal cleaning wheel. I finally gave up and started in on the alpaca cleaner and as I was finishing that up I found the correct grinder. It was time to go to town by then, I will get it later in the week. I kept the sheep locked into the barn lot today to see if they would spread out the grass/bedding I had tossed out yesterday. I just dumped unrolled bales all around the barn with the hope that the sheep would spread it out. They did a fine job! I did notice that I forgot to install the 2×4 board at sheep back high to keep the horse out of the barn. The horse bends down and gets into the bar with the sheep otherwise. I put the board up today. Horse poop can pile up pretty quick!

Today we ended up cleaning out the back garden and tossing it over the fence so the sheep can clean up the leavings. They will eat everything down, if the chickens are not fast they will not get any green tomatoes. Besides, the chickens don’t deserve anything special. I am getting 2-3 eggs/day from 11 hens. On top of that, one of the cheeky buggers is an egg eater! I keep finding eggs with a little hole poked in them and the inside eaten out. I am not sure who it is yet but I do need to figure it out. Annmarie gave an injured alpaca update, his eye is open. He still has an eyeball from the pictures but it looks like his right cheek may be swollen. Since we can no longer just go to the farm supply store and buy penicillin we will keep watching him.

The bull was kind enough to crawl through the fence on the upper hillside while we were inside in the kitchen today. He has a spot just past the second large wire rock crib. He just ducks his horns down to the ground, pushes forward and lets the panel rub across his back as he moves forward. I now know where to fix the fence if I ever get time to do it.

Staycation 100% done

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Well all good things must come to an end and I am no longer on vacation and am back to work. It has been busy so I was unable to post this on Sunday night. Annmarie got me to actually leave the house on Friday night and we went and visited friends and stayed the night. It was nice and now we are planning on them coming over to visit us.

Saturday when we got back we went right into sorting sheep. Our buyer from Elgin was coming over and we had to sort off his 20 lambs. They helped us sort everyone and we got theirs into the trailer and out the door. We now have our small herd of lambs out in the orchard. For some reason this year everyone has wanted a lamb. We have sold 13 lambs to local customers and 20 lambs to our Elgin contact. We have been discussing the prospect of expanding our sheep herd and shrinking the cow herd, the price of hay is going to determine what we do as it may not be cost effective to carry a bunch of cows through the winter. We then had to move the cows down to the lower pasture as they had laid over the fence and were walking around outside the fence. They thought they were starving. I did a 30 minute fix on the fence so the sheep could not get out and vowed to come back and fix the fence on Sunday.

On Sunday I went out to fix the laid over fence. This really meant that I had to dig and set eight wooden posts by hand as the fence was too close to the water to back the John Deere tractor up to the spot needing a hole. Instead I did it all by hand and even ended up putting a scoop of gravel behind every T-post to fill in the gap created by straightening the post. I had to tamp it all down to make the post rigid. I got all of them in but still need to repair one H brace as it is made out of round posts and one of them turned. This is of course the one with the chain gate tightener on it. This means the chain is so tight you cannot get it off to open the gate. Luckily, I don’t need the gate to open right now so this repair is going on the back burner.

Annmarie has started to work on the back garden and is getting things planted. We are going to have strawberries in one tower and herbs in the other. Currently, she is working out water inside the towers, the connections keep exploding and making a mess. She thinks she has a working plan now to fix it.

It’s the little stuff

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Annmarie had a discussion with me about her loom. Now mind you I had to move the loom to paint the entire ceiling after doing the small repair in the craft room. What I did not know was that before you move a loom that is warped up you should relax the warp. Otherwise, you can throw off the tension and alignment, not that I did that. Annmarie was able to fix it because not only did I have to move it out to paint, I had moved it back in place afterwards! She is back to working on our woolen woven hallway old ice fridge cover. She has about 24 ” done and it needs to be 54” long, so almost halfway. Basically the takeaway is ”Don’t touch the loom”.

Since the weather was so nice and Annmarie wants me to catch up on all the little things we spent Saturday fixing the new round planter in our back garden. It needed to be filled with gravel, then soil, Mr Professional filled it with a lot of gravel, some sheep manure compost then we topped it with some good planting mix soil. We topped off all the other bins with extra soil also. It does seem odd to be doing garden stuff in mid February.

The old ram bolted through the gate when we were hauling gravel around, he promptly ran for the main herd of sheep and started sniffing tails. This caused some consternation from Casper, the new ram, so much so that after we got the old ram out of the herd Casper had to mount a couple of ewes just to establish his rank. This is a good thing, as we have seen some breeding activity but not as much as we would like to see. I personally would like to see him lose 10-15% of his body mass due to an unrelenting focus on getting everyone bred as quickly as possible.

I spent an hour grooming Gizmo. It has been a long time since I have taken the time to totally strip all of the loose hairs off of him. He looks great! I should probably do it more often but he doesn’t particularly love this endeavor and I feel like I am picking on him when I do it. Which would be why he does not get stripped very often.


On Sunday I spent an hour and sanded down a piece of maple for Annmarie to practice the laser farm pictures on. We are going to laser engrave all of the turn of the century farm photos we have onto wood and mount them on the dormer in the kitchen. We are hoping to do around 20-25 pictures. So I have a lot more wood to sand!