Gingerman

Spring is here

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This is where it gets tricky. Spring is here and there are things to do outside yet our main bathroom remodel is still in progress. I have to stay focused on the bathroom but some projects still have to get done.

The pears and plums are in full bloom but we have had two nights of hard freeze so I am not sure that we will get any fruit! I sure hope we do this year.

I am mowing the lawn with the sheep again this year so Mr Rainman moved our chive planters to the back garden for a week so the sheep don’t scalp them. They tried to eat the roots last year they liked it so much. Unfortunately, our little dog Milo has learned that he likes to chase the sheep. It is cool. Our side fence is not a barrier for our little dog, he squeezes around the end and our border collie just jumps the fence. We tried locking them in the orchard but then both got into the lavender patch and then got into the garden area. The fences don’t seem to be much of a deterrent or barrier. So on Sunday the Gingerman helped me install the side fence. We made it very tall and the dogs are now contained in the garden area. It works great.

Mr Rainman has been spraying 2-4-D and Milestone on the bottoms. He has already managed to spray fields 1-3 and will work on the schoolhouse bottoms tomorrow. He is also going to spray the edges of the CRP ground we just purchased. The weeds are starting to creep in on the edges, so we are going to spot spray and see if we cannot get them stopped. We will also kill a little spot alongside the fences so the weeds don’t choke out the fences. It is way safer than trying to burn the fence lines later in the year.

I had to add a small 1”x2” board on the end of the shelf in the mud room that is over the outside door. Opening and closing the door is causing the items to move closer to the edge and then leap off to their potential death. The board is installed and now you do not have to wonder if something is going to fall on your head when you use the back door.

Annmarie and I have made a list of all current projects and it has ten levels of priority. This actually works nicely as it lets me plan out projects better and if I have a project I want I can add it to the list. Finish the bathroom is priority 1!

Lambing coming to a close soon

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We had some help this morning with the lambs: Gingerman, Mr Rainman and the Lamb Whisperer. The Lamb Whisperer had not been out to the farm before but she fed Francine then caught lambs while I tagged and banded. It took us a couple of hours to tag and banded 59 lambs.

We had to bummer off one very healthy lamb as its mother rejected it. We are continuing to feed Francine morning and night and she must be getting milk from somewhere else because she is only taking a 12 ounce bottle morning and night. The nice thing is she hangs with her mother until the morning or evening feed then she hunts down a human and hollers at them until they feed her. She was so insistent last night that she ended up riding on the tractor with me while her bottle was getting mixed. She just rode in my arms without any difficulties.

One of the lambs had a piece of grass under its eyelid so the Gingerman washed it out and he and Mr Rainman got it out of the lamb’s eye.

We were able to catch lambs in one area of the barn and once tagged/banded they were let loose on the other side of the gate. This kept all the tagged lambs in one area, only a couple got out and back in with the mommas. It went fairly smooth. I was glad we waited as I had two boys that I was almost not able to find both testicles on when banding. I don’t believe I could have done it had they been any younger. By pure happenstance both genders ended up using #431. We use blue tags for boys and some form of pink/red for the girls. This makes it much easier to spot gender when looking at tags. Hard to believe that we have had over 850 lambs since we started raising sheep.

The Lamb Whisperer had done her part and proceeded to head home once she learned that installing the toilet was next on the list.

The stats had to be updated to reflect the number of lambs that have died and been born. Once we counted today it was a lot higher than I anticipated. We only have one lamb left to tag, the one born today. I think there are three more ewes that need to give birth. There is at least one for sure!

  • Date of update- April 13, 2025
  • # of Lambs born – 68
  • # of ewes who have delivered babies – 39
  • # of ewes still pregnant – 3, I think
  • # of single lamb births – 12
  • # of twin lamb births – 25
  • # of triplet lamb births – 2
  • # tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-32
  • # tagged female lambs-27
  • # of bummer lambs – 2
  • # of lambs who died in first two weeks – 6
  • Total # of lambs on farm -60
  • % birthing rate- 174%
  • % production rate -154%
  • % survival rate at birth – 100%
  • % survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 88.2%

Lambing has begun!

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We knew the sheep were due to have lambs very soon so we started to lock them up at night four days ago. This morning we had our first set of twins! The Gingerman and daughter went out to check on the sheep and discovered the pair. They went into a jug and were fed and watered. Sarah asked me about feed for the momma. We usually supplement their hay with some grain or sheep feed to increase the number of calories the nursing mommas are getting. I didn’t have any out in the barn. So I added it to my list of items to get accomplished today. The Gingerman had brought down another six bags of garbanzo beans so I decided to grind up a few bags to feed to the mothers. I brought the tractor around with a few old protein lick tubs and proceeded to mix feed as it went into the grinder.

I only had one stoppage while grinding this time. I think one of the wires is loose in the on/off switch but I managed to get it going again without tearing it apart. I ground about 200# of feed for the sheep. I have two full metal trash cans of feed already ground for the chickens and at this point I need to get some more metal 55 gallon drums to store feed in the chicken coop. I will need to start moving the cracked seed out into the barn into the large metal feed container. It will hold over 1000#. At this point I am still pretty focused on the bathroom so I will only be cracking grain when I need it for the sheep. I am hopeful this cracked batch will get us to the weekend. The grain containers don’t have covers but I am hoping the raccoon will leave it alone. We will see.

I went into the barn and set up the momma/baby area. Put out feed, opened up the side fence so they can get to water. I put a brand new protein lick tubs outside and pulled a panel over the gate so that no one can get out. We are now ready for the mommas/babies when they are bumped out of the jugs and into their own area.

The sheep snuck by the tractor when I was grinding grain so I had to battle them most of the time. I finally ended up opening up the gates so they could go up onto the back hillside. The grass is a couple of inches tall so they can get some fresh green grass into their diet. We are still filling all of the feeders in the barn also. We won’t stop that for a while. I am hopeful lambing season will go quickly. There were three rams in the pasture for breeding so we are hopeful they all tried to outcompete each other!

Bathroom remodel day 26

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Well my vacation is over and the bathroom is not completed. I am sure that I am not the only man in history to utter those words. Wow, this has been a large complicated project. There have been more than a few setbacks but we are still moving forward. I was feeling so good about progress that I bet the wife that by two weeks from today we will be able to use the bathroom. This may have been premature as I figured out two more setbacks today.

Mr Rainman and I have been going at it every day for the last three days. I have been drinking nothing but coffee for days and not very much of that. So much so that last night my legs spent all night cramping up. Today I decided to up my water intake game and drank almost an entire container of V8 juice and spiking the glasses of V8 with liquid IV powder to give it more kick! The V8 hides most of the taste but I would like to sleep tonight so I am sticking with it. The shower walls are still not perfectly square so that has caused us some problems getting the tiles installed. The predone tiles stuck on a 12×12” mesh has caused us some difficulties. The gaps between tiles is sometimes way off and we have to try and move them around. It’s painful as you usually have to cut the mesh.

The All-set we are only mixing in 1/4 bag batches. Mr Rainman has been weighing it out and measuring all of the water. If the batch is too thick we lose working time (bucket time) and then have to waste it after a couple of hours. It has been taking me about three hours to use up a 1/4 of a bag of All-set. I am not the Flash. That is a lot of mixing and cleanup over the last few days.

The goal is to go into work early so I can leave early and get some more bathroom work done. We will see how this process goes.

Today we figured out that our metal tile trim will not work inside the shower. That tile is thinner than the tile we bought the trim for so it is too big. I will need to go over to Hermiston and trade it out for a smaller size. We also had the niches back wall completed when I realized there were no shelves installed. I had to do a search on Google and figure out that I should have cut the tile on the back wall to accommodate the shelf. We were able to tear out the tile, take it outside and wash the All-set off and then scrape the wall of the niches dry. After I get the new metal trim we will by dry fitting the entire niche before we even mix any mud up to ensure everything fits perfectly. To make this easier I got the boss to agree to another design change. We will be using our 2×6” tiles horizontally stacked so we can cut each one individually and make the outer edge of the niche clean and even.

The Gingerman was out over the weekend and he put together our new grain cracker/grinder and managed to mill about 100# of grain in 15-20 minutes. It works very well. So we will work on cracking the whole grain we are getting so it can be stored that way. In the spring, once it warms up we can just put the grain in a five gallon bucket and let it sprout, then toss it to the chickens.

Mr Rainman put up our new salt tasting center for the sheep. We found a place online that sells about 25 different mineral concentrations for goats/sheep. The idea is that the animals will eat what they need and by paying attention to it you will know what they are short on in their diet. He put this up a few days ago and I spotted the sheep in the back barn lot eating their type of salt. In a week or two we will look and see what type they are eating. Annmarie made labels engraved onto metal plates that we attached above the bins. This way we know exactly what is in each bin.

Bathroom Day 19 remodel

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Well the weekend was well spent, the bathroom is almost ready for tile. We just have to install the two membranes in the shower around the nozzle and the handle then seal the Detra membrane seam and Detra to the wall. The shower pan is still pending arrival by this Wednesday. It should not be a holdup for us as we can do the main bathroom floor and then the main bathroom walls first. If the pan is still not here after we get those tiled then we will grout them all next.

I just need to keep making progress every day. It took two days to get all of the holes and seams sealed correctly to provide that waterproofing that Schluter guarantees. I did not realize how long it was going to take. Mr Rainman asked me if I had read the reviews or not on the Schluter products and I said no. I knew it would do what I wanted but did not want to know about the reviews. He said one of the biggest complaints was on how long the system took to install by people not professionals. After getting this far I would say those reviews are spot on!

On Saturday, the Gingerman helped me seal nail protrusions and joints all day and on Sunday Mr Rainman helped me do the same thing. It is not a fast process. The bucket time on mud is around four hours using the All-set version and this is nice as that much time is needed. The only real problem is as it thickens you cannot add water to thin it out. You have to just hit it with the mixer to smooth it out again. This only works for so long before it is too thick to work with. If we were faster this probably would not be a problem.

When we set the Detra membrane on the main floor, I told Mr Rainman it would only take us an hour. Nothing else I have provided a timeline for has turned out to be accurate and it was already 1500. He grumbled and said we would be there till 1700 at a minimum. He mixed up 1/4 bag of All-set and I cut the Detra membrane to size so that it would fit. We got the entire floor covered with two sections. It only took us about 15 minutes once we had the All-set cured and ready to go. It did take the entire bucket of All-set. If we had another 1 square feet of membrane to apply we would not have had enough to cover the floor.

This gave us time to go out and try and catch one of the alpaca, Mad Max as the idiot had a piece of baling twine dangling from his neck and dragging on the ground. Annmarie had noticed it the day before. I figured we could just show up with treats and they would come running up to us, we could grab him and then be done. Nope, they did not want to cooperate. After multiple failed attempts to grab the needed alpaca by the head or hold onto the twine trailing it we ended up having to push Mad Max and Snoop into the orchard and shut them away from everyone else. This now resulted in us chasing two alpaca around, after several failed attempts and one resulting in me getting dragged across the ground as I attempted to hold onto his foot while being dragged, we opted to open up the gate into the back alley way hoping to get them both into a smaller space so we could catch Mad Max. Mr Rainman went to open the gate and I followed them to gate leading out of the field. It was closed but they both knew it was the desired escape route, it just needed to open for them to have what they wanted.

As I was approaching them, Snoop decided to start picking on Mad Max, this unintentionally forced Mad Max into the fence and I went onto the open side of him. Snoop was blocking the other side and Mr Rainman was able to sneak up on Snoop’s side and grab Mad Max by the neck. I just had to slide the twine over his neck and we were all done! Mr Rainman was out the door with everything done by 1620!

Our grain cracker came a week ago but we are going to have to get it set up. The Gingerman is getting grain from truck clean outs and it is a mixture of everything. The chickens don’t like entire pieces of corn, wheat, barley, or peas. So we will need to crack them so they can be eaten. If the bags are a little wet I put them out for the sheep and they do not care in what shape the grain is, they will eat it. We have a lot of storage space available currently but I plan on getting four more metal 50 gallon drums to put in the back of the chicken coop. The drums will hold about 200# of grain/drum. I have enough room in the back of the coop to hold five drums and then there is a the grain storage out in the barn. The barn storage can hold at least 2000# maybe more.