haying

Feverish farming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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It’s spring time and we are still trying to clean up from last year.  This is the field I tried to burn last fall and just could not get the fire to drive through the weeds.  It got mowed down and I wanted to plant right through the weeds but there is too much biomass on the ground.  So we ended up pushing up piles of weeds by skimming the ground with the tractor bucket.  Once those piles were made they were so dry you could light them with a lighter and nothing else.  Two days of burning has cleared off a lot of weeds. The wind has been kind enough to blow and making the fire spread as needed.

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I bought spring barley on Friday and want to get it in the ground this week.  It is supposed to rain on Wednesday and I would like to have the seed in the ground by then.  I have a small 1/2 acre plot that we saved for peas.  We sprayed every field but that one so that the 2-4-D won’t affect the peas.

I have another set of helpers out and set them to hardening the spring bank.  I only finished one side last fall.  Now both sides are blocked in and it should stop the dirt bank from falling into the spring.  We also lined the bottom of the spring with gravel in that area.  The sheep would know this if they would quit trying to jump over the water.  This did require the teenage helper to redo the wall three times to get it where it needed to be.

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I have been working on my sheep calling abilities.  I have managed to post a couple of successful videos to Instagram.  The key to success is in choosing the right time to call them.  They are used to coming in at night for food and to be locked up in the barn area.  I have had zero luck trying to call them down off the hillside midday.  But if they can hear me in the evening they will come running.

We sold three more lambs off this weekend to someone who is going to raise them all summer long.  We sent our old brown ewe and her 3 month baby over with the lambs so they could try and hand tame the lambs.  Our old ewe will come to anyone who she thinks has food.  We also do not want her getting bred when we release the ram into the main herd.  90E31C90-FECF-4C46-B18B-0822D40F0E68I spent last night on the tractor for 4 hours driving around in circles pulling a disc trying to get the flooded out field from last year ready for spring barley crop.  The ground was full of ruts from the back creek flooding the field and making rivulets.  I hope I got most of them smoothed out.  We are hoping to get the seed in the ground tonight as it is supposed to rain 0.1-0.25” tomorrow and the hope is the seed will all be in the ground by then.  One must have goals in life.

 

 

Barn Blues

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have been having Hoss work on the barn during the week. He usually comes out first thing in the morning and works until it gets hot. He has been digging out the barn with the tractor and by hand. I put in an hour or two after work but I am the one who tore up the barn floor with the tractor. There has been a few boards buckling near the back of the barn. I almost had to rip them out last year and reattach them to the floor braces. After I let the floor dry out they lowered themselves and I opted to leave them alone for another year. Now that I have ripped one out of the floor with the tractor I will have to pull up four rows, clean them all up, clean up the loose poop and then attach three rows Once I am down to one board only I can measure and custom cut it to fit the gap. The floor is tongue and groove and I did not leave any gaps so there is not a lot of movement allowed in the floor. On Wednesday when I went out to the barn for an impact driver I spotted a large pile of poop up against the wall below. I was just starting on Annmarie’s list of to do and thought that a few minutes with the mistress would do me good. So I climbed up onto the tractor and started to scoop up some poop.

Holy smokes! The pile was hot! It was steaming and the temperature was over 80 degrees. I ended up having to scoop up the entire pile at the end of the barn. The 8 inches of rain in one month we had caused us to have more moisture in the barn than is normal. When you dig up the floor with the tractor and leave it in a loose pile you aerate it. Once it gets oxygen with that much heat and moisture the composting process went into overdrive. So now the race is on to empty the barn. The only nice thing is the undisturbed floor/straw manure layer is so dense it doesn’t get a lot of oxygen so its not heating up. It just smells horrible when you disturb it. Hoss has marching orders to finish the barn up this week. It only needs about 6 more hours to be complete. Once it is empty we will let it sit for a couple of weeks then put all of the sorting chutes back inside. We will need to count sheep this month so our buyer will know how many we are selling. We are not even sure how many we are selling until we count them and get a feel for how big they are. He wants them on the bigger size so it limits the number we have available.

It rained 1/10″ on Wednesday. I had the lawn almost mowed but the rain put a temporary halt to my efforts. Running the mower for 3 minutes then taking 3 more minutes to empty the bag and restart the mower makes it very tedious. I would like it to rain one to two more days that much so our hay fields green up a second time.

I found this freeloader on the plywood sheets on the old house porch. I let it go under the bridge, hopefully it will survive.

Hoss disturbed one of the swallow nests in the rafters of the barn by driving in and out of the barn. The nest fell off the 2×6 it was hanging onto and the nest had baby birds. He spent ten minutes catching all the baby birds running around on the floor and put them and the nest up on the ledge inside the barn. When he came back the next day the only thing he found was a pile of feathers! One of the barn kitties probably had a bird snack after he left.

Nothing got broken

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The kids killed it on their hay pickup day and managed to fill the first hay bin room. They moved a bunch but did not finish. Tex underestimated how much was left on the ground. There are 1050 bales to move into the barn. So Hoss came out the next day to finish picking up hay. I had gone to work for a couple of hours to finish stuff and to try not to give everyone the plague. The first load took him 1.5 hours to load and he commented on how long it took to do alone. I kinda chuckled as most of this stuff I have to do alone and it takes 2-3 times as long to do it that way. I told him how to stack it on my way to work. While at work I start getting these frantic texts from Annmarie saying there is an issue at the farm. Hoss sends me a text about an “issue”. I ask for a picture, because really a picture is worth a thousand words.

Annmarie sends me this picture. It could have been so much worse! The trailer is still on the road. It’s sitting on rocks in the front and back so it’s stable. The axle is not bent or pinned on any rocks. The bank just gave away. Now I failed to mention to Hoss to not use this crossing. I knew the rocks were giving way. After the flooding we had this spring they washed out the gravel and created a soft spot. I had filled the gravel twice but realized that the cure is going to be me pouring concrete walls about two feet to either side of the culvert all the way down to the water line. There is no other good fix. I failed to pass on this nugget of information to Hoss or Annmarie. So Hoss started to unload the hay and when I came home we looked at it.

He wanted to get some handyman jacks and lift it up and push it over. I finally looked at it and said we could just use the tractor. I would drive it down to the spring and get the bucket under the tires and push it over onto the road then drive around and pull it out. It only took five minutes once we had it unloaded. Now Hoss will use the other crossing only until we fix this one, which will take a while because cleaning out the barn then building fence are our priorities.

Simple communication could have averted this, one more lesson for me on why I should talk more.

Three musketeers

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have the plague and this is hindering the hay pickup issue. I got Slim and Tex lined up to come out Tuesday morning at 0600 and start picking up hay. I was approached by a friend to see if I needed more help out on the farm on Monday and I decided Monday evening to call them and have them come out Tuesday also. This way I could have Slim drive the tractor and Tex and Hoss could load from each side. While they unloaded hay into the first bay I would have Slim clean out the milking area of the barn and the second hay room as I was sure they would fill the first hay room. I had a plan.

Everyone arrived at 0600 and we spent the first 20 minutes cleaning out the pickup! It was not horrible but it did require some effort and I found a coat and hat I had misplaced in the process. I also think I found a handful of tools that I had misplaced. We tossed out all the trash and even emptied out the bed of the pickup.

I then spent 7 minutes teaching Slim how to drive the tractor, the most important part being always wear your seat belt. I figured she had never pulled a trailer before but going slow and her brother, Tex could give her pointers. Tex and Hoss jumped on the trailer, I went to work and hopefully the hay gets put into the barn magically.

I had to come home early due to the plague, it had gotten hot so they had quit. The first hay room was full and Tex wanted to know how to stack it in the second one. I told him and he said he would come out and finish in the late evening as he was leaving for California tomorrow! I told Tex I would pay him when he finished. He was confident there was only a little over one load left.

Hoss was still here and I walked him around the farm and we discussed him digging out the barn and helping me with some fence for the next couple of months. He was agreeable to this. This was very fortuitous for us.

Tex came out that evening and unloaded two more loads into the barn and said there were at least another 2 loads in the field. He was a tad optimistic.

Hay needs to come in, really it does

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Since Tex did not answer my text he is not coming out. This does not change the fact that we need to get the hay inside the barn. So Annmarie and I headed out first thing Saturday morning to get it done! She was going to drive the pickup pulling our trailer and I would load and unload hay into the barn. The culverts are only 10 feet wide and the trailer is 8 feet wide. This meant that Annmarie made me drive it across the culvert. I chose to cross over the new culvert as the old one is elevated and starting to crumble, the rocks are falling off. I really need to fix it but its a low priority. Hay and fencing are number one and two right now. The bales are kind of randomly spaced and close together so Annmarie had to weave in and out of the bales so I could pick them up. Using hay hooks they are not hard to pickup and the trailer and pickup had no trouble hauling them.

I did the first two loads without a hitch. I had Annmarie trained to start and stop by merely hollering “K”. It was taking about 1.25 hours per load.

So it’s load three time and I almost have the trailer full when Annmarie tells me the pickup engine is smoking. Smoking is not a good sign for an engine. I popped the hood and there is a radiator leak in the top right corner of the radiator. Now, I had been having some issues with the pickup heating up over the last month but I thought it was a thermostat issue, I was wrong. I had her park it and we went inside. Once the engine cools off I will fill it with water and drive it back to the house. We can then fill it up to the brim and drive it to the shop for repair. Now this is not totally unexpected but I still need to get hay picked up!

Tex had asked me if we could pull the trailer with the tractor but I told him I was unsure if the tractor could haul that much weight. I do have a draw bar on the back of the tractor. Now that I have no choice I decided to try the tractor. The holes in the draw bar are too small to insert a 2 5/8″ ball. I ended up going to D and B farm supply store and buying a bar for the three point hitch and a stinger with three sizes of balls with a pin that allows me to turn the stinger and change my ball size. This allows me to use the three point and it pinches it in place which allows me to lift the trailer with the three point. I would need to figure out an upper attachment to allow me to use it without getting off of the tractor. This was going to require more thought and time and my current method worked! I did one more load but as I was getting sick thanks to Tex or Annmarie I went inside cleaned up and went to bed.

The hay still needs to get into the barn. Tex messaged me, he is not coming on Sunday as its Father’s Day. I foresee a day spent on the couch being miserable.