It is officially haying season. I know this because I work from sunup to sundown during haying season. As soon as I get off work in the afternoon I get onto a tractor and go until dark. We had a couple of issues today. Mr Professional was going to use the Kubota and the new sickle bar mower to cut hay but it broke. One asks how does a new piece of equipment break? I would say very easily. We will be using locktite on most of the bolts on the sickle bars. Also, who knew but the new 5 foot sickle bar mower is made in Italy also! I had to download the manual and find the part, the rounded head bolt that kept breaking on our other sickle bar. I found the right part number and called the parts store. I requested five bolts and five nuts. The dealer for these mowers only had three bolts available so they are getting overnighted and we should have them in a couple of days. They are still going to order me two more but those should take 2-3 weeks.
We are going to have to start up another plastic bin of parts for the new mower. Every piece of equipment has a bin now and extra parts are stored in that bin. It makes it a lot less confusing when you know, at least, that the parts do go to that single machine. Mr Professional got about 1/3 of field one cut. Field one has some very fine grass and is drying out quite nicely. The only real problem is it got flooded so there is dirt about 12 inches up on the stalks. So the mower blade is cutting through a lot of dirt. The grass is incredibly tall and thick.
I went up to inspect how much was done by driving up the Mistress with the hay rake on it. I turned a little hay then decided that I needed to row up the hay I had put down on the ground yesterday. One might think that is too early but it is just cut flat and laid down, no rowing at all. The ground is so moist that when I rowed it you could see how much better the hay was going to dry and the ground could dry. It is amazing how wet the ground is still.
I got everything I cut yesterday turned and up into rows. It is supposed to get into the high 80s tomorrow so I am hoping that the hay really starts to dry out. The quail are amazing and everywhere! I must have seen 10 pair of quail running around on my drive out to the field. I hope the rain does not interfere with their egg production because if we have another banner quail baby year we are going to easily break the 300 quail mark on the farm. We think the quail can sustain about 4-500 birds in their society if we feed them through the winter. Time will tell.
There has been a lot of change lately. On Friday, Annmarie went to pickup our new puppy, ”Chance” is her name and she is a Border Collie. The same people sold us a starter nuc with honeybee hive with six frames for $150. Annmarie put the new frames in a single deep box and the bees are kinda moving around. It has been cool and windy so they don’t want to stray far from the hive. We mixed up some sugar water and added them into another box on top of the brooder box so they could eat and not have to go out into the weather. The box is right outside our kitchen window so we can see them. Annmarie did not even get stung, she did wear the protective clothing we purchased also. The puppy is a full time job as it is only six weeks old, so the minute she wakes up you have to rush her outside so she can go potty. We will let her sleep with us until she is about 9 weeks old then we will kennel train her. She needs to be old enough to be able to hold her bladder throughout the night.
On Saturday when I got back home I had plans to cut hay but the weather looked horrible. I was sure it was going to rain. So I did not cut any hay. I played with the puppy all day as Annmarie had not gotten a lot of sleep the night before. I vowed to be on puppy duty all night but after getting up three times in the middle of the night to go potty with the puppy, I was very tired the next morning.
I ended up looking outside and suspecting rain again but by noon, just bit my lip and went out and cut the triangle and part of field #1 & 2. The triticale in the triangle looks pretty dang good. It is very tall and the kernels are at the milk stage. The grass is so tall in places that it started to hang up on sickle bar mower. The blade has to be raised and shaken to get all of the grass off of it.
Annmarie told me that we are expected to start having lambs next week! It seems like it all just keeps happening no matter what, funny how life seems to do that all the time. The cows have had three calves. We will be catching them at the beginning of July. The alpaca will need to be sheared at that same time. Once that is done we will start working on the bridge
I scored the big win on Sunday. I was able to purchase a bell! A very large bell, I drove the tractor an hour each way to pick up the bell as I did not know how heavy it was going to be. It has an amazing sound. Once I figure out how and where we are going to mount it everyone within 5 miles will know what an amazing sound it has.
It was been a long week. We had a wonderful weekend away from the farm, which does not occur very often. On Monday, I had to work late and was even later after I went to the supply store and bought woven wire for our yard fence. We have a few more weeks before the puppy arrives and we need a spot to put them initially that is not with all of the bigger dogs, so the side fence has moved up the priority list. We had several boxes on the front porch which turned out to be the wax dipped wood for our honey bee hive. It will need to be assembled. The back gate on the hillside had been left open and once the sheep discovered it they all ran pell mell for the opening. Annmarie went out and got the sheep back in and shut the gate. The back hillside has foot long grass all over it, the sheep are going to be confined to the hillside for quite some time.
Mr Professional and Mr Flex have been coming out all week to work on odds and ends and to get the hay equipment ready. Mr Professional fixed the gear inside the baler, which means I need to explore an overhead lift capable of handling 4000 pounds. It needs to be easy and safe to work on equipment. Mr Flex got the annual chicken coop cleaning done, this is never a pleasant chore. They started in on skirting the old building and our lawn got mowed twice in the same day to get the height down off of the highest mower setting. We could never get ahead of the lawn, it is very prolific this year due to all of the moisture. Mr Professional got our bee hive assembled and the rest of the parts came this week so I set it out where we are going to keep it. I need to turn the entrance so it is unobstructed. This will also put the entrance so it is visible from the kitchen window. I expect us to do a lot of bee watching this year.
We have had so much rain that the barn door warped and cupped inwards. It would not shut once Annmarie got it open. It really needs a little metal bolted to the outside to slow down the warpage. I had to go out and force it shut. It is already starting to go back to its normal shape due to some dry days this week. We got some scrap metal a couple of weeks ago and one or two of those pieces may work to keep the warpage down.
Mr Professional started cutting around the machine shop to test out the new sickle bar mower for the new tractor. I spent one entire evening into the dark turning the cut hay down by the schoolhouse. There is a lot of cheat grass down there, this makes the hay garbage but where we baled the cheat grass last year there is less cheat grass this year and more orchard grass. So we are going to keep removing it from the fields in hopes that we can decrease its abundance. We will over plant with orchard grass also. This seems to be decreasing the amount of cheat grass that is present. It is a battle but if we keep after it I think we can win. We did not cut any of the upper good looking fields because we knew it was supposed to rain all weekend long. Despite that we managed to get 99 good grass round mini bales into the barn for the winter. We are putting them up a lot wetter this year as we had some serious drying out issues last year. We just baled way too late last year after putting the grass on the ground. So we will cut smaller sections this year and not get so far ahead. Yesterday, when I came home I spent three hours helping pick up hay and get it into the barn. I never managed to get changed into farm clothes as I drove right to the field from work. I definitely need some more new gloves. I forgot what it was like to move hay with holy gloves. We feed 4-5 bales every day in the winter to the sheep.
The cows have started having babies. We had a dead calf already, not sure how it died, maybe drowned in the stream where we found it. We have two live ones maybe? Annmarie and Mr Professional claim two, I have only seen one so far. The mothers are notorious for hiding them for the first 30 days. We have opened up the fields near the mother in law’s house in hopes that the cows will bring their babies into the field and we can shut them all in.
The plan is to work on the office this weekend due to the rain. This is bad for the haying side of the farm but good for office progress!!
This week the weather has improved dramatically so the priorities have had to change a little. I wanted to get projects done that set up Mr Professional so he can come out and work alone when I am back to work. So lots of organizing, sorting and cleaning up has been happening. On Wednesday morning we sorted the sheep and pulled off the rest of the lambs. Not sure why I didn’t think of that the first time, but problem solved. We moved all the lambs but three over into the orchard pasture to hang out. I thought we only had three in with the ewes, we spotted a fourth one that evening when we were feeding, a little boy snuck past, he must have been hidden in a mass of ewes. The grass in that pasture is over eight inches tall and needs something to start eating it down so I don’t have to mow it. We want the babies close as they have a tendency to disappear due to predators. We let Zeke, our old border collie push the lambs through the yard into the orchard, he was very happy. All he did was walk up to them and lay down. He has been laying around a lot lately and has started not eating all of his meals. We are going to switch him to soft food to attempt to encourage him to eat. He is probably not going to make it through this year.
We went out to the machine shed and sorted through the piles of scrap wood we got a couple of years ago. It was leftovers we got for a steal and had it delivered right to the house which made it even a better deal. We are now starting to dig through and use the material for various projects around the house. But it was taking up space in the machine shed and we are going to make the old chicken coop the storage area. So we sorted out the junk. Sorted out the stuff we would use once for concrete forms, which are now stored outside the chicken coop and tarped, under the eaves, so we can have easy access to it when needed. We even kept the subflooring sheets and oak plywood sheets separately in the chicken coop so we can use them for the old house. The old bathroom is going to be Annmarie’s office storage room and it will get oak plywood flooring. The floors are slanted and will need to be leveled. The old kitchen, soon to be freezer room, will need to get leveled also but it will just be 3/4” subflooring and 1/2” plywood sheeting on it. We will just be sanding down the original floor like we did in our upstairs rooms in the house.
I took the time to brush the horse. She is shedding something fierce and without another horse buddy to help her groom she needs some assistance. I have brushed her twice this vacation and Sarah brushed out the dogs when she was home so everyone looks pretty good. We came into the house and took out the old TV stand. It is very heavy but Annmarie reminded us we have the shoulder furniture movers so we found those and it made moving the stand an easy thing. I moved the new chest into its spot after cleaning the floor and doing some cord management stuff to organize the electrical mess. Annmarie wants us to use a piece of plastic channel to contain all of the TV cords to make it neater. When that comes we will install it, it does look a lot nicer with the cords contained.
Mr Professional got the side by side up and running in under five minutes. This is without the battery being plugged in. Adding that large deep cycle battery under the driver’s seat was just what we needed to keep the thing going. A dead battery all the time is highly annoying.
The small stuff I ordered for the tractor came this week. The speed handle is installed! This should just come standard on every tractor, I am unsure why they don’t. There are a couple of tool racks that will hold a chain between them now mounted behind the seat on the roll bar. The chain is actually in one spot now not tied down to some random piece of the tractor. The quick hitch is now installed and I have filled the ballast box with horseshoes. So now the Kubota has pallet forks on the front and a ballast box on the back with several hundred pounds of steel in it. It feels a lot better when you are carrying something heavy on the front.
We let the new alpaca out of the orchard thinking that everyone seemed to be getting along. The old adage that fences make great neighbors is still true. By that afternoon Mad Max had the young brown one pinned to the ground and was screaming in his ear. I tried to holler at them to get them to stop but no go. I went over and encouraged him to get off of the baby and strained my right knee. He did not initially take the hint. The alpaca can be very stubborn or determined, depending on how you look at it. We watched them for a while and all seemed to be copacetic. The next morning when I went outside there was more fighting. I went out and chased away the offenders but I could only find the two new young white alpaca and only counted ten. Which meant that the young brown one was missing, but Mad Max was present but one of our other old brown alpaca was missing. I had to walk all the way down to the end of the driveway and found the poor little alpaca pinned to the ground and the older one on top grinding into him. I had to chase him off with my coffee cup as a tool, my knee still hurts so no kicking. When I got back to the now 12 alpaca I wanted to put the three babies back into the orchard with the lambs. But they kept walking away from me. So instead when I opened the gate the seven older ones bum rushed the open gate and went into the orchard. So now the new animals are outside the fence and the old grumpy men are stuck in the orchard. Mad Max is now with the young ones but he has not been any trouble since the split. So now Annmarie asked me if I verified the gender on all three new alpaca. I did not do that. So now we need to verify that we did not end up with a female as we really do not want any cria.
On Thursday we got the side by side ready to spray. I put the first 30 gallons of round up through just spraying our road and driveway down. The only bad part about roundup is it takes at least a week before you can tell something was sprayed and two weeks for it to totally die. We cleaned out the tank and Mr Professional sprayed field #5 & 5A with 2-4-D & Milestone to kill the broadleafs, the thistles are already starting to spread. Unfortunately, the flood from two years ago changed the direction of the creek and one of the tall banks is seriously undercut. We have probably already lost eight feet of hillside and may lose another eight feet. If we lose that total 16’ I will have to move the fence. There is a very large curve in the creek now. We finished cleaning up and tossing everything onto the burn pile. I will need to get that burned again in the next month.
The big push now will be to get the spray onto all of the hay fields. We need to do this as soon as possible and then once that is done we can start fixing the fence down by four corners. As soon as that fence is done then it will be repairs on the hay baler and getting all the tractors tuned up and oil changed so everything is ready for haying season. We will be getting the barns cleaned out also so we have a place to put the new good hay.
It has been a long summer and it is just getting started! The heat has been incredible. We had a new record high, 116 degrees F. This is an amazing amount of heat and one which normally would have had us hunkered down inside our house enjoying our central heat/ac via heat pump. Yeah, Lady Luck struck again and we had air conditioner issues. The worst kind of issue, the gradual change. As the heat kept increasing every day our heat pump kept losing temperature differential and the house just kept getting hotter. Our house got over 90 degrees and three days after we called a repairman out he came! I consider this a success, but we found out our system has a coolant leak and some valve that needs to be replaced and it turned out to be a factory order so we may get it fixed 8 days after discovering it. If its only 8 days I am going to take it as a win. The heat is now under 100 F and at night it is actually cooling off so we have a huge fan that goes in the breeze porch and sucks in all of the cold air and blows it everywhere via the upstairs hallway. We had to have some relief as Annmarie was sleeping at her moms and I was staying up late or getting up early trying to open the house to get it cooled off.
It turns out my mother had an air conditioner for the shop that she was not using. We thought abut putting it up in our bedroom but it really needs some external support. We ended up putting it down in our craft room with the Murphy bed! That bed is turning out to be on of our great purchases of the year. It is getting a lot of use. I had the saw set up and an old table I had not yet discarded and in an hour we had the stand built and the air conditioner installed and blowing cold air! It was the best nights sleep I had had in one week. The house only got to 79 degrees with the new setup. This is much better than 90, sweat does not run down my back just sitting in the living room now.
Friday was a lazy day for me. I don’t have them very often but it has been a long stretch at work and all of my helpers were busy having lives. So I started the day off by making waffles. I got 2 and the chickens got 4. They fought over theirs more than I did. I binge watched Netflix, I still didn’t manage to finish my TV series, it even has a second season so its going to take some more time. I did spend an hour trying to get our yard sprinkler up and going. I had it apart three times and managed to blow rust, and water all over my face and shirt one time. I did get it up and working eventually, that was my big feat for the day. Annmarie and I even went into town and had a sit down dinner, which hasn’t been happening much with Covid. Our local bunny rabbit makes a showing almost every day now. I see it hopping around and we even saw a covey of Hungarian Partridges (Huns) with babies in our driveway. All of the animals seem to have done well this spring.
Mr Rainman came out today with his wife, Gimpy today to help me pull in the last of the hay off of field #1. There was quite a discussion had, some whining, about my choice of names for helpers. A final ruling was made that a name is given on the very first day you come out to the farm to help and it is never altered. Yes, it may not be as pertinent but unlike your birth name there are no do overs or changes allowed. So Gimpy, without the injured leg, helped load hay today. We pulled another 174 bales off of the field. The best part of this was that our main barn was full so we had to use the lamb shed. What a sweet deal!! Mr Rainman said if I just tossed a round bale on the edge of another by the trailer it would spin and then roll all the way across the ground to the hay stack. This worked fairly well but during the second load he suggested we use the trailer tail gate as a ramp, pure genius and worked perfect! This made unloading super easy. Gimpy decided that the owning a farm was not in her future.
We had a Rock chuck lay out on the wood pile for the first three trips, I finally went into the house and grabbed the 17 HMR and of course we never saw the little varmit again. It was fairly obvious that we had issues with baling hay in field #1. There were just under 100 failed bales that had been jettisoned out of the baler, almost 2 ton. We went around and picked up all of the rolls and fed them to the cows/sheep in the upper pasture. It will take them a couple of weeks to go through 2 ton of feed. This puts off my building fence for a short while. We ended up getting just over 800 bales off of field #1. I think if the weather had not gotten so hot we could have gotten 1000. I am going to spray it with 2-4-D soon after we run the mower over it.
Mr Rainman is going to come out early this week after the holidays and mow down a bunch of cheatgrass. I am hoping to put the hurt on it on Monday. I will stick to the fields around our houses. The front porch has gone no where. So we laid down the same OSB sheets we used to have on it so we could use the front door again. After we get back from our week long respite I am driving to central Oregon to pickup our new ram. He will have a buddy as we are also picking up a ram for the farmer buying 28 of our lambs and starting up his own herd.
Stewart Creek Somethings 