honeybees

Animals think spring is coming

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Along with the great weather the animals are thinking spring is coming! Annmarie went to check on the bees and they are fat and happy. They have tons of pollen and are bringing it back to the hive. We have not seen a single flower but they are getting it from somewhere. They just ignored her while she took some pictures. Hopefully she can get into the hive next weekend and we can tell how much honey made it through winter. If there is lots I would like to steal some more. So we will see hopefully next week.

I let the puppy out into the ram pasture to tear around. She ate lots of sheep poop and ran all over. The sheep were still in the barn so the only animal she could try and terrorize was the horse and she teases the dogs by standing next to the fence. I built a fire and cleaned off the old house porch and burned lots of scrap wood. Chance did come when called and I was able to tell her to “go home” and she ran for the front yard. She is super smart, unfortunately there really is such a thing as too smart. She has been jumping up on the table outside and digging. So far not under the fence. But we found out today that the reason there are dog mud prints on the new office door is that the puppy has learned to open the door!
We have one of those curved handled doors and she is reaching up and opening the latch while pressing on the door. She opened it twice yesterday so we are back to using the dead bolt to keep the door purposefully shut. She will hardly come in and visit with us. She comes and gets loves and hugs then wants to go outside. She sits on the front porch or lays by the door to make sure no one sneaks up on us. We did not teach it but she takes it seriously. Mouse has been picking on her to establish his dominance but she is starting to get tired of it. She is starting to bite back, I expect her to be the dominant dog in another three months. She is just not putting up with his shit anymore.

The sheep are still lambing! We are definitely giving them a small area only so the ram can chase them down more efficiently. This lambing forever is painful. We only had two ewes give birth this week, both had twins. I spent a bunch of time out in the barn on Saturday cleaning out feeders and reloading everything with fresh hay. I really want to get out here and install the 12 V lighting system! The DeWalt hack to the rescue for lighting. But I need to get the wife’s office done first. I told myself no other projects until I get that space completed!!

To that end, Annmarie came up with a fairly brilliant idea, it’s one we have bantered about but I could never see it before. She talked about a rough camping space in a yurt up in field four. We could put it next to the bluffs and raise it about four feet in the air so the animals could not get into it. This would raise it up just enough to give it a great view of the surrounding bottoms but still allow the bluff to protect it from the worst of the weather. Elevating it would also make it easier to install a composting toilet and a small solar panel with a 12 V marine battery. Heck, I might even just be able to use the DeWalt hack and give them a couple of batteries! The internet is spotty so you won’t be using an electrical device much. It would have a small propane heater and double burner propane cook top. Maybe not even have any source of heat. But that would limit the time of the year people would stay and it is pretty in the winter, although we would not be able to have running water in the winter. In the no freezing months we could have 150 gallon water tank. It would not be terribly expensive to get setup. Let’s get through this year and see if it is something we want to do.

The neighbor moved his Angus cows in the field just across the road from us again this year. Our old bull, Thor, is a pain in the ass and he goes down to the huge culvert under the road and crawls under the fence and under the pseudo fence on the other side therefore getting into his cows. This then prompts the owner to text us and we have to go get him. Now he worked hard to get over there and is never super keen to just come home. I chased him around with the tractor for about 30 minutes before he went back to the culvert and I was able to move a panel to lock him in that area. Mr Professional came back out and before we could formulate a plan, Thor just went back through the culvert. He just ducks, squats and bulls his way through. We chased him all the way up to Alcatraz through the bottoms and then our yard and into the impenetrable pen. Now that he is in there with the ram and other two whethers we will have to feed every day. It took 1.5 hours to get him corralled. I am so glad we are taking him to his soon to be forever home! Only six more weeks to go before he is no longer a problem.

Upstairs bathroom might get finished

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I keep focusing on the upstairs bathroom. I want to get it 100% complete. I had purchased a special Kreg Tool jig to allow me to drill holes on an angle and screw boards end to end. It’s a quick and dirty way to join pieces, much faster than any type of glued joinery. Since we are covering the panels with fabric, it was merely a requirement to build a sturdy frame. The Kreg jig worked like a charm. I even did very well cutting all my pieces the same size. I had the whole thing assembled and then tried to clamp them up in place to drill the pilot holes so I could then install the magnets. Nope, I did not do something right. Turns out I used the wrong inner pieces on two different squares. I had to take them apart, thank goodness for screws, and put the proper pieces back together.

Once I had them all clamped in place then I drilled through each one with a 1/8” drill so that I could line up the magnet on the panels with the face of the closet. I used a 1/2” Forstner drill to get a nice hole to glue the magnet into. I have magnets that will hold 20# and I am using at least four on every panel and six on the larger panels. They should stay in place without any trouble. The hardest part is getting the magnets lined up so they attract each other and not push away! I managed to line up the first panel but almost messed up the magnet direction twice. I decided that since every panel is unique and has holes drilled in different spots I needed to be more careful in my magnet application. I only did one panel and am going to do one panel every night until I get them all finished. I cannot have 3-6 of them all drying at the same time and then try and put them back up on the wall. Our new electric stapler came this week so as soon as the spare staples come we will be ready to go if I can get them all set this week.

Annmarie went out and fed the bees today. They made it through the winter! I saw one fly out of the hive yesterday when it got over 50 degrees. She did not put on her bee suit and open it up. It is still not warm enough yet to expose them to the cold. We are going to get one more hive. We have no plans to go past two.

I have been trying to get one of my plants on the breeze porch to crawl across the ceiling. I built a trellis that hangs from the ceiling. It covers a space about four feet wide and five foot long. The plant has started to die, I think I am overwatering it. So I got a new pot for my large jade plant, about 2×3’ and am going to use my old jade pot for the crawling plant. That pot has a hole in the bottom and can drain all of the extra water. I hope that is the problem. The jade should be good in its new pot for another 5-7 years. I would like to get a five foot jade tree grown before I die. It is not easy and it takes a long time. I have been at it almost 10 years already. It might grow faster if I was nicer to it but I like my plants hardy. Plus I keep cutting it and trimming it to the shape I want. I am working on my staff Christmas presents already this year. I usually start splitting and repotting in Sept/October. I have 12 African violet starts going now. This batch is for me, I want to fill up my shelves again. Once I have the shelves full I will make a set for the staff. They are pretty slow growing so it will take a few months to get them up to any size.

Windstorm

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Crazy winters seem to be the new normal. We had the temperature in single digits and this week we got a warm chinook wind that hurdled in and pounded us. The wind gusts got over 50 mph and ended up blowing branches out of trees, blowing the she shed over and the bee hive got blown over! The stuff on the front porch also piled up in front of the door and I could not get out one morning.

Annmarie went out to see if the bees survived. They were all still alive but very mad. She had to put the two halves on separate boards and let them sit for 24 hours then went back out to put the hive back together. The sugar water we had given them had crystallized so she diluted it out a bit and put the feeder back on top. I strapped them all together and added a second strap. So now the hive is attached to the fence at three spots and should not blow over again. I think I can fix this in the spring by pounding in three pecker poles around the hive so it cannot blow over. I need to leave about two inches clearance on each side and make space for a second hive to be installed. She ended up getting stung three times over the course of 24 hours getting them upright and fed even with bee suit on.

The she shed will need to be moved and attached to the old clothesline pole. I need to bring over some more gravel and then attach it to the crossbar.

We have been getting virtually no eggs, I collect one egg a day if we are lucky. There are no more raccoons but there is a possum wandering around. The light keeps going out in their coop and that will make a difference. I have fixed the light twice this winter already and on Friday I spotted what I think is the main culprit for stealing the eggs. One of our outside cats was coming out of the nest box when I went in to put away the new feed bags. I think she is the egg thief! So I will go back to collecting eggs every day and I will get rid of the old rooster and let the young one take over. This will hopefully bring the two different groups together.

Friday I managed to get out to the new office and got Mr Professional came out. We crawled up into the attic and started to install insulation. We used all that I had and we still need a single bat to finish it up. It’s about 3/4 complete now. He worked on finishing the wall while I worked on getting the door secured some more and getting the door handle and deadbolt installed. Once I had the handle on the door I moved on to wiring in the overhead lights. I am still on the first light and have never installed trac lighting before. I recognize the need for the trac to be parallel to the wall. We will see how it turns out but some light would be nice.

Winterizing almost done

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Well Winter is almost officially here. It did snow this week at our house but it did not stick. The mountains have been covered in snow for a week. I keep trying to get things done around the place but the paying job is in overdrive and I have been working a lot making it hard to find time. So I have been doing one item at a time when I have a spare minute. This does tend to drag things out.

We had one of the alpaca die, an old white one. He went to the eternal resting place of all farm animals, the boneyard. Half of them are ancient and half are under age 7 now. We are not sure how their food intake is with all of the land they have access to being dried up. I have been giving them round bales but they are also very dry and the rejects. The alpaca have been eating them but we are worried about their caloric intake. So I went out and got a big bale of alfalfa for them. We have done this in past years but one 1300 pound bale is more hay than 11 (now) alpaca can eat in an entire winter. This makes the bottom of the bale mold as it sits on the ground, gets rained on and lasts all winter long. So this year I managed to get the bale up onto two pallets so it is off the ground. This should make it last all winter, so we are able to feed 11 alpaca for $182 all winter long. Honestly, they are fairly cheap to keep. If we had to pay to have them sheared/feet/teeth trimmed it would be about $70/each. After this year that is not looking too bad! I managed to get the weight box placed on the Kubota and filled up with horseshoes. This is much better than the 50 gallon barrel we used last year. Using this on the Kubota I was able to lift the bale about two inches off the ground and I did not have to try and steer the bale to where I wanted it with only the two front tires touching the ground! I still cannot move the bale in two wheel drive, I have to use four wheel drive on the tractor to get enough traction when there is any moisture on the ground. I will leave the counterweight bucket on all winter, I am hopeful that when I put the snow blade on this will help me immensely. I simply do not want to battle putting on chains in the snow.

I managed to get the mower and weed eater moved over into the wood shed since the bridge is functional. I had already drained and rolled up all of our hoses (11) and drained the front sprinklers and blew out the drip lines in the lavender. I just need to get the hoses into the wood shed and I can cut down the bridge. There are two logs that act as horizontal supports. I will have to build new concrete bases in the spring but I am hopeful that I can use the logs again as the horizontal supports. I will just cut off the ends that have softened. I may be able to get another 15 years out of them. They were here when we moved here and I was able to reuse them when I repaired the bridge the first time. I may also raise the bridge about 12 inches. This should stop it from getting washed away in the floods. If it gets washed away after that then Annmarie will design an ached truss bridge and I will spend a couple of months building it. It won’t be a fast project.

We want to move the honeybees to this side of the back creek. The bridge did not fair very well after the flooding last year and half of it has collapsed. It will not survive another spring runoff. In an attempt to save it, I want to cut it down but then we will have no access to the back shed for a few months. This is unacceptable as we will not be able to check up on the bees and we have been feeding them already so they do not use up all of their honey this winter. We would like them to start the spring with a bunch in the hive so we can steal a lot this next fall. This means the bees need to be moved, without killing the queen and without taking the hive apart as it is now too cold to move the individual boxes. I was able to strap the hive together with a tie down but the bridge needed to temporarily fixed to allow for the transfer. I managed to jack the bridge up using two bottle jacks and this morning Annmarie and I went out to move the hive. It is very heavy and it was decided that just walking and carrying it was not an option. We strapped it to a hand cart and worked it over into the lavender patch. The only problem it will have now is if a huge branch falls down and crushes it. We don’t see that as highly likely but it is possible. We wanted it in the corner to provide some shelter from the wind and weather.

The weather is all screwy again. I am pretty sure that is going to be our new normal. We had 1.35” of rain in a 24 hour period. We set a new record for rainfall in a single day in November. So far we have gotten 1.59” of rain in November and its only the fifth and it did not rain yesterday. We did have a windstorm last night that peaked up to almost 80 mph winds. This of course caused us to lose power last night as all the power lines are above ground and susceptible to tree limbs or poles falling. They had the power up and going by around 1000. Luckily for us we have a propane stovetop and propane stove. We just lit both of them manually and had heat and coffee. Coffee before breakfast, always. There is a reason we keep an old coffee stovetop percolator. We have figured out we are going to have to keep a few gallons of water on hand. I used to keep plastic jugs but found that they will leak over years so we are going to reuse the gallon glass jugs I used to use to make mead. They will not leak and now that we use the old safe I can get rid of the new safe and we will have room for four gallons of water. We did figure one thing out though, we have an old fashioned land line as those used to work 24/7 without power. When our area lost power the land line went dead also. We will now be cancelling our backup as it no longer works without power. Our cell phone service is spotty but its what we have. I will need to get a solar charger for our electronics. We should probably look into solar panels so we have some type of power if the grid goes down but I am unsure about a battery bank and think the technology might be way better in five years. Our puppy did not like the wind storm, every time she went outside she barked at the wind for about 30 seconds before going outside to potty.

Planting done!

Steve Hardin2 Comments

It has been a pretty good week. Annmarie and I went out to get the sheep on Wednesday evening. We were headed out to the upper pasture when Annmarie spotted this alpaca with an injured eye. It was hard to look at from twelve feet away but it looked injured and had some blood on his face. I thought the eye might be encased in a scab and blinding him. Since I had just come home from work and we were only going to walk up and push the sheep back to the barn lot I had not bothered changing clothes. Knowing the best way to see if the alpaca was blind was to sneak up on his potentially blind side. This worked amazingly well, I got right next to him, but what if he smells you? The solution is to just grab him around the neck suddenly with no warning whatsoever. One would think I would have learned by now, but the rule is once you grab you don’t let go, no matter what! If you let go the there will be no touching that animal for the rest of the day. I held on despite getting tossed around and ending up on the ground. I managed to put a wrestler hold on his neck and get on top of him for the pin! Annmarie had to hold his hips while I looked at his eye, yep scabbed over, could not see the eye. We are going to just watch him. He is one of our older animals and pinning him into a pen for repeated daily treatments when he doesn’t have much life left doesn’t seem like a quality of life he would appreciate. We don’t do the vet for the alpaca, sheep, or cows. The history precluding this incident is he has been on the war path and chasing and beating up other alpaca all week before the injury. We are not sure if he got kicked or ran into something. He was literally chasing victims all over the farm earlier in the week. Annmarie found my phone and all the pens I scattered all over the ground during the takedown event.

I was finally able to get some triticale seed 400#. I could not get it locally in 50# bags and I don’t need a 2000# tote full of triticale seed. I ended up getting it out of Walla Walla through Nutrien Ag Solutions. They delivered it to the house as there is an employee who lives in the area nearby. I got this done Wednesday evening so I would be all ready to go on Friday when I started to plant the triticale. I have three small fields that need triticale, the grass has been planted. There are two patches up on the hillside that need grass planting still but they will have to wait until after the triticale is planted. I don’t want to break the seeder on the hillside while planting experimental test plots until the triticale is in the ground, essentials first!

Friday morning was the big day to get all of the seed in the ground. I got up, cooked a great breakfast and got out to the machine shed. There was only a little grass seed left so I just tossed in a bag of triticale over the top. The bins will only hold one 50# bag of triticale. It will hold about 75# of grass seed. On a fluke I decided to inspect the seeder, it had been used for several days last week. Yep, it has these six inch teeth that rotate, two teeth to each hub for a total of twelve, five of them were broken off. Very not user friendly to get them off. I kept pulling out tools, finally grabbed my impact driver and could not get bolts loose with that. I need a 18” bar to really get some leverage except the teeth sticking down cause wrench access issues. It was a nightmare and took way too long. I finally snapped a couple of bolts off. I managed to get three installed and called it good enough. I was going to have to make a trip to Pendleton to get new nuts and bolts and a round trip would take me around two hours. It was supposed to rain and the clouds looked like it was coming. I started to get the occasional drop on me while I was laying on the ground doing mechanic work. I fired up the tractor and started planting seed, after the first field I had to stop and go back to the machine shop for an actual jacket, it was cold. While I was there I had to pump up the left front tire, it has a slow leak. As soon as I did that the rain started. I got that field done and then drove up to the triangle. The rain makes it easy to see where you have been. It didn’t really start to rain hard until the last thirty minutes. I was shivering by the time I got done and it still took me until 1630 to get done. I spent a long time in the hot shower getting warm. We have gotten one inch of rain in the last 18 hours! The weather is just crazy. I will be planting the hillside after it dries out for 4-5 days. The ground needs to not be muddy. I will also be picking up new nuts and bolts for the seeder. Luckily, I did have a stockpile of teeth already in my parts bin.