John Deere tractor

Farm 3/ Predators 3

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The predators are gaining ground fast. We had another chicken killed the day after the first two. I have been going out at dark and again at 0200 armed with pistol and spotlight. I need more light than a flashlight, 400k lumens of brightness. I have not seen the raccoon since the first night I shot at it. Unfortunately, Mr Rainman and Gingerman have both spotted a raccoon but have been unable to get a shot off as they were unarmed. So everyone is starting to pack all of the time now so they can snag a predator.

Friday evening the Gingerman missed out on an opportunity to shoot at a coyote because he was unarmed. We had a cow die and he went up with the pallet forks mounted on the Kubota to remove it from the field and place it on the bone pile. It was one of our original heifers, so she was 15 years old. Unknown cause of death, but she had just been walking around earlier that morning. Luckily, Gingerman got to her before she popped. It has been very warm and they bloat up pretty fast and opening up that will make a very odiferous mess. I expect the vultures to show up in a couple of days. They fly up from the reservoir and can eat on that carcass for over a week. We might even get an eagle or two scavenging. The eagles will chase off the vultures, they chase off everything! No one wants to mess with a bird that is that big. We have not lost any sheep that we know of so far.

I did tear apart the John Deere driveline this week. I was convinced it was the U joints on the driveline. Surprisingly they made it really easy to remove. Pop the snap ring off, drive out the shearable pin then drive the shaft toward the back wheels. The back end slides along splines and then once the front is off you just drive the shaft off the rear splines. Nope, once the thing was off the U joints have zero slop in them. I think it is the rear spline attachment getting sloppy because the rubber guards have been missing and this allows grass to wrap around the U joints and drive shaft. I dug out all of the dirt in the rear cavity and installed both U joint guards, rubber sleeves. I need to order some more parts so I can fix it. I have started a new shopping list with each piece of equipment a category and then just list the part I need under that category. This way when I get around to ordering parts I don’t forget something.

Gingerman took out the radiator on the 1957 truck and is getting it repaired. Once it is repaired then we can drive the truck in to the brake shop and they can finish adjusting the brakes. The drums and pads will need to be inspected. Once that is done I will need to work on a 12 inch rail going around the truck bed to hold in the dirt and or rocks that we put in the dump bed. They have to be attached to the bed so when you engage the dump bed you don’t throw off the racks every time.

Farm 3/ Predators 2

Steve HardinLeave a comment

There tends to be an optimism that persists whenever you are talking about predator control. Maybe it’s hope, maybe it’s bragging rights but whatever it is it does happen. I have had to decrease the farm score this year as last night a raccoon killed two chickens. It was most likely the same raccoon I saw at 0200 when I took the puppy outside to potty. I was of course in a robe and slippers without any glasses on. No way it was a cat as it jumped out of the large wild rose bush and proceeded to run down the creek and under the fence and then down the creek. It was very noisy. I was ignoring it until Mr Rainman sent me pictures of two dead chickens today with a third one injured. If the stupid chickens would go inside the coop this would not happen.

So now I am going to have to go out, check on the chickens and then just stand around looking for frogs to see who can out wait whom. A classic game of prey vs predator.

Since the farm is ahead of the predators I decided I had better be proactive tonight and make sure all of the chickens went into the coop before the automatic chicken door closed. All of the chickens were inside and the only animal I spotted was the grey barn kitty down by the creek. I was standing by the coop looking into the back creek with my spotlight trying to find the noisy frog that I know was right in front of me when a damn raccoon jumped out of the bush next to the chicken coop. It was running over the overhead soon to be roof supports. I had my trusty suppressed 22 pistol and started flinging lead into the sky. I for sure hit it at least once if not twice. By the time I got around the coop and into the ram pasture it was running toward the barn. I am a firm believer in more lead matters, so I continued to fling it. I managed to get off nine rounds and had to search the barn. I was unable to find the raccoon in the barn. Annmarie thinks it is living over the tack room during the day.

Mr Rainman came out today and repaired the sickle mower for the Kubota tractor. Later he went out and finished cutting field one. I think there is about three acres left to process in that field. I really need to focus on repairing the u joints on the John Deere tractor tomorrow. I had to dig out some grass on the driveline on Sunday and the U joints are bad! I have all the parts to repair it but have not taken the time to actually do it.

We had to take a break today to unload the antiques we won at an auction. One of the local antique stores in Pendleton was having multiple clearance online auctions and today was pickup day. I had to make two trips with the pickup to get everything. Now I will need to wash and polish everything up. We are going to rearrange our living room and Annmarie’s office to fit the new furniture. We are actually going to get rid of three items and replace them with three new ones! I scrubbed the bronze book ends and small brass sculpture tonight. Plus, I managed to score some more old marbles!

Hay storage remodel

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have been thinking about hay so Mr Rainman was mowing fields, the cheat grass is trying to take over parts of the farm. I went in and moved out the last of the broken hay bales and started to dig out the hay storage area in the machine shed. Once I had all the hay out I cleaned it out with the bucket and started working on digging a “T” shape at the back of the building to allow me to put in a French drain that will remove moisture and drain it out into a water sink in front of the building. The runoff from the roof is collecting and causing moisture issues.

Mr Rainman and I spent about two hours digging ditch and moving the dirt out. We are waiting on gravel to be delivered. I ordered it and it came this week. The ditch needs to be a little deeper and then I will install the drain and fill it up with gravel. Once that is done the entire bottom will be graveled. My hope is that I can get the Gingerman to come over with a bigger tractor and stack the bales 3-4 high. I could store 45 large bales in that area if they are stacked. Once we have the inside all completed we will work on a French drain on the backside of the machine shed. I dug a gravel trench years ago and it did make a huge difference but now I want the majority of the moisture to go away fairly quickly. We are no longer just getting “a little” rain at a time now. We are getting 1/2-1” at a time! This causes other problems. If you had not noticed the problems tend to change therefore causing new problems that old solutions no longer cure.

Once Mr Rainman left I got on the tractor and mowed cheatgrass until dark. I remembered why I need to not wear my hearing aids with ear muffs after the muffs pushing my ear up against the hearing aid for four hours. I had a heck of an external ear ache that lasted a few hours. Plus, the external pocket battery did not have enough juice to recharage my Bluetooth speaker headphones so I had to mow in silence. I charged them up that night so that would not happen again!

The wife says I managed to snore and moan at the same time in my sleep that night. She believes that I should do some form of baseline exercise year round instead of diving right in at spring time and working myself into the ground or until I cannot physically continue. It does make more logical sense, no question about it. In another month or so I should be past most of the pain.

We are having raccoon issues again. We have one coming to the back porch where we feed the cats. The Gingerman and wife failed to kill it. I have not seen it yet but keep getting woken up by the dogs barking which causes me to get out of bed and attempt to see the raccoon. No luck, but I am not losing chickens yet so I will keep after it. Eventually, I will get lucky or the raccoon will get unlucky.

Weekend update

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Mr Rainman came out on Saturday so we could pour some more concrete. I ran into town and got another pallet (56) bags of Sackcrete and three bags of sand only Sackcrete so I could do the brick power enclosure near the front bridge if there was time. Mr Rainman got the mixer in place and the last two supports on each side of the form installed. We carried around 30 bags over to our work area then started mixing and pouring. It was a lot easier, there was more room to work and we were higher than the mixer so you did not have to try and muscle the bag up while dumping it out. This time I managed to mix almost half the bags before trading spots. We only needed 40 bags to get the other bridge footing poured. Once it was poured we covered it all up with a tarp. It is getting down into the 40F range at night so I wanted to try and trap some of the heat into the form and concrete.

We then went to the other bridge and I installed a 36 brick rectangle with a power outlet built into the side of it. I am not a very good brick layer. It took some trial and error. Time will tell if I did it right. I have a hollow rectangle now. I am going to find a concrete block that I can just use as a topper. That way I can have access to the inside for wiring in the outdoor kitchen light power (after its built!).

I was pretty stoked to get all of that done in a single day. So the next day we were going to get the tractor mower going and Mr Rainman would mow the rest of the fields and I would work on wiring the lights in the barn. I hate playing at being a mechanic. When Mr Rainman went to hook up the new PTO shaft he noticed that the gear box on the mower was loose. You could shake it and move it around about 1/8” in either direction. He showed me so I said lets just tighten it up as I have done nothing in ten years to ensure its tight. I want it to last another ten years. So we lift it up with the rear three point hitch and he crawls under it. After much swearing and two four foot lengths of pipe (cheater bars) I manage to break a large crescent wrench. We tip the mower up on its side and chain it to the other mower bucket for safety. Then we proceeded to try and take it apart. I hate cotter pins. I hate tight spaces. Who has a 1.5” open end wrench laying around? I did find the wrench after I went and raided the last of my father’s machinist tools. I have never needed anything that large before and I am pretty sure the bolt was metric. No go, we could not get it apart. So Mr Rainman went home to get a 1/2” DeWalt impact driver for just this type of problem and I tried to get more parts and a torch.

We tried the impact driver and got no where! Nope, Nada, Nothing, it was not going to budge. I get impatient and just said cut bolt head off. After taking off all of the guards on the grinder and putting on a cutting wheel we were able to hack off the bolt heads. The threads had been worn off due to the rattling and looseness, there was no way it was coming apart or getting any tighter. It took us four hours to do nothing. I finally just gave up, had him grind off the bolts while I went and wired lights. He hooked up the spreader and went and over-seeded field #1 and the triangle. I got all of the light strings wired but one. That last strand I had one light that would not work and the last light on the string that did. I have one more sixteen feet in the air to still wire in. I think the first one has a wiring issue. My splice piece did not want to go on easily and I think it failed. Needless to say the last run is the one that lights up the hay rooms! So there is no light when you are getting hay until I fix it. I did discover that we can only run two strands of light at any one time. The voltage drops too far if you try and run three strands at the same time. Two is just fine and will work perfectly.

Mr Rainman is going to come out the next couple of days to work on the fields.

Fencing again

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The weekend was another one of those catch up ones. We ended up doing the things that had been put off but still needed to be done for various reasons. These weekends don’t feel as productive to me but they have to be done.

The Apprentice came out early Saturday and we prepped for fencing. This meant greasing the John Deere. This was a job I thought she might know how to do. The Apprentice assured me she had driven a large tractor before, a huge tractor. Yes, she had driven it but had not ever greased the fittings before. We ended up with grease on some things that were not fittings, but together we managed to get it done. We ended up laying out T posts and wooden stays all round field #1. We ran out of wooden stays! So I ended up splitting some of our own from the old cedar posts I had kept on the farm. I was able to get three stays from every post. I ended up breaking two shingle hammers doing it. I need to use the hand axe instead to get a weightier hit when splitting the post. I think I have enough posts left to split at least another 100 stays. After that I will have to buy some more. I always forget that the prep work for the fence is about half the install time. It takes a lot of time to measure and toss out all of the needed items. Doing this makes the fence go up a lot faster when the actual build begins. We even drove in some T posts by hand. This was not a job that the Apprentice does well. But she killed it when it came time to digging out the barn. Different muscles were used in each action. The post pounding muscles need a lot more work.

We spent most of Sunday out in the orchard. We had to pick the nectarines but they were not quite ripe. There was a huge storm coming into California and was supposed to bring potential flood levels of rain. The branches were already breaking on the nectarine tree so I figured it would be prudent to pick them now before the rain and storm ruined them. We tossed all of the tiny ones and any that had been eaten by earwigs over the fence for the cows and sheep to eat. We tossed out a lot of fruit and still ended up taking about 60# into the house and spreading it all over the dining room table to ripen over the next 1-2 weeks. I filled the entire table and was glad we fed the marginal stuff to the animals.

I even ended up going over to our Italian plum tree and tossing about 20# of fruit from the lower part of the tree over to the animals also. The branches were bending under the weight of all of the fruit. The pastures are getting pretty dry, we are a desert climate so I opened up the orchard for the cows and sheep after the Apprentice and I moved T posts and fencing wrap around all of the trees and raised it up back to it’s original high level. The cows still came in and reached up and ate all of the leaves, fruit and small branches they could reach. This has raised the branch level up significantly on all of the trees. There are still more Italian plums than we can safely eat left on the tree. This does not include the little yellow plums up in field #4 that should be ripe around the same time. The Asian pears are still not ripe yet and the fruit is very small this year. I will probably need to thin them harder next year to get a bigger pear.

The last half of Sunday was spent pounding posts into the ground. We even hooked up the post hole auger and switched out the 12” auger for the 6” auger. It was supposed to rain and I figured if I could get the 6” hole completed then the 12” auger should just follow the hole and tear it up. It just sits on the top of the dirt when it is super dry so following a hole should make it easy. We also put on the Texas T-post driving tool and filled the tractor bucket with gravel and 150# of steel tractor weights. We did manage to get some of the T-posts pounded in with the tractor. We also bent several of the posts in an attempt to use the tractor to pound them in. The heavier T posts make using the tractor doable.