John Deere tractor

Fresh beef coming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I have been busy and am having a hard time working on the blog daily. I have gone to the weekends as I can carve out the time. It allows me to think about the work that has been done and see how we are moving forward. I still like the daily blogs but after dragging myself in and cleaning up, I am tired and it is proven that I don’t write very well when I am tired. Annmarie says it is possible to read my emotions when reading the blog. Sometimes I am short and factual but other times I see it. I am still not convinced but I have come to enjoy writing about something I love. It’s not always glamorous, its not always humorous but it is honest. It’s the real trials and tribulations that happen on a farm. We have worked hard to learn about what went on and why things were done by the families that lived on this farm before us. A diary of the farm would have been a treasure trove of information. I guess in a way this is my dairy and contribution to future generations of the Gilliland Century Farm. This is our part of the story and I want those families to love it as much as we do. We work every day to make this place our own, we work every day to repair and build onto the work done over the last 114 years. It is a daunting thought to think that it really has been that long and we are continuing the tradition. Every year we try to become a little closer to self sustaining. I think we will make it in the next three years. I am going to boldly proclaim this goal!! Because, honestly, its just words for now, the real work will be documented here in this blog.

The butcher is coming to the farm soon and we needed to sort cows. We had kept the four boys off of the main herd of cows but Donna had spotted a new calf. Annmarie and I spotted it when we came home from our coast visitation/vacation/restacation. This means we need to run in the cows, and deal with the new calf. On the last calf we waited too long and the nephew and I could hardly hold him down while we tag and banded him. We now have large banding pliers with oversized bands that will fit a calf up to 250#. I personally do not want to wrestle with a 250# calf in an open pen with no rope and only two men.

We do have a real roping rope and we have a real short chunk of rope to tie the legs. We watched a YouTube video on how to tie up a goat and I have forgotten about 80% of what we learned. I find that to really cement a YouTube lesson one must watch it, then go out the same day or next and practice it for real then go back and watch it again. I did not do that. I figure that if I can learn to shear, trim feet and teeth on an alpaca from YouTube I can lean almost any animal husbandry from it. I do realize that YouTube is not an expert but if you are careful you can find good information. Trial and error is the best teacher.

We had to run the four boy cows into the corral first then sorted off the 8 month old to leave in the corral. He gets to rejoin the main herd and the other three got pushed into the upper prime field. They get to have a butcher visitation next week. We have already sold all three live animals.

We took the dogs with us and I even remembered to grab the 30 foot lead rope in case a dog got super exuberant when we worked the cows. I set the lead down on the corral while working the first set and did not remember it until we were on the back hillside headed down to get the main herd. I never manage to actually bring the lead when needed. The cows were down by the school house, farthest distance from the house possible as usual. I took Zeke down and rounded the cows up while Annmarie stayed on the hillside with Mouse. Mouse did not like this arrangement and ran down to me. We really needed the lead rope. The calf was fairly young, probably only a few days old. We are guessing this because it was still very curious. We had a hard time herding it as it kept wanting to come see us or the dogs which caused the momma cow and the bull to get agitated. Eventually we ended up getting the cows into the barn lot. Annmarie and Zeke pushed the sheep out of the barn lot then we pushed the cow herd into the corral. This was not too bad, the green ear tag cow did not want to go, she never does. We have at least three more cows that are super pregnant and should have more calves in the next two months. The summer births are way better for the calves with this breed of cow. We got the cow and calf isolated to one pen and then got the momma into the chute so we could touch the calf without her being able to touch us. I asked Annmarie to film us but she was irritated as I did not have all the tools ready and had to make a barn run. It went very smoothly, I got two testicles and I used the right color of ear tag and I even remembered to tag the calf in the right ear as we will be selling it. Keepers get a tag in the left ear. We then put pour over fly medicine on the cows. The flies should be going away as soon as the weather turns.

We discovered that last year we missed a steer. I realized this seems near impossible, but it is easier than you think. So we sorted off another cow for the butcher. We will be stocking our freezer this year with beef it seems.

We managed to do all of this in under two hours. This is very good and the dogs made it all that much easier. Zeke had snuck off while we were in the corral the first time working the cows but as we headed down to the school house he appeared down by the pumping station. Mouse was a good boy and waited for us.

I have been trying to get the two upper pastures disced and knock down the weeds. I seem to be tracking in a small bucket of dust every time I get on the tractor. I am closing in and hope to be done this weekend. I spent about 14 hours at the beginning of the week going around in circles. I change it up occasionally by going in a rectangular pattern and if I am feeling adventurous or in an odd spot I will even go in a figure 8 pattern. Its not very riveting but I have found that a book on tape is the best thing for this kind of work. Its way better than music for keeping my brain engaged. The mistress is no worse for the wear. Not a single new dent or scratch from the tip over. I really need to take a few hours this month and give her a bath, repaint the hood as the horses took another bite out of her. I may even take a hammer and see if I cannot beat the dent out of the hood. The hood latch is very hard to work and I may need to do some adjusting but that probably won’t happen as long as I can make it work. The roll bar lights on the right side are missing and need to be replaced. I suspect I will need new tires in a year or two. I am pretty happy with my little John Deere tractor. It has made my life a lot easier and I would recommend a small tractor for any small farm. It is a must.

It was bound to happen sooner or later

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It was merely a matter of time before the Mistress and I had a little spat. I had a little more time off and decided that I needed to get our upper fields disced up and weed free. I hooked the disc set up directly onto the 2.5 inch ball setup on the back of the mistress. I had been going around in circles for about an hour, when I decided I needed to get the ditch area. The right side of the ditch is elevated and I had the tractor bucket way up in the air with 300# of tractor weights in it. I started up the ditch then felt the tractor tipping to the left side. I knew it was going to go over onto its side and there was nothing I could do. I had enough time to consider bailing off of it but I had the seatbelt on and cinched down. I could have released it and attempted a dismount. I decided against it then started reaching for the dirt as it approached before realizing that I just needed to ride it out. I pulled my hands up and just held onto the steering wheel until the roll bar smacked into the ground. I was not hurt and now had to figure out how to get the tractor upright.

I hoofed it down to the house and grabbed the pickup. I had two chains with the Mistress and I was hoping the pickup could pull the tractor upright. I hooked onto a bar by the front tire and onto the roll bar with separate chains and then pulled them tight and hooked them to the stinger on the pickup. The pickup had no trouble uprighting the Mistress. I kept the tractor chained to the pickup and jockeyed the tractor back and forth using the chains to move forward in an arc and not tip back over until I got out of the ditch. I then spent another six hours knocking down weeds. The mistress and I no worse for the wear.

The baby chickens are going to lay green eggs, we had ten in the coop over the last four days. I need to get about 8 green ones a day to truly justify their expense. Let’s hope it actually happens.

Field prep area

Steve Hardin3 Comments

I was unable to get out and work on the farm on Friday as I ended up covering at work but I had high hopes for Saturday! The bull corral is usable, so in Steve speak this means I am about 90% complete and have moved onto a new project. I still need to put up four rails, attach about 8 upright sandwich boards to get the woven wire locked into place on the wooden boards and I need to put away a few more tools. I also need to move all the lumber out of weather and into the barn. That moving job is going to be a bigger deal. I may end up moving most of the lumber to the old chicken coop, so functionally done.

I need to get the two upper fields ready for alfalfa which means knocking down weeds again. I have the new disc set I just needed tot get it working. I figured this would be an easy endeavor on a Saturday morning. It took me almost two hours to get the discs working correctly. There is no instruction manual and the seller was in and out in under 10 minutes after he delivered them. There is a handle missing that controls a release arm to let tension off of the locking mechanism to get the back set of discs to swing out. I tried pushing on the discs. I tried backing up and jerking them forward to get them loose. I had to use an old dog leash to hold the arm locking mechanism open. I figured that part out early. After hooking onto the back set of discs with a chain and pulling and jerking from various angles I gave it some more attention and started to figure out every single little mechanism and discovered the locking arm was missing its handle but I could turn the pipe manually. Once I had that disengaged I got the arm to pop loose with WD40 and more tractor manipulation. Then I had to drag it around in circles to figure out how to adjust it and where it needed to be to get me maximum effect without bogging down the tractor. I also had to gas up the tractor and blow out the radiator so dirt and weeds didn’t cause me to overheat her.

So two hours later I was able to start discing the upper prime field. This is very monotonous. Around and around and around you go. It is a must that you wear your seatbelt as tight as you can get it across your thighs. The tractor is constantly jumping around due to ruts and bumps and dirt clots and it starts to wear on your back and shoulders. After 8 hours with a seatbelt my back was starting to holler at me for doing it so long.

I refused to come in for lunch and just kept after it. There are deer absolutely every where in the upper fields and harvested wheat field. There must be at least 50 living on the property now. The amazing part is even with no rain and 100+ degree temperatures I was able to find dark brown moist soil in several areas of the field. This is very good news for our dryland alfalfa experiment we are doing next year.

My chickens hate the heat and are only laying 3-4 eggs a day now. The babies have not started to lay yet with any consistency.

My practice area below, I am going to toss out some dryland grass seed and hope it takes in the spring. The big win was I managed to even out the small area. It had a bunch of different holes and has been needing some attention.

We have killed one badger so far and no coyotes.

More of the same

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Sunday I was back at the field. This time it only took 30 minutes to get the tractor ready and get up to the field. We are getting ready to love us some high speed fiberoptic transmitted internet! Here you see the fiberoptic cable coiled up and ready to go to our house. Annmarie tells me that in one week we will have it up and running in our house! It could have been sooner but we opted to have them bury the cable in our yard and install two routers inside our house with direct hard wire to the fiberoptic line. It will be amazing. We have even heard rumors that some of our neighbors are inquiring about having it added to their house now. I spent another 8 hours on the tractor again. It would have been a straight shot but a couple of hours into it Zeke showed up to the upper field. He loves eating voles but its not safe for the dogs to be up there currently. So I walked him back to the house and discovered that he had pushed on the panel going into the ram pasture. The bungee had broke and he figured it out causing an opening to near the top. I closed it and tied it shut. But no Mouse or Gizmo anywhere in the yard. I figured they had used the same hole but when I walked up to the front fence I discovered that Annmarie had not latched the gate into the corral and Mouse had pushed on the gate and opened it up. The other two dogs used that opportunity to sneak down to Grandma’s house and ate cat food. I pulled weeds on the front hillside and hollered for the dogs occasionally. Mouse came back first and Gizmo showed up about ten minutes later. Once everyone was back in the yard I went back out and started to go around in circles. I managed to get one field completed and started in the next one. There was an old hay elevator parked up there that I grabbed with the tractor and pulled back to the house. The two flat tires were no match for my mistress! The elevator is an old pto belt driven thing probably from the 1950’s. I need Annmarie to tell me scrap or front yard decoration. There is still some 4 inch mainline irrigation pipe buried alongside the fence in the upper 7 acre field. It will have to be dug out by hand. It is resting nicely where it is for now.

We have been feeding the sheep for about 2 weeks now and they have all put on weight. The pasture we were keeping them on had no nutrition. We have not let them out on the back hillside because of the coyotes. Losing three of them has made us cautious of just letting them roam free. If we do that then we still have to bring them in every night. So for now we are having to feed hay. This is cutting into our winter feed stockpile and I am going to have to buy another four tons of hay to get us through the winter.

And it continues

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It is amazing some of the things you learn when you work with old stuff. When we first moved to the farm one of the kids that was helping my father -in-law would collect old railroad tie date nails. I knew he had found a couple out on the farm but I never really paid any attention to it. As we build this Bull enclosure we are ripping down an old fence line and a few random railroad ties. About 50% of the ties are rotted off but the other ties are still good and are getting reused in the new fence. I have found two of the dated nails and managed to pull one out intact. The head popped off the other one. Annmarie looked it up for me when I came back inside. They were used to date the tie as there were several different methods to treat the posts and the railroad company wanted to track which ones worked the best. So this railroad tie is from 1929 and I put it back in the ground! I am hoping to get 100 years out of a railroad tie, truly amazing. A real testament to what living in a desert like climate can do for stuff. I guess that < 12 inches of annual rainfall is good for something.

I decided to do something about the front gate entrance. When you step in through the gate I always have to step to the side and onto some gravel I had piled up. Well that gravel is sliding down hill so I thought that creating a short wall would help the problem. I bought 25 blocks on Friday and got them installed two days ago. I am still not certain it is a good thing. It will keep the gravel from slipping as much but now I have to actually pick up my feet.

Bubba has been out for a few hours the last couple of days and has been filling the rock cribs. This is an essential task as I cannot move forward without them full. I was very clear that I wanted him to get them from the old rock wall to minimize driving on the hill. So yesterday when I was out working on the enclosure I had to finish topping off a couple of the cribs. I ended up crawling on top of the the cribs and moving rocks around by hand to get them to stack better. This made more space therefore requiring me to haul more rocks. I decided I would drive to the top of the hill and get some random rocks that were sticking out of the ground. I would eventually like to pick all of the huge rocks off of the hillside. As I drove past the old rock wall I marveled at how many rocks were still left. We had four rock cribs almost full and it looked barely touched.

Yet as the mistress took me up the hill i noticed what looked like a well beaten path going up to the top of the hillside. I knew i had only been up there a couple of times and could not have made that many tracks . I was right, Bubba decided that the extremely large pile of rocks on top were a lot less work. The rocks are all loose and you can just drive to one spot and load them up. Now this might upset the rock chucks that live in the pile but other than that no harm. If you look at the below picture the old rock fence is at the top of the shadow and the huge pile of rocks is at the skyline. Oh well, the grass truly is greener on the other side!

I went out and worked on the bull enclosure again until dark. This is cutting into my wife time. I need to just get it done so I can move on to the next thing, which is going to have to be the machine shop. All of my evening help was busy so I worked alone, I did three loads of rocks to top off cribs and then hung a gate over but the lamb shed. The gate only opens out toward the bull enclosure, it only went about 25% of the way in the opposite direction. I will need to remove some earth to make it open both ways.

I had to go get some woven wire but I my choices are severally limited as there are only three rolls left on my fencing pile. I managed to find two that will hopefully work. I will have to reuse the woven wire from the fence line I am tearing down to make the entire enclosure.

I managed to get the woven wire stretched over one section and will now just need to install the tamarack railing and it will be done!

Annmarie took these pictures out our kitchen window. We had some water issues and fertilizer issues this year with our boxes and had a hard time with some of our seeds growing. We have lots and lots of onions and potatoes. This is only our third year and we may have gotten it figured out. I still want to do the underground greenhouse next year. I think it would be amazing to grow fresh vegetables year round!