lambs

Ready for winter

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Well we are finally starting to make progress on the finishing touches for the front porch. Mr Professional and Mr Rainman got the blocks installed on Friday. They were having some trouble with the corners getting them to match up and get the cut angles correct. I told them I would get it this weekend. I spent about two hours on Sunday cutting angles with the wet tile saw and then breaking the blocks with a mason’s hammer. I then used a diamond blade to grind the rough edges smooth. I was able to make both corners and ends fit nicely. Annmarie thought I had not had enough water to drink, said my lips looked like I was dying. I had to go inside and look in the mirror, I had concrete dust all over my face and my lips were a pasty white color! I am going to live.

I let the sheep into the front yard hillside both days this weekend. I put the dogs on their runs and then had to chase the sheep into the yard as they just did not want to go on their own. I ended up using Zeke to chase the sheep into the yard every morning and then used Mouse to bring the cows in every night. Mouse is starting to dramatically improve. Separating him from Zeke when they work has helped a bunch. He is really starting to listen and we can just focus all our attention on him. The front hillside has at least five days worth of food on it. We are keeping the sheep in front of the barn due to lambing season, but since we had the one baby last week, we have not had another. A few of the mommas look like they are getting milk, and we are hopeful they will have babies this week. I think the sheep can eat on the hillside for another few days. The only problem is the dogs need to stay on the runs outside to prevent the sheep from eating my trumpet vine and my hens and chicks. Eventually we will finish the rock wall out front and get a fence on top of it to keep the dogs out or in depending on if we are using one side as a buffet for the animals.

Saturday was moving large hay bales onto the farm day. This typically takes most of the day. Mr Rainman cleaned out the machine shed storage area and then proceeded to clean up the machine shed in between loads. The new tractor can just barely lift a new bale off of the ground but it cannot get the lower bale on top of another bale. It just won’t lift it up and the governor won’t let it lift that much weight. So we were only able to get 13 bales in the machine shed and 9 more in the horse arena we moved next to the grain bins. This keeps the alpaca from tearing up the bales. They are horrible about burrowing holes into the bales. They love alfalfa!

Mr I Need a Belt Bad spent two days digging out the front ditch. The weeds were clogging it up. He helped me dig out a ditch in front of the block wall today. I ended up having to drag some dirt to lower the area some in from of the new porch. Now that a rain ditch has been installed it will need to be filled with gravel. My railing part for the stair railing is on factory back order. It may get shipped this week, I am unclear on if this will actually happen. The new Kubota 3100 tractor is a little big to use inside our yard. I am loving the tractor so far but in the yard the small space would be better served by the little John Deere, but it has a flat front tire. I will need to get that fixed this week. There always seems to be something.

Annmarie and I went out to the orchard just before dinner and ate some honey crisp apples directly off the tree. They were so good, the dang yellow-jackets think so also and have been eating the near ripe fruit. I am going to have to hang out traps next year and see if that slows them down. We took about 30 minutes Saturday morning to drag out the path of our next fence. It is going to be blocks on the lower half and a metal topper. I measured the posts today and their outside dimension is 1 5/8”. So I need to buy a pipe with an inside diameter just over that so I can set the new pipe into the ground in concrete and then slip the fence inside of it.

Lambing has begun again

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Our daughter had noticed on our hallway calendar last week that Annmarie had written down we were going to have lambs. Annmarie had seen the ram do his duty then marked our calendar with a date five months in the future. I thought it was too early but we sorted the sheep off on Saturday anyways. The cows and sheep needed to be sorted so it was a good time. On Sunday when we drove the pickup and trailer around to the ram pasture Mr Professional did not latch the gate completely. He left a gap which all of the sheep exploited and left the area to go up into fields 2-4 to eat with the cows. Following the rule, I went up Sunday night and pushed the cows and sheep down into the barn lot. I propped the ram pasture gate open so the sheep could crawl through but the cows could not get in. My hope was the sheep would finish putting themselves back where they belonged with no assistance. The self sorting relocation idea was merely a pipe dream, the sheep did not come in to where they were supposed to be willingly.

On Monday when Annmarie opened the gate into fields to let the cows go up the sheep went also. They had not complied with my hidden directive to self sort. Annmarie sent me a text, I told her we could get it that evening it would be fine. She went out that evening before I got home and sent me a picture of the brand new baby lamb! Who could of thunk that would happen? I came home and helped sort the sheep and fed them a big bale. For some reason the other pregnant ewes were picking on the new momma, kept head butting her. So we sorted her off and put her in the barn with some food and water and her newborn lamb. Annmarie gave the lamb some selenium paste. There may have been some “I told you so” moments in the last 24 hours. We did not have any more lambs today. The sheep are now firmly trapped in the ram pasture, behind the barn and in the front barn lot. We walked the perimeter this evening to make sure there were no more lambs tucked away in some corner.

When we were walking around and getting water for the ewe, Annmarie pointed out that the spring needs to be cleaned out. This job requires rubber boots, gloves and a square nose shovel to get all of the vegetable material and extra dirt dug out. This is a perfect job for Mr I need a belt bad! More work for him.

Sheep sold for year

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Annmarie took care of the lambs this year! We sold Pahlow Farm in Elgin, OR 24 ewe lambs and 4 whethers. We sold 11 whethers and a cull ewe to our regular buyer and we kept 3 whethers for local customers and one replacement ewe lamb for a grand total of 43 lambs. The real problem here is we should have had 6 more lambs as we did find one dead one in the barn lot.

We figured we lost six lambs from the lambs going into the upper field and getting eaten by some predator. We are not sure if its a cougar or a bobcat. We have had neighbors and helpers see both on the property. The bobcat was spotted trying to kill a fawn. Again we have that dilemma about cost versus loss savings. We lost about $500 worth of lambs. Annmarie has me trained during the winter to bring in the sheep. After the first few times the sheep pretty much do it themselves as they quickly learn we are feeding them when they show up every night. I take the summers as a time to just let them run wild and do whatever they want. What this really means is I don’t have to go out every night and get them into the barn lot and lock them in and then in the morning let them out again. So if we figure the summer consists of four months or 120 days and we lose $500 worth of sheep it costs us $4.20/day to not bring the sheep in every night. Now this is a fixed cost so only bringing them in occasionally will not be a cost savings, it has to be every night to realize an actual savings. Maybe what we really need to do is to run the alpaca with the sheep during the summer? We could get a little donkey to keep the horse company but it would really be for the sheep and I am afraid it would just get fat on an all you can eat diet like the sheep have. The donkey would have to be fairly cheap to make up for the loss of lambs and any upkeep it would cost us. Our adult ewes are still coming into the barn lot every night on their own so their good habits seem to be protecting them.

Annmarie had some help from Mr Rainman to sort them as they had all gotten back together. The latch I was supposed to repair a couple of months ago on the barn lot double gates failed and allowed the entire herd to reform. So they had to sort out the lambs from the ewes and then sort off two groups of lambs. She managed to get both parties to come on the same day to pickup lambs so sorting only had to be done once! She said the lambs were so tame that even a shaker stick would not move them down the chute. This is a good problem to have, usually they are so flighty that its hard to keep them contained. We have been working on temperament for years and it looks like we are finally starting to get some success. Pahlow Farm has a St Croix ram so it will be interesting to see what the blood line addition will do to the new babies.

Our three local sales and replacement ewe will hang out in the orchard for a few months and then become food and breeding stock. The game birds are doing amazingly well this year. We are seeing quail everywhere and today spotted a pair of adults with 10 babies! We have pairs of quail all over the place and went into spring with 40-50 mature adult quail. If every pair has 5 babies that would be another 100 quail but it could be another 250 quail! I told Annmarie if they can get past 500 quail maybe then we would consider culling some but not until they become a nuisance. They are by far and away our favorite bird on the property. I even spotted the Hun partridge covey again this week when I was coming to work. On our way home last night the stubble field had five whitetail buck deer in it grazing away after dark. There are a couple of nice four point bucks in the group but I did not get a buck tag this year.

The heating/air conditioning got repaired today! Annmarie says he is now her favorite man of the year. The house was 72 degrees within 15 minutes of it being repaired, the entire house! It was amazing, and yes he is secretly my favorite man of the year also. 72 was too cold so we had to turn the air conditioner up to 74 degrees so an extra layer is not needed inside the house. I am hopeful that Mr Rainman can get the entire place mowed next week and Mr Professional can get the yard cleaned up and my replacement door onto the Ford Focus that was attacked by deer.

Haying done!

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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.

Moving on to decking

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My helpers finished getting in the last two tons of hay into the barn this week. We managed to get one ton of grass hay just off of the area around the school house. Even with help and me doing the driving I was done last weekend by the time we got the hay into the barn. Mr CrossFit ran the weed eater and cleaned up the berry area. The grass and weeds keep growing back. We are going to lay down some ground cloth and cover it up to keep the grass and weeds down, eventually. It’s on the list but not a super high priority. It was time to shift gears and move on to the next project.

The front deck needs to be finished and TREX deck applied. I had all the TREX laid out by the house and thought I was ready to go. Friday morning, Mr Rainman came over to help, he unloaded the pickup with my daughter and then we went to town to buy more stuff for the deck. Another $1000 and we had more lumber and concrete blocks. We unloaded everything onto the yard pile and started in on making the deck underlayment. The price of TREX and building supplies is really high. I know I keep reading about it but a project I planned two years ago was going to cost $6k in materials and now is costing $10k in materials. It is crazy, I have had to shift some money I was saving for the old house remodel to the deck project. This is making the old house project look mighty lean!

We started to install the support framework. This did not go fast and we kept having to stop and take more measurements. The corner beam had to be moved in an inch. We had to stop, make adjustments and keep the width the same every time we moved forward. This sounds easy but it is a constant battle. We did not get very far on Friday. One of the beams had about 20% dry rot and had to be dug out, we ended up cleaning it out and filling the holes with concrete.

Saturday was the day to get completed! Mr Rainman came out and we started in again. I had him doing the cutting, which involved carrying and delivering the cut wood to the job site. I stayed in one place and hollered out measurements. We set posts for the railing, this involved digging a hole, filling with some gravel, setting the 4×4 concrete footing block then centering the block. Once we had the block centered we sandwiched the 4×4 with 2×6 pieces to keep it from moving then I even filled in the other two sides with wood and shims to lock it all into place so that there is no way the posts can come loose!
It got hot on Saturday so Mr Rainman was in full force, we discussed the need to drink more water. Neither of us were drinking enough to pee every hour, but I was ahead. My wife was sticking her head out the front door and ensuring that my water consumption was sufficient. He was on his own.

That evening we went down and pushed the sheep up into the barn lot. The dogs did all the work, we just plodded along. Once we had the sheep into the barn we sorted off all of the babies. The youngest set of twins were not quite three months old. It actually went fairly smooth and we sorted off a nice big lamb for one of our customers. They took it home in a dog crate and Annmarie overhead the spouse telling their partner that “this one is food”. They now have two pet lambs from last year that are now no longer lambs. We pushed all the lambs over into the ram pasture but it is looking pretty eaten down, the sheep will need to be let up above into field #4 with the cows this week.