lambs

Moving on to decking

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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.

Boring is necessary

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I had lots of help on Saturday, Mr I Need a Belt Bad and Mr Professional came out. Mr I Need a Belt Bad and I helped Annmarie sort sheep first thing in the morning. We had the sheep in the barn first then set up the gates. It’s easier if we do the gates first but the simple fact is using the gates and sorting chute is one of the best decisions we have made when it comes to raising sheep. It doesn’t take up much space and we can sort them whenever we need. We never want to sort the sheep, its always a need. We needed to sort off more lambs that were over 90 days old. We got 18 more pulled off and even managed to mark three of the little girls as savers and future breeders for us, they are incredibly calm. We proceeded to push them through the front hillside and over into the orchard pasture. This would have gone smoother if Mouse had not decided that he knew how to herd sheep better than Annmarie’s directions and just as they neared the gate he broke and rushed in. There was some chasing of a particular sheep and yelling and some creative word play. On the next attempt the dogs listened and the sheep went through the gate. This all leads to the necessity of a woven fence on top of our rock wall to keep the sheep out of the yard. We also want to keep the dogs out of our yard so we can get a no hole yard. This whole process only took one hour. It used to take around 2-3 hours before the chute and then you had to chase the sheep around the barn and dive on them or catch them mid air when they tried to leap away. It was entertaining but a lot more work and we are not getting any younger. Our ram is starting to lose weight and it looks like some of our ewes are pregnant. We hope so as he only has one job.

Mr I Need a Belt Bad and I then stayed in the barn and proceeded to get it ready for hay. We did this by putting all of the netting and hay string into empty 50# feed bags and tossing them into the back of the pickup. The dumpster is still on the property and got emptied Friday so it needs to be filled again. I was hoping that I could be done with one more week but after emptying two hay rooms and picking up all of the netting and more buried twine we filled the entire dumpster with the addition of all of the feed bags from the chicken coop. I still have a lot of items in the old house that need to be round filed so the dumpster will have to stay for one more week to get filled for the last time, a total of 6 yards of trash will have been removed from the farm. I sure am glad we have weekly trash service. Once we had all of the trash corralled we went into the barn and reorganized some wood. I had built a loft over the sheep feeding area and had been storing wood on it. We reorganized the room over the tack room and then moved and restacked all of the lumber except the 1×12 boards into that room. I used the 1×12 boards to toss down and cover some of the holes in the decking. We are going to start haying soon and we have a couple acres of cheat grass. The flood ruined a couple of the fields and now there is a lot of cheat grass. I just about had it under control in a couple of fields and it is back. So we are going to hay it and use it for bedding. The bales will be stored up on the walkway and you will be able to just cut them open and dump them off the walkway. The sheep will break them up and spread them out. It’s a great use for them and stops me from having to buy straw. It also lets me work out any kinks in the baling process before I get to the good grass. Practice is essential as we have only used it for one year. When it comes time to clean out the barn I need to open up all of the doors and use the leaf blower to blow the dust off of everything. I will need goggles and an N95 mask for that as it will be very dirty and dusty.

Mr Professional arrived and started to work on getting the lawn mower running, he had it fired up in no time and started in on the lawn. Mr I Need a Belt Bad went to the back garden to weed for the second time. All of the grass that he missed last week had gotten some rain, sun and some extra room to grow. It had taken off and he was able to knock it down one more time. I will mix a little Roundup now and keep it in a little one gallon hand pump sprayer. I used it every 1-2 weeks to knock down the grass instead of having to pull weeds all the time. Weeding sucks. While they did that I finished spray painting another three metal gates. If I waited much longer the rust was going to become much worse. Mr Professional fired up the weed eater and I knocked down an especially tall spot in the yard then proceeded to weed eat the berry garden. Once we had it down, we went around to each plant and pulled out the weeds by hand to create a weed free zone around each berry bush. I may even plant some blueberries as well as the berry garden is doing. I am going to bring over our large water trough and get it set up for strawberries. This will keep them from spreading all over the place. We do have a mole out there and I am going to have to set a trap. We tried to find the entrance hole but couldn’t find it. So all of the mounds got spread out so I can decide wear to set the trap.

Mr Professional and I set up my Christmas present and I now have two targets mounted on the hillside at 100 yards. Now to see if the sheep will leave them alone. I was able to use the rangefinder to figure out how far objects on the hillside were, 150-200 yards. The side by side had a flat front tire so we took it off and I will get it fixed this week. The tractor is the key piece of equipment that is missing. As soon as it comes the sickle bar mower needs to get attached and fired up to do a job.

Lambing season is done, we think

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well, we think we are done having lambs. It was pretty drawn out this year and our plan to stop this is to turn the ram loose with the sheep in a confined space. When he has to run all over the farm and try and catch all the ewes to breed he starts taking his time and we need a faster approach. We will be putting the ram in with the ewes in 1-2 weeks so he can start the process all over again and we will have lambs again in five months!

  • Lamb finalized
  • 49 lambs born alive
  • 32 ewes delivered
  • 0 pregnant ewes (we think….)
  • 15 single lambs
  • 17 twin lambs
  • 3 bummer lambs, all survived
  • 29 lambs on the farm
  • 150% birthing rate
  • 144% production rate (goal >150%)
  • 96% survival rate at birth
  • 98% survival rate at 2 weeks

Annmarie has already sold 20-25 lambs to a person nearby who wants to start their own herd of hair sheep! The truly amazing part is this same person wants to run them in with his Dexter cows!! We got a good laugh out of that as we thought we were the only ones in the area who had done this. He wants the sheep to eat what the cows will not which is exactly what they will do. He has not yet discovered the joy of eating a hair sheep and the fact that they are milder and sweeter tasting.

A snail will get to the finish line eventually

Steve HardinLeave a comment

A lot has been happening on the farm. Not a lot by me, but stuff is getting done. As always, Annmarie is keeping us afloat and continues to do 85% of the chores, maybe 90%! I do go out to the barn once a week to “do my part”. Getting to the barn is the hardest part, once I am there I can do the feeding but the return trip to the house I can feel the shortness of breath and chest pain kicking in, I need to get past the Covid leftovers so I can be ready for spring. The sheep are really not doing their part on having babies. They are doing some serious lollygagging, I suspect the chief culprit is the ram. So we are still lambing, one here, one there, we have only had two born since the last blog update.

  • Lamb update
  • 30 lambs born
  • 20 ewes delivered
  • 15 pregnant ewes (I counted Jan 2, 2021)
  • 10 single lambs
  • 10 twin lambs
  • 1 bummer lamb
  • 29 lambs on the farm
  • 150% birthing rate
  • 145% production rate (goal >150%)
  • 100% survival rate at birth
  • 100% survival rate at 2 weeks (26/26)

On Friday, I needed to go to the scrap metal yard and pickup a culvert and check on my gates. We have opted to no longer go with commercial gates as the bull has decided he can just bend and twist them to his whims. I had asked for three 12’ gates a few weeks ago, I now need five 12’ gates. Luckily, I knew there was needed lag time so I don’t need them for about another two months. I am now on the list for five gates. I picked up two loads of old metal rims for a new section of fence down by the machine shop and a 20’ four foot diameter culvert for the barn lot drive over crossing. This crossing will be about 16 feet of drivable wide crossing with the other four feet taken up by concrete rastra and rebar. I am going to put rastra on both ends of the culvert and some cable between the two ends so if the water runs over the top it won’t be able to push out the downstream side. This and two fencing projects are the big ticket items for this next summer. I ordered an attachment for the tractor bucket that should allow me to push in a T post into the ground instead of pounding it in. This won’t help where its super rocky but the fence I want to install is just long, not horrible tough ground. So I now have some more metal rims, but not enough to do the section of fence I want yet. I will need more trips to the junkyard for that. This expended a lot of energy, even though I did a lot of sitting.

I am not known for my Uber iPhone skills so my phone will randomly take pictures when I am trying to use the camera. I decided to keep the sleeve picture as its my father’s old denim coat from the late 1960’s. We use it as a barn coat and it has just gained more character the longer it is in use.

Saturday morning was the planned day to work on the barn and I just did not want to get out of bed. I was reminded that the day before was really a play day and I now needed to get to the planned job. Again, very correct and I drug myself out of bed and went and picked up Mr Professional so we could work on the bathroom. We managed to get the window cut using a plastic bag and a vacuum cleaner to try and keep the dust to a minimum. This is never possible when cutting sheet rock with a sawzall. So it took another hour to vacuum, wipe up the mess and clean up the stairwell. I spent most of the day cleaning up the breeze porch. The window caulk came and I want to get it up so we can keep some of the bugs off of the porch. We removed lots of trash and tools and even ordered some new dog kennels in an attempt to neaten up the porch.

Upstairs bathroom is back on the list and work is happening.

Steve Hardin2 Comments

Well it is now 2021, we were fortunate to have a New Year’s lamb born yesterday. Unfortunately, it was in one of our young lambs that Annmarie did not think was pregnant, just fat due to her age, so instead of 6 ewes left we probably do have around a dozen left to deliver lambs. We kept quite a few 6 month old lambs this summer when we culled and they must have been old enough to get pregnant. Yes we do know they can pregnant that young but for the most part they tend not to in our experience.

I decided the upstairs bathroom needs to get finished. Due to Covid I have not been doing much this last month but I am having Mr Professional come out now and he does most of the work, cringingly I will add that I do a lot of supervising! This will make some people happy in my life but it is incredibly frustrating for me to stand around and do something for five minutes then sit down and wait or breathe. I vacuumed bugs off of the breeze porch five different times! We have a Dyson with a four foot rigid hose attachment and I kept vacuuming them up and dumping them outside all day. The chickens will not eat grease bugs or the black and red ones, this is a travesty as we have a lot of those bugs around the place. I ordered two cases (24 tubes) of silicone caulk last night as I will be improving the sealing around the inside breeze porch windows and inside siding. The bugs made me crazy yesterday, they kept dive bombing me while I was sitting around doing nothing.

I did manage to get the inside portion for our bathroom window cut. The plan is for me to finish the rough frame, install it and then Mr Professional and I will mark the stairway side by drilling the corners, blue taping the seam, cutting away the Sheetrock with a razor blade with a vacuum going then we will cut out the wood shiplap. Our “window” is a stained glass piece that will look out into the natural light coming into the stairwell. It will be about eight feet above the stairs and protected from approach by a moving overhead fan, no one will be peaking. The bathroom Is in the middle of the house and has no natural light so we thought this was a good way to just come some ambient light into the room and display our purchase from an Oregon Coast trip made in 2020. It will be our version of shining some beautiful light on 2020!

We got the room cleaned up prior to starting as it had “acquired” some items over the last year, cleaned up the horizontal surfaces and floor of dirt and debris. We collected tools, emptied out 12 month old construction supplies into the outside dumpster and then spent about an hour trying to figure out where the cut pieces we had leftover went! We figured that out and figured out which ones we wanted to discard and then started in on the closet area. It doesn’t look like we got much done but we actually installed 11 pieces of wood yesterday. Of those five had to be be custom fitted with more than a single saw cut. It is progress and this is a great thing!!

Our chickens are going gangbusters! We have 27 hens and they are old enough now we have two sizes of eggs, small and extra large. We are collecting almost 16 eggs every day in winter with a light bulb, on a timer, that gives them 17 hours of light a day. This is what I would expect of my summer production so I am not sure what the summer is going to look like. I usually only get about 30% production in winter and 50% in summer. Unfortunately, these chickens don’t like to go into the coop at night so we end up chasing 3-7 chickens in due to them missing the automatic door opportunity. The raccoons will solve this problem eventually.

The mild winters have been great for our bird populations. We have about 50 quail living on the property now and I have it on authority that there are at least 18 rooster pheasants running around on New Year’s Eve. I see the pheasants all the time running around the stubble fields. The pigeons have almost been controlled and the only other nuisance bird causing us issues is the Eurasian ring necked Dove. It is starting to overtake the property and push out the native mourning doves. This will have to become a 2021 issue to correct. We are hopeful that the quail can triple this year! I would love to have a few hundred quail running around on the place, they make us smile every time we see them! We holler out “Quaillyyy” whenever we spot them.

I had to do an update to the lamb count. My version is a 6×9 spiral binder with scribbles. I consulted the wife’s new spreadsheet, I missed a set of twins so that correction will be included below.

  • Lamb update
  • 28 lambs born
  • 18 ewes delivered
  • 17 pregnant ewes (I counted Jan 2, 2021)
  • 8 single lambs
  • 10 twin lambs
  • 1 bummer lamb
  • 27 lambs on the farm
  • 156% birthing rate
  • 150% production rate (goal >150%)
  • 100% survival rate at birth
  • 100% survival rate at 2 weeks (20/20)