I decided after last weekend that I needed to stay ahead of Tex. So every evening this week I went out and moved rocks for an hour. I tossed the rocks over fence so Tex could build a series of rock retaining ledges. I knew I was going to have to work Thursday night so he would need materials prestaged for Friday.
I spent Thursday morning getting more rocks and decided to clean up the Y gate area myself. I have been wanting to do this project for a couple of years but I thought it would take me a day or better to complete. In reality I had it all done in three hours! I managed to find a 600+# rock to anchor one side of the railroad tie. This meant I did not have to try and drive any pipe into the ground. The bigger rocks are actually easier to get with the tractor as they have enough mass to allow you to push them around and manipulate them into the tractor bucket. 
It turned out very nice and now the lambs won’t have to work so hard to get up into the barn. As an added side effect the Y gate is easier to move and has a little more clearance. I keep hoping I can get some sort of plant to grow in this back lot, but so far I have had no luck getting anything to grow. I have started to move more soil around and create some retention walls in the hopes that I can get about a foot of soil to stay in place. Once the soil stays I will then try and find something that will sprout and grow fast in the spring then die off in the summer. 
Annmarie went out Wednesday morning to let the sheep out of the barn and discovered that one of the yearling ewes had twins! She was surprised at that mother was not on the list of suspected ewes pending birth. She got the momma and both lambs into the momma baby area before I got home. They look good and one of them is a screamer. 
When I went to bed Thursday I had rocks piled up and ready for Tex. Some of them ended up in the spring, but most stayed on the hillside. The goal is to create a series of small rock walls then back fill the walls with dirt so I end up with several 1-3 foot wide level areas along the hillside. Once the rocks are in place I will start in on moving some dirt. I am going to use the dirt over by the old blacksmith shop. This serves two purposes, it gets me dirt for the flowerbeds and it lets us sort through the dirt for interesting metal pieces from the blacksmith area. My only real concern is getting a flat on the tractor.
Thursday evening when I went out to feed I checked on the new lambs and one of them was not sitting up. It was all limp so I took it over to the front yard gate and set it in the sun till I was done feeding the cows. Annmarie came home about 5 minutes later and took it inside and started warming it up and feeding it. She had me bring in the selenium paste so she could feed it a supplement and she kept giving it a bottle. It was doing better by the time it got picked up but not great. The other lamb is doing fantastic. It’s hard for first time young ewes to raise twins. 
Friday morning, after working all night, I came home to find Tex hard at it. Annmarie had him do the morning chores then I texted him to move more rocks, he dug out a channel for the culvert in the upper barn lot also. I need to go buy one of those culvert joining pieces so I can create a 20 foot piece instead of two 10 foot pieces. But I need to measure it first as I am not sure if it’s 24″ or 20″.
We marked out the spot for all the posts and got the auger mounted on the tractor. I went to bed while Tex kept at it. I did give him a sack lunch with cheese, meat, fruit, tortillas, water and a soda for lunch. Annmarie tells me that is not lunch but I eat that all the time for lunch! I didn’t get any complaints from Tex. 
When I woke up I went out and surveyed his work. The rock walls look great! We just need to get some dirt on the hillside now so we can create the flat areas for the flowers. I am super excited to get this done as I like random wildflower beds.
We then finished drilling all the holes in the ground with the tractor. Sometimes the clay makes the auger just sit on the surface and not cut through. So I had Tex use the hand post hole digger to create a small hole in the middle and then I could power through with the tractor auger. This got us all the holes except for the two down by the water. Those required the use of a shovel and a breaker bar. The hole ended up being pretty big after digging out all the big rocks we found embedded in the hillside. 
It’s supposed to rain this weekend. The grass looks amazing and we will be letting the sheep up onto the back hillside. They are keeping the upper pasture all eaten down. 
We had a set of triplets, and I isolated them under the stairs. They appeared to be doing well. I found one lamb under the feeder a couple of times but everyone was getting up and eating. I went out the third night and found this gal buried under the feeder and ice cold. I brought her in and took her over to the propane stove to get warmed up. I tried to feed her a bottle but she didn’t have the energy to drink. So I worked her jaw for her. That got a little in until I got a syringe and started to squirt it in her mouth and rub her throat to swallow. She looked much better by the time that Tisha arrived to take her to her forever home.
I had to keep staining the stairs repeatedly. I forgot that I had put down oak treads and they just won’t take the stain very well. I had to stain the stairs three times and the upstairs floor twice. I managed to get the stain to a place that was acceptable. It’s not near as obvious where the dogs have created a path. My goal is to put on more than two coats of Varethane. I went to Sherwin Williams to get the same Varethane and found out it was discontinued but they had four gallons left. I only needed one and it cost about 1/3 of what I would have normally paid for it so I was pretty happy. 
Clean old milk shed area
Sander died
I went out this morning to feed after a few hours of sleep and there was snow everywhere. The big bales are done so the cows are now eating normal 100# bales of alfalfa but these allow them to tip the feeders very easily. I wanted to feed some alfalfa and a little straw to the cows with the tractor. I started up the tractor even with the temperature under 20 F, no trouble. I let it warm up for a few minutes and put it in gear, the tractor died immediately. I did this 3-4 times all with the same results. I lifted the bucket up and down without any trouble. Stumped I decided that it just needed to warm up some more and I went and fed the sheep and horses. No babies this morning. The “wide as long” ewe was still in her pen and still not doing anything. The sheep are starting to mob me as I am giving them grain in the morning on top of their hay and at night I am tossing a half a bale of alfalfa onto the top of their hay.
When I was feeding the ram and his three ewes I noticed that our water was running again. We have a hand dug well on the property from the 1940’s and it has buried pipe that goes to the barn lot and under the creek over to behind the old chicken coop. The standpipe by the coop is broken and needs to be replaced. This will spontaneously start to flow when the ground water level gets high enough in the well. It will run for 3-4 months. Now we don’t have to bucket water to the ram. I just placed a drinking bucket under the running water and the sheep can just drink as much as they want. The pipes don’t freeze as it runs continuously.
