lambs

Bathroom remodel prep work

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Winter can be seen from our house, the foothills of the Blue Mountains are covered in snow and on top the local snowpack is 175% of normal. It’s 44 F today at our house and the most we get is rain on a fairly regular basis now. It is supposed to rain almost every day this week. Of course I never bother to look at the weather person predictions unless we are spraying or cutting hay so I thought it would be a great idea to move some dry wood around on the farm.

Mr Rainman had emptied out one of the old grain bins and the plan is to get all of the rough cut black walnut and maple out there and store it until it is needed for some project. All of the trees were obtained from family or friends for the labor of removing them from the property. I had them custom cut into slabs at our local mini mill. The hardest part is having the space to sticker them and let them dry out. We have had the maple for over 15 years and some of the black walnut for eight years. I have one massive piece of 10 foot black walnut that is 20” wide with one raw edge and 18’ thick, ten feet long. It has split in two almost dead center so that there are now two pieces with a live edge. It has another 5 years to dry out, you only get 1” per year when air drying. The large crack will help it dry out faster as it is almost 1/2” in width. I wanted to get it all in one spot where we do not go, it won’t get damaged so we can use our other spaces. I have about 1/3 of the old chicken coop full of rough cut wood. I would like to get that wood all moved out, do some slight rearranging in the chicken coop and then I can move out most of the tools and storage from the old house. This will give me an open room for projects near the house. A lot of what is in the old house is in bins for various types of activity. There is a bin for working sheet rock, bin for installing ceramic tile, bin for painting, shelf of finishing nailers and supplies, several bins for wiring a house, various organizers for parts, nails, screws and a shelf for ice fishing. I have not been in 20 years, but there are a lot of mini rods!

Gingerman and I went out yesterday and started to load the flatbed with black walnut boards, 1” thick, then 2” then we got to the 3” slabs that are ten feet long and those are heavy! We got the first load all onto the trailer and had a plan to come back for the maple. The rest of the black walnut is in the main barn off of one of the hay rooms and is not currently in the way. We drove to the grain bin over the sketchy culvert I have in the barn lot. It really needs to be dug out and reset as the water is going through, under, and alongside it. This is causing the dirt to collapse so I keep jamming large boulders alongside the culvert to prevent anything from falling into the gap. I have a couple more years before total failure hits. We ended up needing to take out the door metal supports on the grain bin, these add structural strength to the door so it does not blow out when grain is in the bin. I swept up and as we were finishing cleaning it started to rain. So now our dry wood is getting wet and I did not bring enough stickers to put between the slabs. We hustled and got all the wood in and set some leaning on the perimeter to be stacked next time we try and move wood.

I really want to get this done in the next week so I can build the bathroom cabinet in the current storage room. It would help immensely.

Since it was raining I decided to back to working on the new bathroom vanity. Gingerman helped me and we got the holes for the sink and faucet placed on the dresser top. I had found some boards out in the old chicken coop to use on the dresser transformation to vanity. The dresser is made out of oak but I am not adding oak pieces for the transformation. I will stick with some Douglas fir and stain it. I was able to get the large drawer put together with nails and glue, it needs to spend the night in the office to dry. I will be able to cut the back out of it once dry and it will still work as a partial drawer, over one half was able to be saved. I have a small drawer on the top that will only be about 3-4” deep. I may put a couple of 2” long spots on the side, I have not decided yet as to whether they would actually be usable.

We were fortunate enough to get more baby chicks on Friday from Mr Horse Tamer. He has an incubator and started 30 eggs, we got 29 straight run chicks. I spent Friday evening putting down new bedding, food and water in the baby chicks area for them. One had splayed legs and he told me to tape the legs together for 24 hours and it sometimes gives the hip muscles time to firm up and the chicks will do well. Gingerman and I took the tape off the next day and the chick is moving around and doing great. We had one yellow chick just die but everyone else is doing great. They have a heat lamp and a heat shelter so even though they are in an unheated coop they are staying nice and warm. I decided to use the heat lamp in conjunction with the shelter as it will also keep the water from freezing solid if it gets that cold.

The check came from the auction and we were gloriously surprised! Those 18 whethers weighed on average 98# and sold for $160/each! They killed it, the auction website said the average price for lambs was $55-150. We scored, those sheep looked amazing, the timing and quantity all rolled up to form the perfect circumstances.

Experiment a success

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Today we went and picked up the sheep from Hermiston. They probably could have gone a couple more weeks but we can maybe start a little earlier next year. It was a success for the land owner and the field looks great. Their first cutting of hay next year will look very nice. We brought all of our light panels from the barn and were able to form a chute to the trailers. Initially, we had a Y setup but the stupid sheep did not want to go through the chute system so we had to push them and do one trailer at a time. We took down the temporary fence and rolled it all up, we will reuse it next year. The field was so wet that no one used the water trough, they just drank from the various low spots that had a few inches of water. We ended up just loading up all of the sheep into the two trailers then drove them to our house. We backed up to the corral and then unloaded each trailer into the corral area and then we sorted the sheep off into three batches. One group went back into the trailer-those were Wil’s, one group to the back pen-all boys, and last group was all females and the two rams. Since we have three pens that worked great and all of us managed a single gate to move them in or out of the chute as they were moved in. This worked great and took us about 45 minutes.

Once Mr Horse Tamer had his and left we sorted off all of the lambs and put them back in with their mothers. We also sorted off the two rams and moved them into Alcatraz. Then we sorted the boys and took 13 off that are already sold and turned them in with the mothers. They won’t get slaughtered until early January. That left us with 18 lambs that will go to the auction next week. This will be the first time we have ever taken any to the auction so we hope it treats us well, but you never know. We had to move the feeders back into the barn and filled them all with hay. We won’t have lambs until early April 2025.

Mr Rainman and I worked on getting the bee shelter completed this week. He got the posts set and frame built. I made a trip to Home Depot and got three sheets of roofing tin at $45/each. The prices for materials these days are amazingly bad. Now is not the time to build a new building. We were able to use up the last of the 1x8x8’ boards on the shelter. We had to go to a board and batten siding pattern as we did not have enough lumber to go over each side twice. It is very loud inside the enclosure when someone is working on the roof with an impact driver. If the bees complain of the noise we can line the roof with plywood to dampen the sound. I will wait for the complaint department to voice an issue before doing this. We did have to put up a panel to keep the alpaca and cows out of the shelter, they had already found it before we had the roof on it and were hanging around. I had opened up the orchard to allow them to come in and knock down the foot tall grass. Now that there are no leaves on the trees they will leave them alone.

We were also able to but the boards on the new rock crib on the corral. It used up the last two rough cut 2×8 inch tamarack boards I had left from building Alcatraz. We cobbled it together and Mr Rainman will fill it with rocks tomorrow and put a panel over the new gate so the sheep don’t crawl under or through it. We used the old gate today to keep them from going through the new gate, by propping it on the inside of the new gate.

We have finally started getting eggs again, we are getting about a 30% production rate which is normal for us in the winter. Wil is hatching 30 chicks for us so that should get us 15 more hens. By mid summer we should be back up to 30 hens.

After all of that today, I needed a nap and I got one!

Predators 10, Farm 8

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Well it could not last, the predators are ahead again. At least this year it took them until September to get ahead. We are losing chickens daily now. They have killed eight chickens so I am down to 15 hens now. I will need another two dozen hens at this rate by the spring. This could really screw up my egg production next year. Bottom line as long as we make about one dozen eggs a week we can personally eat fresh eggs. No one else will get them but they don’t have chickens. Our plan is to move up creating a better Fort Knox for the chickens. We will finish the wire roof over the entire chicken run. Since there is an auto door going into the run now and it stays open 30 minutes after the sun goes down the chickens will all have time to at least get into the yard before that gate shuts down. This way any late chickens will be protected. They may be tormented by the predators trying to get into the chicken run but as long as a raccoon cannot get through the wire we should be good.

The other two deaths are newborn lambs. I counted them last week and there were only 13, there should have been 14. I walked the entire barn lot and could not find a corpse. I chalked it up to a miscount on my part. This is a common occurrence so it was an easy assumption. I was counting lambs today when we tag and banded them and there were only 12 lambs! Again, no corpse anywhere in the barn lot.

We talked about moving the lambs and mommas into the ram pasture and putting the other sheep out into the barn lot. But on further reflection we just decided to utilize the barn. It is ready, dug out, clean and has fresh bedding. We will just start doing the nighttime feed in there so the sheep will come automatically every evening. I locked everyone into the barn tonight. Mr Rainman will let everyone out in the morning when he comes to clean up.

We worked on the gazebo today until I pulled the not safe card. We then went and tagged and banded an even dozen lambs. We had someone reach out and ask us to save an intact ram boy. We saved a pure white one, the biggest of the lambs. He got a tag in the left ear and was not banded. This time around it is an even split between boys and girl lambs.

We then cleaned up the root cellar, put away tools and cleaned off the old house porch. Tomorrow, Mr Rainman will walk all the stream beds and pick up trash/limbs/lumber from them. We want to get all of this cleaned up before the spring ,when water starts running again. There are some boards that need to go into the burn pile and a second burn pile has been started up in field four, he will get all the loose material up there and toss it into the pile. We will have to wait until late fall after the rain starts to burn.

We are working on a list of things that need to be done in October when I take off on vacation, more like a staycation and farm catch up.

Predators 6, Farm 8

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The sheep are still giving birth one at a time on the occasional day. The one a day trickle is very annoying. We are only two weeks into this birthing process. The rams only had eight weeks with the herd so we should only have about 8 weeks left as we should take into account any late births.

Newborn about two hours old

I lost more chickens again to the raccoons. The weird part is they did not kill them at night. They came up the dry creek bottom and killed them in the morning, three chickens gone. Mr Rainman managed to shoot at one as they were running away. They have not returned but since there was no body we don’t get to count them on the predator dispatch count. Otherwise, it would be artificially inflated! The predators are coming in closer to the barn and house. I had two lamb corpses to go up to the boneyard that I had placed over the fence. Mr Rainman went to take them up to the boneyard the next day and the coyotes had come down to the gate and taken them. There were no bodies. We use woven fence to keep the sheep in but it also helps keep the coyotes out. They usually have to dig under the fence to get past it. This is why it is recommended that you run a single strand of barb wire at the ground level on a sheep pasture fence. I don’t do this but it is the recommendation. I usually just fill in the hole but after losing so many sheep last year I put a snare in the crossing now.

Last night when the progeny was returning home after dark she spotted a possum leaving the mother-in-law’s back yard. The Gingerman jumped out and dispatched the possum. I had been noticing a steady decline in eggs recently and figured there was a possum around. They will sneak into the coop during the day and eat the eggs. They rarely kill the chickens but they love the eggs! They are super hard to get rid of because we are gone during the day usually or out and about on the farm.

It is dove season now so we are starting to thin out the doves. There are over a 100 now on the place and they are competing with the quail. We like the quail over all other birds and have worked for the last 20 years to protect and grow them. There are several coveys on the farm but we won’t know how many are on the place until it starts getting cold and they all come down to the houses to winter over. They know where the easy food is located. Hopefully, the population is over a 200. It waxes and wanes pretty significantly. We have had as few as 30 and over 200 over the years. The last few years we have managed to keep over 100 at any time on the place. But this is the most doves we have ever had on the place. Only about 25% of them are the ring neck version. These are invasive and quite a bit larger than the native doves.

We are now seeing bunny rabbits on a regular basis but still only seeing one at a time and only in a couple of places on the farm. They are the dwarf bunnies native to Oregon. I think the owls and hawks love rabbit and they just cannot reproduce fast enough to get ahead of the depredation. They are maintaining a small population.

Mud room progressing

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Mr Rainman stopped at the lumber store on his way out this morning so we would have enough lumber to finish up the walls. We had to frame in the door opening to the rough dimensions on the door receipt. I kept the receipt as it did have the needed dimensions and so that I could argue with Home Depot in six weeks when my door is not in yet.

We had to finish the door opening and the frame above the door. The door is 34” so that caused some problems framing the door, we got it worked out. The hard part was the corners. Each corner is an old iron pipe with 6” square 1/4” thick ends and then bolted to the concrete and the porch. The real problem is the pipe is welded in different spots on each end and neither pipe is identical. We had to try and frame around the pipes to get the corners stiffened. This was not easy and we kind of had to piece things together where the wood would actually fit.

When we went out to the barn this morning I tagged and banded the last pair in a jug. It was a little boy and he had pasty butt! The new momma was not keeping him cleaned up and it had frozen to his hair. It was a mess, I got it cleaned enough for him to poop. But it needs to get above freezing so I can get it out of his hair. We may have to bring him inside and get it all cleaned up. I will keep an eye on him. I had to do the same thing again this evening.

It did rain off and on throughout the day and we are under an ice advisory. You can see how the snow is turning into one big ice sheet with water on top. I finally had to start locking the dogs into the laundry room. The puppy’s injured foot was getting scraped up on the ice edges when her foot broke though the ice covered snow and she was leaving blood on the ice. She did not like not being outside while I was outside. It’s supposed to warm up so flooding may be a thing before the week is out.

Mr Rainman and I then worked on getting the plywood sheeting up onto the frame. As things started to get closed in I was able to really see how big the room was going to be and start thinking about what needed to happen on the inside. I think another $1k by the time I buy insulation, sealant and 12 more sheets of plywood with one smooth side. That doesn’t include sealing the plywood or building the countertop, bench stool and two open fronted shelving units. I think we will be into it about $4500 by the time we are all done with it.