lavender

Still doing Fall catchup

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Last weekend Mr Rainman came out to help for the weekend. The plan was to knock out the Lavender and get it all trimmed and weeded so it was all ready for spring. Fortunately or unfortunately, however you view it Saturday was a burn day! We have been trying to burn the pile for the last two months but we keep missing the burn days. So we got the pile of cardboard from the old house, the mud room and the pickup and then proceeded to light the pile on fire. It took off straight away so we decided to go down the driveway and start pitchforking the tumbleweeds over the fence and stuff them in the back of the pickup to be tossed on the burn pile. My Mother-in-law came out and said she had a bunch of stuff for the burn pile so we piled that on then noticed that the apple tree broken branch had been cut out by one of the nephews so we piled that onto the burn pile and kept one branch to start the new burn pile behind the grain bins out of sight of both houses.

We kept forking weeds over the fence until the wind was blowing so hard that we had to hold them on the fire with a pitchfork so they didn’t just blow away before they could catch on fire. We were losing weeds and figured that it was a waste of time to just keep going.

Annmarie has been cutting stuff out of cow hide for the progeny’s wedding on the laser. It smells like charred leather so I offered to hang them out in the old house. This way they can air out and start to smell good. It worked amazingly well! Nothing the smell of dirt and old wood cannot fix.

My car battery died because I left the dome light on. I let it sit around for a week before I put the ancient charger on it. Mind you when I put the charger on it you could turn the key and get the radio and dash lights. After 12 hours on the charger the battery was totally dead, nothing worked. I tossed the ancient broken charger into the trash can. Mr Rainman offered to come out during the week and install a new battery. I had been driving the gas guzzling pickup for over a week and had already filled the tank twice. I looked at the battery compartment and was dreading the attempt to install it. He had it changed out in no time and it works like a champ again.

The bathroom deadline is approaching quickly so I have been working on getting it completed. We shimmed out the wall on the inside of the door so it is ready for trim. The entire inside of the bathroom is ready for trim. I need to get the Sheetrock repairs completed so that I can put primer on the wall and get it painted. There is a lot of height difference in some places so I am going to have to build it out with the mud to make it look right. I am not the best sheetrock person but I can muddle through.

On Sunday it was supposed to rain so after feeding the cows and getting the barn ready for the momma sheep we went out to the lavender patch to trim it up. We had intentions of keeping nice individual plants. In places it is growing into a single row and we are going to let it. While Mr Rainman cut the lavender I worked on pulling weeds next to the yard and in the next walkway. The weeds were the worst in those two rows. In the spring after we spray the grass we are going to have to use some kind of growth inhibitor to keep the grass from invading again. We even spotted a few honey bees on the lavender despite the wind blowing pretty hard.

Lavender harvest

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Mr Rainman and the mermaid (formerly the Gimp) came out on a Friday to help me harvest some of the lavender. It did not take us long we had about half the patch harvested in two hours with Mr Rainman and I weeding as we went along. By the time we were done harvesting we had the entire patch weeded! I used a little serrated sickle bar and it worked slick. I grabbed a full handful, cut it and then passed it off to the mermaid who rubber banded it together. We filled seven totes/boxes and they took two for helping harvest.

Annmarie posted it on Facebook classifieds and we got zero hits. I had put it all in her office and cranked the air conditioning up so it’s about 62F in her office now. We ended up taking a bunch to work to give away. This was over two weeks ago and another 25% of the lavender patch is ready to be harvested again. The Grosso (type of lavender) still needs another two weeks before it is ready. We are going to use that to redo our wreath we have inside the house. Annmarie puts new flowers on the wreath every year and we hang it up in our dining room.

The garden is starting to produce finally. We have collected almost three full flats of strawberries from a 2×6 foot trough elevated bed. It is amazing how many berries we have been getting. We are freezing them in one cup baggies so Annmarie can use them in her breakfast smoothies. We did have to net the berries this year to prevent the birds from eating all of the berries like last year. The raspberries have just started to turn red so we will be picking them seriously by next weekend.

I really need to get out into the garden with a hoe and clear some weeds. I had done it a couple of weeks ago but it already needs it again.

Just before we left for camp last week, I set up a drip system for all of the fruit trees. Each tree is getting 12-24 gallons of water a day. The plums and apricots were checked today and they have another 1-2 weeks before they are ripe. We will be harvesting everything this year and cutting and prepping the extra for the freezer for Annmarie’s breakfast smoothies.

The wild blackberries are blooming continuously and we should have a bumper crop this year. So between all of the berries and fruit trees we should not have to buy any frozen fruit this next year.

The sunchokes I planted are already two feet high! I am hoping they do really well so I can move them to someplace else in the yard. We have never grown them before so we really did not know what to expect.

Winter is coming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Winter is coming and Fall has officially started. I have a bunch of vacation (staycation) planned for October. I had 22 items on the list and managed to get two done this weekend. At least 16 on the list have to be done. I tried to rent a boom forklift and a scissor lift on Friday but the scissor lift is overdue and they did not know when it would be returned. There is no sense renting one without the other. Unfortunately, after further inspection the roof of the gazebo has been blown off the blocks I had used to shim it up. This has caused the one side to fall about twelve inches. Luckily, the strap and platform are holding it all roughly in place. I will try and rent equipment on Tuesday. If not then it will be the first weekend of October project. I will only have two days to get it done. It will still cost about $1800 to rent the equipment. Now had I rented a crane in the first place I may have been able to do it in two days but I am doubtful, I think it would have taken 3-4 days. But, I would not have needed the scissor lift. I think it would have been a wash on the rental price.

I took the day on Saturday to finish up the lavender. I had spent a couple of hours on it earlier in the week. We have about fifteen volunteer plants growing where they are not supposed to be. But I had to really hack into the plants that tried to die this spring and I am not sure that we will not lose ten plants this winter. So in the spring I will replant all that die and take the extras out and put them in the front yard along the fence. This took quite a while as I had to take a pair of loppers and dig into the plants to cut out the dead and save the live part of the plant. I ended up with quite a pile of lavender scraps tossed over the fence. It is amazing how much scent the plants can put off even if there are no flowers. I smelled so strongly that I was occasionally coughing from the scent overwhelming me.

I did go check on Lil Dumper to see if the brakes were done, nope. They had ordered parts and torn it apart and discovered they had the wrong parts. So new parts were ordered and hopefully it will be done this week. When it gets done I will be able to move soil from the barn lot to new flower spot in the orchard. We are going to toss out a bunch of wildflower seed and just let that area go wild for the honey bees. Mind you we don’t currently have any bees but there are still honey bees around we just don’t know where the hive is located. We have a Nuc on order for the spring so we can start over again next year. I told the brake place that it was taking as long as the tires and rims took to do the brakes. He had assured me when I dropped it off this time that it would be done faster than the later, he was wrong.

I also ordered more parts for the baler. I was sent the wrong large gears and am missing two crucial bushings. When the parts come I can send the others back for a credit. Which is a good thing as it is $500 worth of parts, they should be here this week.

Sunday I spent on the weed eater killing the nasty stuff on our front hillside. We had a lot of thistles and tall weeds that needed knocked down. This is a messy process and it gets worse when you crawl down in the ditch and try to weed eat all of the water plants. If you angle the weed eater one way it tosses the water away from you and the other tilt angle throws it right at you! I was able to dig down into the top two inches of water with the weed eater. I did the lower half of the ditch first and by the time I started back up the ditch I was beat and left the last 1/3 for later. I thought I could just go back inside but after I filled the horse trough with water it took me another 45 minutes to spray off the walkway and bridge. Otherwise we would have tracked all that cut grass into the house. Annmarie got chain and figured out how to keep our porch gates open. The puppy, Milo, can no longer squeeze between the rails and has yet to figure out how to open the gates with his nose. So we have to keep going outside to open the porch gates for him to go potty. Since winter is coming we want him to figure out how to go potty by himself without us standing there and encouraging him.

I am just starting to get back to some sustained level of physical exertion. I had no idea how doing nothing for six weeks and then doing slightly more than nothing for four weeks would affect my level of conditioning. I still feel like I am going to die by the end of Sunday but at least I can get to that level of exhaustion now.

The coyotes are making me crazy. This morning when I went out to let the sheep out of the pasture and the moms/babies out of the barn the coyotes were right on top of the hill barking and howling. I could not see them but there were there. So after feeding I ambled back to the house, grabbed the shotgun and some hearing protection and popped off a round out the back door. They took off and quit making any noise. This is a stupid problem.

Lavender and bees

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well, we missed the lavender harvest again! We really needed to harvest the food grade about ten days ago while we were on vacation. So now the lavender is feeding the honeybees and they seem to love it. Our oil lavender is just getting ready to bloom.

Annmarie and I went out this morning to refresh our lavender wreath. We have had a very nice wreath on the wall in the dining room for last 2-3 years and even dried out it was very nice but most of the smell had vanished. So we decided to try and redo it with our own lavender. I did the lavender harvesting and Annmarie did the wreath building. It took a lot longer than I anticipated to harvest the lavender. I was cutting it a single stalk at a time! The honeybees were everywhere and we just ignored each other. The hardest part of having bees is just learning to ignore them. If you ignore them they just tend to do their own thing and all is hunky dory. I had to reach out to the expert afterwards about how to harvest lavender efficiently. He said to use a hand sickle and sent me a little video on how to harvest it. This was very helpful and I have already ordered the hand harvesting tool! We persevered and harvested enough for the wreath. It is a little lopsided but we are going to keep it for a year and try again next year! We decided to mix colors in ours this time and I cut lavender from four different types of plants which I think affected the uniformity as I kept moving to different types of plants and Annmarie built the wreath as I was cutting flowers. If I had precut all of the flowers we could have mixed all of the types together initially and our uniformity issue would have been solved. It smells amazing. We have a vase of lavender in each bathroom now also.

Annmarie and I have been doing more research on farm camping hosting. We would like to do it up the creek next to the wheat field. It would be fairly primitive. Power would be 12V solar for lights only, some form of composting toilet setup (these vary dramatically so more research is needed), solar shower, canvas tent of some sort and all of it built on an elevated deck next to the rock outcropping. It would go in a place that we cannot use currently. So we would not be losing any land. This would require us to move some fencing so the animals will stay out. You would have to walk in to the site about 125 yards, no vehicle access. We would provide drinking water in 1/2 gallon glass jugs. There would be an outside kitchen with a single propane burner and propane grill. I want to put in a spot to hang two hammocks on the deck also. We are still doing a lot of planning before we do any real work. There are several projects on the farm that have to get done before we work on this.

More haying

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Annmarie is getting a migraine so the weather is changing. She would have made a great weather witch. She knows a few days before the weatherman that rain or a storm is coming. It’s supposed to rain by Friday. I cut two small fields and 1/3 of field #1 today. I will turn them on Tuesday and we should be able to bale them on Wednesday. The two little fields will have around 25 bales in each field so about 1000# of hay in each one. I am hopeful the 1/3 will get us around 150 bales. At this point it is all a guessing game.

I did not have any trouble with the little sickle bar mower, but it is noisier than the other one and noise tends to equal soon to break issues. My hope is to get all of field #1 cut without breaking the mower. But now that I know its going to rain, courtesy of Annmarie, we will need to get all of the baled hay out of the fields and into the barn.

So tomorrow after work, Annmarie and I will have to go out and pickup a 100 bales and get them into the barn. I had to sleep downstairs last night. I moan in my sleep once I start getting my physical activity up to hay speed. My shoulders and back do not appreciate the workout. I am able to stack the bales to seven feet without climbing anything but it is a shoulder workout.

Calling the mommas in at night

Our lavender is looking great and should start blooming soon. I went through it today and pulled the few weeds that are growing in it. It really needs a leaf blower used in it before the blooms start but I am not sure we have time for that. Both bee hives are still alive, we thought the original one had went kaput but it snapped back and there are more drones now. We are looking at another flower area to the left of the lavender so we can time the blooms accordingly. We need something to be blooming at all times all summer long. The quail are in pairs all over the farm. I have not seen any babies yet but I expect them to start crawling out from everywhere soon.