Mr Professional

Weeding

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Saturday evening Annmarie and I had to go down to the far end of the property and get the sheep. They were in an area they were not supposed to be and had to crawl through a hole in the creek crossing. I knew the flood had damaged the creek crossing fence but had not been down to repair it yet. The sheep found the hole like they always do and went through. This area is still fenced but I just did not want them in there yet. I took Mouse as he doesn’t work well for me and we are trying to reinforce the dogs training and obedience. It took a while, it would have been faster had I listened to Annmarie, this does seem to be a trend in my life. She really is the smarter individual. It got done and Mouse listened much better to me then he had at any time this year.

Mr I Need a Belt Bad came out again on Sunday. I had some things to do inside and it rained again last night, so mowing the lawn was not going to happen again. I turned him loose on the grass and weeds in the back garden area. There was a jungle and lawn attempting to grow and he tackled it with a pair of bent needle nose pliers! He got the entire area cleaned out, I have a few stragglers that I will hand spray with Roundup and put them out of their misery. I even went and got the leaf blower out and blew all of the winter leaves out and cleaned up the area. It looks much better and this needed to be done.

I stayed inside and did some inside chores, cleaned up and even hung up another oil lantern. Annnmarie’s grandparents had these drop down cast iron stands for lamps. I took one last night and scrubbed on it nonstop and got it fairly clean. I also cleaned up an oil lamp from them also. The lamp was stunning! It had an amazing color to the glass and we wanted to showcase it. So I hung the lamp shelf in the bathroom on the slanted wall that was never going to have anything in it. The lamp looks great and it will be a nice reminder of them.

After 24 hours without a front porch I was ready to be done, using the back door nonstop is going to be painful. So we finished pulling nails out of the porch and laid down temporary sheets of OSB I had out in the machine shop sitting around. The dogs and everyone else appreciates the return to our routine. Once we start back up with the supplies this is going to be a big incentive to get things completed in a timely fashion. I may even take some time off to just see it through to the end. I think we could be done in a week.

Mr Professional came out to look at replacing the front bearing seal on the tractor. Once we figured out you needed a hydraulic press and had the potential to damage the bearings we just hooked up the trailer and loaded it up. I will drop it off at the dealers tomorrow at lunch and get it fixed. We will need it in a couple of weeks to mow. I need to get the parts for the second sickle bar and get it up and ready also, we may get to make some hay this year. We are working on adding a large marine battery to the side by side. It will go under the drivers seat so we can hook the sprayer up to it and it has a voltage sensing switch that will isolate the main battery if it starts to go low so we will always be able to start the side by side. I am draining the little batteries trying to run the sprayer as much as we do. The sprayer hose all needs to be replaced, I have all the parts but just have not done it yet. I need to weld on the extensions and just get it done. There is always something. I have one good day in me on the weekends and then take it easy on the second day. I am feeling better but I am not out of the woods yet with my post Covid symptoms. It has been five months now since I caught it.

Porch begins

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I spent Thursday cleaning and emptying Annmarie’s grandmothers house so we could close on Friday. It took longer than I thought it would but I managed to get it all wiped down and the wood floor oiled. We went in and signed paperwork on Friday afternoon, we no longer own it. The new owners have plans to fix the roof and do some remodel inside the house. This will allow us to focus our time and energy into the farm only. We are going to use the money from the sale to put on a new porch at our house and to help convert the old house into an office space/maker space for Annmarie and the second room will become a reloading area and jewelry construction bench. We are also going to convert the old kitchen into a freezer room. Each freezer will get its own breaker and I want to install drain pans under each freezer with a drain drilled through the floor so it will be easy to defrost and clean.

Saturday the plan was for Mr I Need a Belt Bad to come out and mow the lawn! The sheep knocked it down so he should have been able to plow through it with the mower and we would have been good for a couple more weeks. Unfortunately, it started to rain early Saturday morning and then continued to rain most of the day. This put a damper on the lawn mowing goal, it rained 1/2”! So instead we cleaned out the pickup which needed it badly. I also still had items from Sarah’s that I had just emptied out yesterday and we had to sort through it all and bring it inside or put it in the old house or send it to the dumpster. Once we had that taken care of it was time to make some progress on the porch.

We really needed some accurate measurements so annmarie could CAD up the new porch using TREX products. She is going to make a parts list also so we can just go in and order everything at once. This will be super nice as we are going to need porch railing, step railing and we want to put 12v lights into the risers on the steps leading up to the front door. I will need to bring a 110V outside box out to the front of the house. This will mean crawling under the house and seeing what is what! I know there is a spot I can tap into I am just unsure where it is, I think there are three places, two I know for certain but its been at least ten years since I have crawled under the house. I am sure the spiderwebs are thick as thieves under there. I figured the only real way to get an accurate measurement was to pull all the decking off of the original porch. We needed to look at the supporting structure and see how much was going to need to be replaced. So Mr I Need a Belt Bad, Meathead and myself tore up the structure. Mr I Need a Belt Bad was the cleanup specialist and proceeded to make a large burn pile out in the pasture. We kept up at it and had the entire porch decking and eight feet of the substructure torn off in three hours. I was surprised at how fast it went. The two front boards along the outer edge of the deck will need to be replaced all around the porch. They are rotten from the water. We will replace with pressure treated wood and that will help considerably. It was a good thing we did tear it off as the decking went under the house four inches! Annmarie used to complain that there was a BREEZE blowing under the front wall and making the entire house cold. Once we installed the tile floor and sealed the floor to the wall this went away. Yep, there was no insulation and no covering, the wind was literally just blowing straight into the house. So we will need to insulate and then seal off the bottom part of the wall. As an added bonus we let Mr I Need a Belt Bad be the pyro person and had him light the porch slats on fire. He went out one time to shove the fire back into a tidy circle and realized that the fire is hot, what he didn’t know was if he had been wearing cotton or wool long sleeves it would have protected him much better. He didn’t get burned and the fire took a while to light as it had been raining!

The dogs had gotten under the porch and dug a nice hole. Plus over the last 50-70 years a lot of dirt had built up under the porch. We shoveled the extra dirt out and proceeded to smooth out the area. This will make the additional pillar supports much easier to install. One corner post that holds up our second story breeze porch is about 50% off of the support! So we will need to fix that before the deck gets installed. The pillars are sitting on all kinds of scrap metal pieces, old plow shares, old metal discs and some pieces I think are joint pieces for railroads. I am unsure on what exactly they are.

Mr Professional came out and planted the rest of the Lavender. Annmarie found our old diagram and I was able to update it. We still have eleven spots that need plants but I think we actually may get some lavender from our Grosso plants and maybe even the Folgate. We will see, every one of our Melissa plants died over the winter, we replaced every one and added some more and will see how they do this winter.

Murphy bed install

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I spent Thursday getting ready for the Murphy bed install. I spent an hour watching how to videos from the company’s website then I went into the craft room and unpacked all of the parts. They used a lot off expanded foam sheets and had broken them up to create a custom box. This left little pieces of styrofoam on everything. I spent all of the time wiping and vacuuming down the pieces to get all of the styrofoam contained. I had them all laid out and ready to go for Friday. I had also perused the written instructions just in case so it would not take very long to install. I had said two hours.

Friday Mr Professional came out and we spent five hours working on the install. Annmarie always multiplies my time estimates by three when she is calculating how long it will take me to do something. She is usually right, you would think I would have this system figured out as the outcome is fairly predictable, three times my estimate almost always. We took our time and went over every step meticulously. There was no room to just order another piece. I was going to just fish an extension cord behind the bookcases when we installed them so we had power on the wall. Mr Professional wanted to extend the outlet boxes out and put them into the bookcases. This was a much better plan, not an easier plan, just a better long term outcome. We extended the boxes and installed the outlets into the back of the cabinets. I even ordered wooden outlet covers that match the finish on the bed. They should be here next week.

Mr Professional came out on Saturday for a couple of hours and finished shimming the book cases and installing the trim. The trim is not supposed to be necessary but due to our uneven floor and wall they are needed. After it was all said and done you cannot tell that there were any issues. It looks amazing and now our visitors will have a nice double bed to sleep on and we can still use the room 98% of the time for other things. We are getting sheets and new pillows today for the bed and its will be all ready. We can leave the bed made up and merely have to just pull the bed down to get it to work.

Spring is here, finally

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I had big plans to get stuff done this weekend but you only have so much time in a day. On top of that its Easter weekend so we have a family dinner during the day and I don’t do any work. I know its not very common for me but I do take a day off occasionally. Since the beef needed to be cut up that occupied all of Friday. It took about ten hours to cut it and wrap it all, that included the clean up time at the end which is essential or the entire house will continue to smell like raw meat. The meat is incredibly pale and Mr Professional and I had steak, eggs and toast for dinner and it was amazing. Annmarie is busy all week with Easter and helped for a couple of hours before having to go into church. Our biggest problem is the two freezers are full! I had to move a lot of stuff around to make room for the unexpected beef. We filled the tractor bucket with all of the bones. Mr Professional was out after dark putting stuff in the pickup and heard a commotion at the tractor, the cats had figured out where we were piling the scraps! We have two cats living in the machine shed, we must need a few more since the mice got into the air intake on our side by side.

The side by side was ready to spray so I got moving early on Saturday and was out spraying weeds by 0830. I realize that this is not especially early but I did cook breakfast, sausage and waffles, first and then had to drop the panels over the back creek to keep the sheep near the house. We wanted them to be able to go up on the back hillside and eat. For two reasons, one the grass is growing and two they are eating lots of hay. Due to the changes in the creek banks from last years flooding I had to cut the panels to fit as they would no longer occlude the opening like they used to. While Annmarie was letting the sheep out onto the back hillside she asked me if I could see Big Brown, our old ewe. I did not spot her, but once Annmarie came into the yard she reminded me we put her into the orchard with the weanlings to give them some direction. We chuckled as both of us had forgotten this detail. Once that was done, I went out and sprayed. Our side by side has a 50 gallon tank on it and when it is full it makes steering the side by side very hard. The front tires are not really gripping the ground very well and any turn takes twice the normal radius. I need to get the welder up and going so I can make some tractor weight holders to mount on the front of the vehicle. This should help the steering immensely. I sprayed the orchard first by just spot spraying with the wand. It didn’t need the entire field but it did have some patches of thistles that needed to be killed. I found the old Big Brown ewe dead over by the far gate. She had died in the last 24 hours. I finished spraying out the first load of spray then went and picked up Mr Professional. He took the beef bones and Big Brown ewe up to the boneyard.

Once he came back from the boneyard and saw all the green grass and the flood damage he wanted to start planting the bare spots. I told him nope, the plan for the day was to spray weeds and finish the bathroom, nothing else!! We cannot get distracted, there is a lot to do and limited time to do it. We must prioritize or the necessary things will not get done. This is the sole reason to keep a running list of to do’s and keep juggling their priority. He finished installing the four boards in the bathroom and rehung the sliding door so it opens and closes correctly and stays shut. I did not have it level.

I managed to spray all of our upper field, #1 including the fence lines and the ditch. I even managed to get 1/2 of field number 2 sprayed. I also sprayed the triangle near the wheat fields that is a breeding ground for thistles. At one point I overfilled the tank and even managed to spray all the area behind the grain bins. The side by side really needs a ring job, it is burning lots of oil. Before the engine got warmed up I thought I could merely drive over the weeds and smoke them to death. I was getting ready for tank number four when all of a sudden our power went out. Mr Professional was upstairs and hollered to look at the power line, it was waving back and forth. Our up stream neighbor was having some trees cut down. So we drove up there to check and sure enough they dumped a tree on the power line but had no cell service, we drove back down th road until we got service and called the power company around 1330. We did not get power back until around 2315 last night. Before the power company was done they had 3-4 vehicles and a backhoe out there and ended up having to replace a power pole.

Since we had no power, Mr Professional and I went out to work on stringing up the new fence line that runs along the edge of the wheat field. I now use the 5000 foot bailing string to run fence lines and it is the best! We used the T-post tractor pusher to set the T posts, it is the slickest thing ever. We put a few extra right by the horse’s resting area so no one runs over it.

The sheep had gone down to the schoolhouse. My fence repair was supposed to stop that, but fixing the fence does no good when you leave the gate open! Luckily the sheep put themselves onto the back hillside with no prompting and the gate just had to be shut. They even came down and slept behind the barn last night with no prompting! As always, when the sun is out shining it is hard to tell a live alpaca from a dead one.

Groundhog Day

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Yesterday was supposed to be an easy day. We were going to sort off the two little bull calves from their mothers. The cows will have babies soon and we don’t want any competition. Now mind you, we tried this in the fall and one of the two crazy babies ran off and stayed away for a couple of days before coming back. We had to let it back in with its mother to get it into a fenced area. We fed on Friday and all of the lower area cows came in so we shut the upper gates so it would be easy to herd them on Saturday.

Saturday morning I went to pick up Mr Professional and I noticed that there were no cows in the correct pasture. That is because I failed to check on the lower pasture gate, it was wide open and the cows were down by the schoolhouse. As we came back from town we stopped at the schoolhouse and ran cows back into the area near the creek. We reinstalled the gate that the bull had removed. This is where one of the heavy duty Packy welded gates are going before we let the bull out of Alcatraz. Mr Professional followed the cows up into the designated field.

Annmarie opened the new yard gate and moved the corral gates around so we could herd the cows in. She also moved the horses to one side of the barn lot and the upper cows into the barn lot so we could sort them next. We opened the gate into the orchard pasture and Mr Professional got three cows in and stopped the rest. We only needed to sort off the little bull and he was one of the three. The new gate in the pasture blocking off the alleyway is not yet completed and once we had the dogs in the field the cows of course bum rushed the gap and got mixed in with the weaned lambs. We got them out and managed to let one cow back into the lower pasture. Now we just needed to move the little bull and his mother to one side of the pasture and into our upper yard hillside. Unfortunately, our youngest Border Collie, Mouse, was just not listening. After a couple of herding chases, Annmarie called him and put him on a lead and took him to other side of the fence. We got the pair onto the upper hillside, the alpaca were in the same field. They had seen the gate opened the day before and ran into the field, but only a few of them, the rest were outside the fence. So we are closing in on the necessary fence opening with the cows, the little bull is looking edgy and trying to bolt. I look up and two alpaca are both on their hind legs standing at full height and trying to fight over our wooden fence! Look squirrel! At this moment, as I am exclaiming my wonder out loud, the bull calf makes a break for it and jumps the ditch. We turn around and try to get him back when he does the same thing he did last time! He jams his head above the woven wire between two strands of wire and starts trying to jump through! Annmarie turns Mouse loose in hopes that he can push the calf back but the calf is faster and manages to leap through the fence. He runs for the long driveway with Mouse in pursuit. We finally get Mouse back and then Annmarie jumps in the pickup. The calf is at the end of the driveway near the cattle guard eyeing us from a quarter of a mile away. Annmarie takes the pickup down to the little seven acre field. If she drives along that field she will be on a diagonal from the calf and can then drive up the road and push the calf back from the cattle guard. Nope, as soon as she started to drive up the edge of the field I saw that calf make the decision, he jumped the cattle guard again and ran down the road.

I was not going to wait two more days just to do this again! The decision was made, it was time for some milk fed 9 month old beef. I headed to the house for my 243 rifle. Annmarie calls me to see if I was getting a gun, once informed I was already headed to the house she followed the little bull so we would be able to solve this problem. Since she had the pickup I loaded up a knife, plastic bags for heart and liver and a rifle. The little bull was kind enough to run into the upper CRP. Annmarie had trailed it on the road to keep it from coming back to the pavement and running into the neighbors field. I was already planning to talk to as many neighbors as it took to solve this problem. I gotta say that the Covid has been rough, that was enough physical activity to give me the shakes. I only wanted to head shoot the calf so we didn’t mess up any meat. I sat down and formed a tripod position and shot it. Nope, it started to trot off and I had to shoot it in the head at a run. It dropped on the second shot. This was not on the list for jobs to complete this day. But once the decision is made everything else has to be set aside so you can process the animal. When we cleaned up the carcass, I had shot it in the neck the first time behind the head but had missed the spine, second time was in the head.

Mr Professional went to get the tractor to make everything easier. We spent the rest of the day skinning and cleaning the carcass. Annmarie had a great idea to tan the hide so we were super careful when removing the hide. I didn’t have any game bags but luckily Mr Professional did. So we will be ordering game bags for when this happens again, because I am sure it will. We could not find any tanning solution locally and after reading the instructions on how to brain tan an animal, I did not think that cooking the brains then running them through the food processor then applying them to the hide seemed like a good use of our time. I am going to get a tanning solution also so we have that on hand. Once we had the carcass all cleaned and bagged up we moved it out to the machine shed. I have a couple of hanging spots for animals and it is away from the chickens and any animals. We moved it with the tractor and when we tried to hoist it up on the single pulley we could not do it! We had to use the tractor and with both of us pulling we managed to get the carcass to move slightly. So using our combined weight the carcass weighs around 330#. I will be adding a second pulley and rerouting the rope so we get a reduction when pulling! I did not expect the carcass to be that heavy. I figure we will get at least 200# of meat off of this animal. Now I just have to plan on cutting up the entire animal this upcoming Friday. It will be an all day affair. We did not get the upper cows sorted. That will happen in the near future.

The wild turkeys found us yesterday and cruised through the property. I don’t mind them passing through, but really don’t want them living anywhere near the houses or outbuildings. Annmarie got tomatoes in the ground and walls of water around them so they don’t freeze. It also keeps them warmer and they grow faster. We are probably going to revisit the driveway gate decision again after this last cow escapade. We had talked about putting two gates across the driveway entrance that are open at all times and we only close when we are working animals so they don’t go down the driveway. It’s hard to get them out of the long driveway. I will need to measure the opening so we have a better understanding of how far of a gap we are trying to block off.