Mr Professional

Can we squeeze 6 more hours into a day?

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I had to divert from field work on Sunday to take care of a couple of OMG its going to freeze items on the to do list. I fed the cows. I like to try and hold off until November but it was just not going to wait any longer. Annmarie had a great idea, we are going to feed one bale in the orchard and one bale in the pea field (#7 if we use the same counting and a total of 10 fields delineated by fence). This forces the cows to choose and not run off certain cows. I will swing the gates and isolate them to this area only in a few weeks when the weather gets bitter cold. I also had to fill in the ditch we dug this summer to fix the main water line leak. I had not done that yet, so I took the time to fill in the ditch with the piled up dirt I had dug out. It took a lot less time to fill it in than it did to dig it out. After that was all done then I did go pull the disc around.

I spent Monday and Tuesday evening/early nights on the tractor dragging the harrow around. This would have been easier if I had burned off the field first. It keeps getting clogged up with dead plant debris. The upper wheat field (#1) is so rutted from the flooding this spring that it just bounces you all over the place. It’s brutal to sit on that little tractor and get bounced like a monkey in a cage. If if did not keep my seatbelt on I would get tossed off of the tractor. The harrow has a bar and rolling compactor in the back, its an arena groomer, so I am able to really smooth out the field but it means going over the entire field a second time!

Driving around in circles leaves lots of time to think. There are definitely more mice out in the dark then daylight. Unfortunately, there are not six hawks and the local kestrel resident swooping down and killing them at night. I started wishing for owls to drop out of the sky and swoop down and catch mice but none came. Then I thought it would be cool if large mice eating bats would drop out of the sky and start picking up and flying off with mice, very cool. But then it dawned on me that the bats would probably have to be fairly big and blood suckers. It sounded less cool after that so I went on to large spiders. But then I figured the spiders homes would be in the very dirt I was turning up and then the tractor is not tall enough and has no cab. I do not want huge spiders crawling all over me. I went back to my original idea of owls, owls are safe. I had to give it up Tuesday night after a harrow part came loose and I needed two wrenches and only had one on the tractor. It was a sign from above to be done.

Annmarie finished our third batch of apple butter. Really our ninth as we keep making triple batches. My suggestion was to double the spice and cut sugar down from 6 cups to 5 cups. When I came back inside she had tripled the spices and kept the same sugar. It tasted like she had added about half as much sugar as the last batch where she only used 1.5 times the spice. This #3 batch is the best! We are looking to see if we have enough apples for a fourth batch.

Today Mr Professional came out and blew water out of our sprinkler lines and picked up hoses. It is supposed to drop down to mid teens by Saturday and snow. I have not managed to plant yet. I am hoping next week after it warms up I can finish it all up. This is not easy to get all the things done in a day. I finally took tonight off and cleaned up the kitchen, cleaned the hard water deposits off of our apple butter jars and worked on the blog.

Farm 3 Predators 0

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well now that I am back to work I only have time to blog occasionally again. My goal is still 6-8 posts/month and I have done pretty good this year keeping to it. I was driving to work early Tuesday and spotted a coyote in our driveway. I knew we had one on the property as a friend had called and told me they had spotted it in the stubble field. A coyote hanging around the place is bad for the sheep. One of our nephews shot the coyote this week! So the sheep are safe and I don’t have to spend time hunting it down. Tonight, Annmarie spotted a porcupine on our back hillside. Luckily we dispatched it before the dogs discovered it or we would be going to the vet with three dogs. Annmarie is pretty sure the dogs tangled with a raccoon in the dark early one morning this week. Winter is coming, the predators are starting to come in to the buildings and head towards the chicken coop. The vet bill to sedate three dogs, remove quills and come in on an emergency basis, around $800-1000 for enquiring minds. Our oldest border collie has a torn up ear from wrestling with something in the yard this week. The dogs are valuable team members with a very specific job and they need to do that as we are going to have to start moving animals for selling and feeding in the barn.

We took our first two cows in to be butchered. Thursday evening Annmarie took both border collies into the upper fields and pushed the cows down into the corral. Mr Professional and I showed up after she had the cows in the corral. We sorted off two cows for slaughter. It helps that most of the bunch were on the menu but we just snagged a couple of the bigger ones and sorted them off into the third pen. We then pushed everyone else out and gave them water overnight. I backed the horse trailer up to the chute so I could just open the chute up and push the cows into the trailer first thing in the morning. We had to be there by 0730. The cows are all pretty skittish as they have not seen a human for about two months. Friday morning I just opened up some gates and pushed the cows into the trailer and off we went, took 10 minutes and we were on the road. We are going to have to drop off the cows two at a time and the sheep in batches of five. So we will be doing this every week. We were going to kill one of our original three cows but she is pregnant! She is so mean we had wanted to make her into hamburger. She is going to get another one year reprieve. Our bull only had access to her for about one week after she gave birth but it was enough to get her impregnated.

Today we started out the day with homemade cinnamon roles that raised overnight in the refrigerator along with some Kansas City bacon! It was so good we are having a repeat tomorrow morning. I am going to drown my cinnamon role in butter tomorrow though. It kept raining off and on throughout the morning so when I went outside I had my rain coat on. I had to run to town for diesel before getting a start. It was raining again after I got the disc hooked up to the tractor. If it gets too wet I cannot pull the disc. I remembered that a cheat for this is to weight the front of the tractor down, I found and put 350# of tractor weight into the front bucket to give the tractor more traction. I headed up to the upper pasture to disc with the rain coming down hard. I managed to get a few times around before going into field #2 and working out some of the water ruts in one area. I was cold as I only had a neck gator on and a long sleeve shirt under the thin raincoat. I need better clothes for this, I need to use my chest waders, a warm vest and some waterproof gloves! By the time I made it back to the house 3.5 hours later I was freezing cold and spent 45 minutes in the shower getting warm. We got 0.12” of rain by 1700 today and have gotten 15.49” of rain this year so far.

I like the rain as it softens up the ground but too much and I cannot work the fields. Such a gamble, I had no idea how much luck was involved in farming. Our Morris chair hinges came today. Some old geezer makes them, so now I will be buying a couple of pieces of oak so I can take apart the chair back, make a new rail and reglue the entire back.

Forever Friday 45/45, on to Monday

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It’s that time, time to go back to work, vacation is over! By work, I mean the paying job, the stuff done around the farm was for rest and relaxation. I spent the day before we left for the coast discing the field down by my in-law’s house. I want to plant it in grass this fall but I need it ready for seed. It is still too dry to plant but if we don’t get rain soon, I will have to put the seed in the ground anyways. Mr Professional came out over the weekend and changed the oil in the tractor. It is all ready for winter. The tractor now has just barely over 1200 hours on it.

I went out today and used the arena groomer to knock down all the big dirt clots and drag all the extra dead grass out of the field. It took about three hours to get it smoothed out and ready for seed. I even picked up any scrap metal, rocks and loose old hay strings. Once that was done I swapped out the arena groomer for the box blade. I have a real hankering to get the field number 2 cleaned up and move some of the dirt out of the damp area so I can get a usable grass field planted. I moved the dirt out out of the middle of the area and am using it to fill in all the washboard flooding damage in the field. I got about 25% done today in four hours. I think I can get the rest of it done in about 12-15 more hours with my mistress on the job. If I have some leftover time on the backhoe I need to rent at the end of the month I could get it done faster. The backhoe is needed to finishing fixing the berm and creating a new one in the middle of the field. If it does flood I only want it to wash out into small portions of the fields, not the entire thing!

I saw several rooster pheasants today and two large covey of quail. The quail are incredibly passive, they fly off just enough to get away from you but still within 40 feet of you. The sheep are looking mighty fat and this week we start hauling the cows in for slaughter. We are only doing a couple at a time so we will be spacing them out and letting the customers know when their cow is ready. I will probably be helping Scott with his two sheep next month after it cools off a little. I did not get a deer tag this year so I will not be hunting for venison on the place, our nephew is coming out to see if he can shoot one of the two bucks we have on the property. So far I don’t think he has been successful. I still need to finish the barn lot fence…

Forever Friday 32/45

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well it’s closing in on my home time, in two weeks I will be at work trying to figure out what has changed in the 6.5 weeks I have been gone. I am actually looking forward to going back and getting back in the thick of things. This is starting to affect my at home timeline. I had a friend bring over more plants on Sunday that they had culled out of their garden. I planted five more currants, four more bush raspberries and two more thornless blackberries and trimmed off about 8 blackberry pieces and shoved them into some dirt and tossed some water on them, hopefully they will grow. I have enough blackberries now. I still need about four more raspberry canes to fill in the rest of the line. I need to hammer in some pecker poles and create a couple of wire supports for the plants to grow on. I also went through the area and hoed up all of the thistles. The garden area looks much better. I am hoping that next year I can hit it early and kill all the weeds. I used Black Gold potting soil around all the plants this time to give them a jumpstart. I am going to do that with all the transplants from now on. Our soil is solid clay in places and just does not provide that initial surge growth that is needed for the plants to get well established.

I drove in early today to town and picked up more potting soil and ran errands. I was able to get everything I needed and fit it into my car. I did not want to take the rock filled trailer off of the pickup so I got it all to fit by using my trunk, backseat and front floorboard for storage.

Today, Mr Professional and his progeny came out for two hours and helped me plant the rest of the plants over in the flooded zone. The only plants that survived the flood was a male sea berry that was underwater, five echinacea plants and today I found some little bitty green plant that I remember planting but don’t remember what it is called. Nothing else survived the flood. We planted15 more plants and spread out some flower seed. Every plant got potting soil around it, it took all 8 bags I purchased plus two more from the leftovers in the lavender garden, there are only two bags left unused now. As we were planting the tiny little plants the teenager chickens kept coming into the flower area. I had not anticipated this as they are just squeezing through the large square openings in the ranch panels. The chickens will eat all of my new flowers and bushes! So then we had to string up 18 inches of chicken wire in the inside of the new fence to keep the chickens out. If I had thought of this earlier while building the fence I could of accounted for this but it did not occur at that time that the chickens would be a problem. I left two plants down in the spring water to see if they would snap back, they did not look good after staying out all night. I even watered everything last night before coming inside. Back at the fence tomorrow…

Forever Friday 29/45

Steve HardinLeave a comment

So strange to think that I will have to return to work. I have really enjoyed by time away and am getting lots done around the farm. I have spent the last three days concentrating on the barn lot fence. We need that fence to be completed so we can maneuver animals around this winter and allow them to go where needed but to to stay out of other areas. I had some help this week and it made all the difference in the world.

I am going to dig some flood irrigation ditches to come out of our back irrigation ditch so we can get more water out onto the fields. This should help us with the feed.

On Wednesday we started in on getting the area for animals stuck in the ram pasture water access. The chickens are not super happy with all the changes as they are now beholden to following the same path as the large animals. They really are not as they could squeeze between the cow panel squares. It will just take them some time to learn this trick.

I think I have designed the fence this time so that the panels will break away under water pressure and allow the flood waters to pass. I have anchored the posts with large rock cribs and even went so far as to alter the way I am making H-braces. I used to use smooth wire and then use a post to twist the wire to make it tight. The problem is in a couple of years the wire gets slightly loose and I want to retighten it but cannot as there is now woven and smooth wire going over the H-brace. I am now using high tension wire and tightener spools with small crimp on tighteners. I can ratchet the wire super tight and in the future I can retighten easily. I even went so far as to cut small notches at the sides of the railroad tie to let the wire lay in so there was not any pressure on a staple. It took me about halfway through the fence construction before I realized I should have been doing that all along. All the other posts have three two inch staples holding them in place. Fencing is definitely an art and over the years I learn something new every time I do a major rebuild. I look at why the fence broke and or how the animals got out and then try to rebuild to prevent that in the future. I also look at how other people have overcome some of these obstacles.

By Thursday we were down to just the fence in the momma/baby area left to be completed. The real crime here is that none of the rock cribs have rocks in them! We will have to go back and fill them all with rocks. I think I have a plan for that this year. I am going to take the 16 foot trailer up on the upper CRP and next to the fence line there are huge piles of rocks that have been removed from the field piled up next to the fence. I can pick up those rocks with the tractor, place them into the flat bed attached to the pickup and then when its full pull it down into the barn lot. Picking rocks up on the hillside one bucket at a time and driving them to the barn lot takes a lot of time. The trailer will hold 7500# of rock at one time.

Today we had to build two more rock cribs for the Momma/baby area. I wanted to get them almost 16 feet apart so we can have one cattle panel hanging between them and allow the water to push it away. The only real problem is I could not get them far enough up the hill to make a really good valley for the water between them. This means they are likely to be surrounded by water if the water level gets too high. We made the cribs 4×5 feet and will fill them to the top with rocks. I need them to be massive enough that the water will not mess with them. I do realize that constant water would eat at them but I only need them to withstand flood stage for 1-2 days a year.

I am getting pretty good at using the tractor and guessing how much weight you can manipulate in the bucket and not tip the tractor over! The tamarack 2x8x16 foot boards I got last year are amazing! They look great and are in great shape. I expect them to last an easy 20 years. Mr Professional and I went up to the upper fence line and using the tractor, pickup and trailer ended up getting 2.5 loads of rocks! We used the tractor to load them and then I just backed the trailer up until it was on a downhill slope in the barn lot and we rolled the rocks out the back end of the trailer. The incredibly large rocks will go behind the barn where I am building a retaining wall so we don’t keep losing soil down into the spring. I don’t want any rocks under 100# for the retaining wall base.