Mr Professional

Staycation 70% complete

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well the weekend is over and I did get some stuff done. It feels like I am not getting anything done sometimes but that really isn’t the case and I do know that. There is so much to do! I took it pretty easy on Saturday. I stained the upstairs bathroom door. I do need to get that done! This was the single reason for taking some time off, so it does need to get completed. I transplanted some of my house plants I had rooted from starts and they were ready for the soil. I hit the $1 store, now $1.25 store, and cleaned out their four inch pots. So I now have 24 new pots for houseplants. I like to give the plants out at Christmas as gifts to my staff but it takes me all year to get the plants ready. I am going to start African Violets next. I want to get about ten more plants going. I have several of the crawling cactus plants growing. I may even try a Christmas cactus replication. I have never tried to get a start going from one before.

Sarah had posted the old WW2 dog tag maker we had for sale online. Our only taker was a gentleman from the Air Museum in Pendleton. They want to recondition it and use it at their museum to make dog tags for kids. After they left I talked with Annmarie and we just donated it to the museum. On Sunday two old guys came out to pick it up. I had sworn I would not move it after wrestling it up to the second story many years ago. It was easier to get down than up and I used the tractor to lift it into the back of their pickup. So it now has a new home and the bedroom has some unused wall space!

I went out Saturday and started working on filling in the culvert in field #4b. I was able to get one side of the culvert done enough I could drive up to the top and dump soil over to the other side. As I was was stealing soil it dawned on me that I should turn this flat spot into a hay storage area! The cows will be fed up here and the hay is easier to feed if it is right there. So we will be working on this also. It just needs a simple fence to keep the cows away from the hay.

I had my lifelong dreams crushed over the weekend. I have wanted peacocks for ever since we moved out to the farm. The reason we have not gotten them is the noise but I was hopeful that I could eventually overcome this obstacle. When I went to get the alpaca there were a bunch of peacocks. I spotted 8 males and they were amazing! The alpaca owners lived right next to this spot. I happen to mention how amazing they were. It turns out they are feral and have been loose for over 50 years. They are incredibly destructive! I had no idea. After hearing many horror stories I will not be getting peacocks. A lifelong goal dropped.

On Sunday, I spent even more time on the tractor moving dirt. I even went up the road to pick rocks and dump off soil. There is one spot in the dirt road that slants severely to the downhill side and this winter when it was wet the tractor almost slid off the road several times. I took dirt down to try and level off the road some. I was able to move it a few more inches level than it was but I need about another ten inches to truly make it safe! This meant I had to load rocks into the bucket to take back to the culvert. I need to line the entrance and exit with rocks to help harden it and to keep the dirt in place. I managed to get about 20% completed and will need to keep dragging rocks back. I need a little more dirt on the far side but it can now be driven over by a vehicle and trailer. Once it all settles down I will sprinkle it with some gravel in late summer.

I did go inside and measure the bathroom closet openings and now have dimensions for the frames. I have one frame all cut and sanded. I just need to assemble it now. We are going to cover the frames with tapestry a good friend of ours left to us. The quail all over the farm now! We see them multiple times a day in our front yard and back yard. They are starting to break up into smaller groups so hopefully they will start laying eggs soon.

Staycation 47% completed

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I keep thinking I am not getting things done but the blog helps keep me on track, if nothing else I can see that things are actually getting done. First thing Thursday morning I hung the corner shelf I made earlier in the week. The brackets came with a cute little 4” level to make sure you hung the shelf correctly. That afternoon the new cables and cable protectors arrived and Sarah and I put the router up onto the shelf. The 90 degree data cable ends really helped the cable stay next to the wall. I had to put an extension cord up to the shelf and plug in the two things behind the router. I was afraid you could tell but it is fairly invisible. This also gives us a better wifi signal throughout the house as the transmitter is higher up on the wall. There was only a small amount of disagreement. We basically agreed to disagree as neither one of us was listening or communicating effectively. This summer when the child and foreign child are home I am going to be spending a lot of time outside. I believe this is the wife’s number one complaint! Our old foreign exchange student, Monica is going to spend the entire summer with us. She is out of college for the summer and will be getting some experience on our farm with various animals. She also wants to learn how to drive a stick shift car. I offered to teach her how to drive the tractors but she was not as impressed by that as she had spent last year driving a skidsteer in a dairy setting. She has been working out so I see a lot of rock wall work getting done this summer.

When I went out to let everyone out of the barn I spent an hour digging straw and making sure we could open various gates. I used our new lightweight panels and built a run that would funnel the sheep to the back of the barn, so we could then run them through the chute and sort them. It was nice to be able to just put the panels on top of the straw and not have to dig down 18” to make the panels fit. Sarah and I were going to come out and sort off the female lambs so the new ram could not get them pregnant. The problem with this is no one likes being separated from their mother and they throw a continuously loud fit for several days over it. But it needs to happen as the sheep can technically get pregnant at 3 months old. We have never had any under 6 months old get pregnant but after 6 months all bets are off. We needed to count lambs also so we know how many we can sell.

I had spaghetti sauce on the stovetop. I use the melting burner to keep a really low heat on the pot. The problem with this is the sauce was not cooking down very fast and since Sarah and I were headed out to sort sheep at 1500 I figured I could turn up the burner and when we were done in an hour it would be ready for the final adjustment before dinner at 1700. I should have known better. It took us 135 minutes to get the sheep sorted! Annmarie came home around 1700 and found out that the sauce had just started to burn on the bottom of the pan. She was able to transfer it to a new pot, add a cup of water and finish it off. It tasted very good.

Sarah and I counted 42 lambs. It was supposed to be 20 boys, 22 girls, instead we had 21/21. I had to look at the online birth record and we tagged one of the girls with a boy tag because we ran out of tags, two of the boy lambs had managed to rip out their ear tags. One of the calmer ewes had a big bubble on the left side of her face. Sarah had sent me a picture so I brought a scalpel out to the barn. It is most likely an abscess and will need to be lanced and cleaned. The baby girls were crazy and kept ramming into the sorting chute and almost managed to jump back into the pen with the herd several times. We had to put up a second wall to keep them away. We pinned the face bulging ewe into the chute and it was an abscess, I cut about a 1.5” long horizontal incision and then squeezed out all the pus. It was really thick and would not have been easy for her body to get rid of it. I then cleaned it out and put some blue skin treatment on it. Unfortunately the skin treatment stains everything it touches and the ewe had started to swing her head around by this time and get it all over Sarah and I. Sarah got it the worst. We went inside to crow about our success and the first thing Annmarie asks us is why we did not sort off the boy lambs also? This way the ewes would get a break from making milk and burning so many calories and could maybe put on some weight. As there was no logical reason for us not doing this Sarah and I were kind of dumbstruck. Annmarie and I will be sorting them again next week.

On Thursday I was given the contact information for some people in the Hermiston area that were trying to sell their three alpaca who are only one year old. So I called them Friday morning and after morning chores I hooked up the stock trailer and went to Hermiston. I got all three intact boys, brothers, for $280. We now have 12 alpaca and will not be buying any more for years! They live 20 years and we will lose several in the next 1-2 years as they are just old.

The custom wood mill called Friday afternoon and said they wanted to cut the black walnut we had dropped off. I hooked up to the flat bed trailer, picked up Mr Professional and went to the custom cut mill. We talked about the pieces and how wide to cut them. The mill can only cut 24” piece but by the time you clear the edges we ended up with a solid 20” piece. The wood has so many colors! I was surprised at the variety of colors in it. In two hours they were only able to cut 1/3 pieces. On Monday I will go and get the other two pieces cut. We came out to the farm, cleared a spot in the old chicken coop, cleaned off all the sawdust and then unloaded it. Those nine foot pieces 3” thick weigh almost 200#. Once it was stacked we banded it together. It took a while to get the hang of the bander. I had never used one before. I did find a way to use the OSB sheets we have stacked out in the machine shed. We are going to put up black plastic to keep out moisture and light and hold it pinned up against the chicken wire to keep the rain out of the building. The building is about 1/3 full of wood. The OSB was $5/sheet as it was scrap so its perfect. I will keep each end open so the wind can still move through for circulation.

Staycation started

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well it’s official, I am on vacation at home for the next 17 days. I had to take the first batch of cows in on Friday morning. Unfortunately, Annmarie and I had a dinner to attend Thursday evening. So I was outside in the dark trying to move animals. We have it set up now so you can push animals through the orchard then through our front yard into the corral. This is infinitely more preferable to just letting them out into the area surrounding our houses. They can run all over and with the buildings and piles of stuff all around it makes herding them very difficult.

The two new alpaca were still in the orchard so I ”let” them out. This sounds easy but they did not want to go out the gate and kept running past the open gate. I did this several times then went out the open gate and tried to drive two of our main herd alpacas into the orchard. This was another abysmal failure. I had a head lamp on and I had a bright flash light that I would shine on the gate opening. I went back into the orchard muttering to the alpaca that they needed to comply or else I was going to have to go get the border collie, Mouse. They have not been exposed to the dogs except through the fence and I did want the conditions to be better before relationships get established. Eventually, with running back and forth I managed to get them to go through the gate, then latched it. I went down to pasture #5a which borders the orchard, latched the gate that goes out into the main grazing area and opened the gate into the orchard. The cows usually come in at night and hang out near my mother-in-law’s house and they were so I did not have to go all the way down to the school house and try and run them back. Again, the cows did not want to go through the gate. The green tag cow kept breaking and running behind me. This reminded me of why we are getting rid of her, she is so painful to deal with on multiple levels. After much effort on my part I was able to get the cows into the orchard. There was no way I was going to get them through the four foot gate, into our front yard then into the corral alone. I opted to go get some help that is used to my working animals language. Mouse, came out with me! It is hard to see a black and white border collie in the dark so we have some collar hanging bobs that strobe white. We used to use them when letting the dogs out to potty at night. They would pretend they could not hear us because we could not see them. The lights stopped that nonsense. I found one that still worked and put it on Mouse. This way I could see where the dog was and only had to worry about finding the cows with the flashlight. It was rough going initially. Mouse still thinks a problem should be dealt with head on hence his propensity for straight lines. Eventually with enough yelling and trial and error we established an effective communication method that allowed us both to kinda get what we wanted. Once we had the cows into the corral area they ran back behind the barn. Unfortunately, all of our cows happened to be in the barn lot and everyone started raising a ruckus and I was afraid the four would go through the fence to join the herd. Mouse and I managed to dissuade this desire and got them locked into the corral area. Now when I came out in the morning and backed the trailer up to the corral the cows can just be encouraged to load up.

The plan worked! I had no trouble getting the cows loaded and taken in to the abbotoir. That was the first four, I will take the last three in for their final destination in a couple of weeks. This is good because yesterday morning I went to pull the pickup over to the flat bed trailer and the pickup would not start, totally dead! Even though I had all the spare parts and tools with me on our Salem trip in case we got stranded this would have been bad. The last time I was stranded with Annmarie in the vehicle we bought a new pickup. She doesn’t like hanging out on the roadside. The pickup just needs some TLC which it will get as soon as I drop off the last three. Mr Professional got the new battery connection installed, unfortunately the old one was glued on and it took some extra tools to get it off the battery terminal without injuring the battery. I drove right over and we hooked up the flatbed trailer. While he worked on the battery I worked to clean up the seeder/fertilizer thrower. I used wire brush grinder to remove and smooth out all of the rust. I had to clean and adjust the window doors and scrape off the old caked on grease. I ended up breaking off one of the grease zerks trying to tighten it and had to use an easy out tool to remove it. Mr Professional put it on the tractor and greased it all up while I was off buying farm supplies.

We had a long discussion about needed supplies and since the price of fuel, spray, fertilizer and seed has jumped dramatically this last three weeks we felt it was best to get it all now. I have to say that I had plans to hold off on some of these items as I was going to purchase them over the entire year. I went to Pendleton and bought railroad ties (entire bundle)- they should be out of them by the end of this week. I bought the very last roll of smooth wire in the store. I bought some woven wire, I only needed one roll but bought two more just in case. I bought enough T posts to redo the fence down by four corners. The gate price had jumped over 20% already so I bought that also. We looked at chemicals to spray on the farm and I picked up the rest I would need for the whole year. I got the tighteners needed for the new fence on four corners. Today I just gave up and bought the ballast box I need for the kubota when using the forks. I also bought another quick hitch category 1 hitch for the Kubota. I bought a chain holder for the tractor also and some bushings for the category one hitch that lets me get away from the pins. I got a speed handle for the Kubota also, they are super nice and the one on the Mistress has been amazing. I just ordered all the lights for the machine shed. Luckily, I already ordered the parts for the baler and now just need to install them.

Unfortunately, this dramatic rise in price of everything means we will be doing a bunch of maintenance on all the equipment. We are going to rewire the flat bed trailer and the horse trailer. I purchased those supplies this weekend also. The fuel tank has been emptied so now I can get it filled with diesel, if only I had done it three weeks ago…

Mr Professional went out and spread about 35# of grass seed onto a few thin spots on field #1. We had a nice light rain last night 8/100” so the seed should be wet and now we just need some warm weather. I need about 5-7 days with no rain and I can plant the last 2 acre field with grass seed and the planting will be done until fall.

I have all the stuff to strip and stain the upstairs doors. But I need to empty off the breeze porch first, tomorrow the child and I will be going through the entire house and removing the giveaway. We may even add to the giveaway pile! My goal is to thin everything pretty hard. I went through two kitchen cupboards today and removed a pile of stuff.

Annmarie found the plans for our future outdoor dining area. We just need to find a used grain bin for sale to tear down and use the components. We also looked at my retirement projects using a welder and a lot of horse shoes! Currently, I think I may be able to make the chicken.

February catchup

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I got behind again on the blog. This is so easy to do if you do not just sit down and write every week. It can get away from you quickly. Kind of like the weather at the end of February. We got snowed on and it persisted. The alpaca were getting used to green grass then there was snow all over the ground and it was cold! It dropped down to -1 F! This of course caused much consternation as I have half a barn full of straw, not really hay. There are not enough nutrients in it to keep the animals going but I have a lot of it! There is so much I am unsure where I am going to store it all to make room for this year’s perfect and awesome hay that is going to be baled and stored in the barn for next winter.

Mr Professional and I went and bought another three ton of alfalfa from the rancher we had just purchased some from 6 weeks earlier. Both times we went over scales and paid per ton. The bales lost 6% of their weight in those six weeks. They went from 100# bales to 94# bales. I have never looked up how much weight is lost over a year when you talk about bales and dry out over a year even if stored inside. We have enough hay now to make it until spring to not have any leftover.

I had two of the new chickens die. One stayed outside and got eaten by something. I am not sure what as it tore its head off, tore both wings off and only ate a little of the body. It was pretty weird. But we did see a bald eagle flying around the property but I doubt it was a large predator bird as I would have expected one of them to just remove the chicken from the premises.

A week after the cold spell the snow just up and vanished. Our back runoff creek did not go up at all. This is very good news as it means that moisture dropped into the ground and soaked in. Now our front ditch which is fed by a spring has gone up quite a bit. The springs on our place are putting out a lot of groundwater. The fields all look really good!

Mr Professional also found a great deal on some cow scratchers and a pto driven seeder/fertilizer. All of it together was very reasonable. We just need to get them mounted, one on the upper property and one down on the lower property so the cows can use them both. We are going to hang fly powder directly above them so when they scratch the fly powder will fall down at the same time.

Tree killers

Steve HardinLeave a comment

There is supposed to be another winter storm coming in the next 24-36 hours. The temperature is supposed to drop to 10F and we are supposed to get 8-18” of snow in the mountains which will again cut off all traffic through the area. So I spent the last two days doing projects as the weather is going to limit my choices again. I got the fuel pump all assembled and working! I just need to pump out the five gallons of diesel and treatment I dumped into each side of the tank then I can get signed up for diesel fuel to be delivered on a quarterly basis. It will be nice to not have to go and fill up five gallon cans every week during the summer. I used some more gravel to widen the driveway. I want to eventually use up all of the gravel so I can move the entire pile to behind the grain bins. Yes, I did go with a hand fuel pump, we don’t use so much that hand pumping 5-8 gallons really is not onerous.

Mr Professional came out today and we worked on cutting down the maple tree in the backyard. The tree is shedding leaves everywhere, shading our garden, and once we cut it down it was rotten to the core! It had a 8” patch in the middle of the tree that was dry rot. I was saving the trunk to get it cut for lumber but once we found the rot in the middle of the tree it was only good enough to throw on the burn pile. We removed about 60% of the upper branches and then tossed the rest over the fence so I could retrieve them and use them to build up our ”burn pile/quail cover”. The quail love the pile of wood so we are hoping that by building it back up they will choose to stay longer or even roost in it overnight.

We leveled off the area with the tractors, unfortunately the temporary fence that is no longer dog proof had to be torn down. So now Mouse will be able to freely just run back and wolf down all the cat food without anything slowing him down. I will be buying some fencing materials so we can fix this fence in a couple of weeks after the weather warms up again. Of course the faucet back there is leaking and will need to be repaired in the spring. The spring projects are starting to pile up! I am taking some time off work next month to come home and relax. I will be spending that relaxing time stripping and staining doors. Annmarie would like an upstairs bathroom door. Currently there is no door whatsoever.

On my way back to the machine shed I encountered one of our sheep having a seizure or had just gotten hit in the head. I watched it for a couple of minutes but it seemed to be coming out of it. By the time we had the animals fed and let them all into the barn he was inside wandering around the barn. So he was able to walk over with the rest of the herd all on his own. I will be checking on him in the morning. All 100 quail were in the driveway when I came home. They just cannot decide were to run and hide. It is a hoot to watch!

I am still messing around with the night time picture taking.