Mr Rainman

Still doing Fall catchup

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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.

Winter is coming eventually

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I think Winter will show up eventually but it is slow in arriving. We have had a couple of hard freezes and I have actually scraped ice off of the vehicle windshields twice. Mr Rainman came out last weekend for a couple of days to help me. It is nice to have the help and I am still healing up from the pneumonia, a little pericarditis tends to slow you down some. The Winter chores need to get done so we worked on that Saturday. We stripped the garden clean and rearranged the beds so that different vegetables would be planted in different bins in the spring. I dug up the other half of the potato bin. I did decide to leave the beets in the ground that I planted late this fall. The greenery is still intact and has not wilted so I am going to let them grow/hibernate until the greenery dies. I planted one bin three weeks earlier than the other and it is doing much better. We had never planted beets before so it is a great experiment. Once that was done and we had the garden area ready for Winter the bulbs were next.

I had an entire vegetable crisper bin in the fridge full of flower bulbs. It was time to get them planted before the ground froze solid. Since the rock wall is only completed on the right hand side of the bridge I only wanted to plant bulbs on that side. After much contemplation and input from various sources I am going to have to rip out about 15 feet of completed rock wall on the left hand side. When I dug down I found the original base stones and I was using those as they lay. The wall is kicking out the further I get toward the barn. So I need to tear it back and scoot it closer towards the house and keep it in line with the right hand side wall. I may even put up a stake with a string! We tore down the fence and I had to bring over five loads of dirt and a load of rocks to finish getting the flower bed lined and height correct. We opened up the packages and read the planting instructions to determine the height of the final plant. We tossed out the packages based on height then laid out all of the bulbs on the surface of the dirt. Once we had them all laid out we planted them. Surprisingly, there were a lot of bulbs. We ended up planting a bulb almost every six inches throughout the entire flower bed. The tallest flowers are toward the edge of the wall so they will shade the short plants. I realize that appears backwards when you are driving in and walking down the sidewalk but from the house we will see more flowers. Most of the short bulbs are early risers and like partial shade. We will know next year how they do but they are in the ground! Once that was done we laid out the fence over the top of the entire flower bed to keep Chance from digging up the bulbs. So far it has been one week and she has not dug up any bulbs. She has another hole to China started and it is deep enough now that when she goes in it she disappears. This hole is of course in the front yard.

Mr Rainman had to leave after a few hours so I spent the rest of the day on the tractor working on building up our dirt levee over by the old chicken coop. I had extended the hill last year but the cows had torn it down to only about six inches high. This time I piled up the dirt and then proceeded to drive on it every time I went back for another scoop of dirt. This really helped compact it down. Once I had the entire thing done I ran over it again in two directions to compact it one more time. I am only looking for about 16” of berm. Those last two horrible floods could have been diverted back into the stream bed with a 12” berm. I am just trying to get the flood precautions all finished. I have one more thing to do, there is a downed tree in the dry creek bed that is backing up water. I need to cut the middle out of the downed branch so it doesn’t create an artificial dam and flood out field #1. Once I get that done all of the flood precautions that should help if we get another bad flood will be in place. There is no guarantee they will work but honestly, I would rather do all the work, guess and take precautions and never find out if they were necessary! It has taken me years to rebuild all of the stuff torn out, or up or altered by the flooding.

Treasures

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Sunday we went over to a neighbor’s house to finish getting his chicken coop ready for chickens. It now has chicken wire over all the windows and around the entire yard with bird netting over the entire chicken yard. He is all ready for chickens. I will hopefully be getting a few laying hens over there in the next week. He doesn’t want a rooster so I will have to get rid of the third rooster we now have. I usually only keep one rooster but we now have the chickens ranging up past the old chicken coop, behind the barn and up on the back hillside. Both roosters are trying very hard to keep apart and it is leading to a much wider roaming region.

Mr Rainman went over with me and we got our trailer loaded with an old cow feeder, a wind directional feeder, an old grain bin that used to be on a very old combine and an old cook stove. The cow feeder just needed rolled out into the pasture and filled with hay. The wind directional feeder needs a wire bucket installed so the hay will be contained while the horse is eating it. The grain bin is big and should hold a lot of grain but the entire bottom is rusted out. We poked holes in it while we were loading it. We knew this before we loaded it but reality set in when the tractor forks went through the floor. The stove just needs a wire wheel brush and some new stove black paint to get it back in shape.

We are going to put the stove in the gazebo. I will cut a vent hole in the door of the gazebo and make a covered wood pile out next to the corral. We won’t need that much wood and it will all have to be fairly small to fit into the fire box on the stove. The fire box and ash box are in great shape and do not need any repairs. The floor has to go into the gazebo before the stove can be set.

I will need to get some sheet metal to fix the grain bin. I am thinking 1/16” should be plenty thick. I am not sure what gauge of sheet metal that corresponds to, Google will have to tell me. Google says it is almost 14 gauge so I guess 14 gauge is what I will use. I will definitely need to practice first and I suspect the wire feed is going to be the key to my success when working with sheet metal.

The wheat field has gotten enough water to really shoot up and is doing well. The mild temperatures have been allowing it to grow.

Sickness cannot halt progress

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Sickness cannot halt production on the farm, it can merely sideline it! I was very ill last week and ended up catching pneumonia. Ever since that first bought of Covid my lungs have not snapped back and I get pneumonia pretty easily now. Of course I got it and finally had to reach out to my PCP when my oxygen saturations started to drop into the mid 80% range. This caused several days of missed work but Mr. Rainman was coming out for the weekend last week and I needed to take advantage of the help. The plan was to get the sand down and compacted in the Gazebo so that we could lay the pavers. There are about 1200 pavers that have to go down to fill up the space. This does seem like a lot but they just have to lay down then we can put special grout down and seal them all in place.

The real problem was we had still not managed to get the compactor to function correctly. We have done multiple things to get it going. We ended up having to change the oil as this model somehow gets fuel into the oil which then causes the motor to kill itself when it gets up to speed. Once we did that it worked but the throttle cable was still not working correctly and Mr Rainman ended up touching the hot exhaust plat and burning a couple of bolt patterns into his palm. We decided that this project was going to have to wait until the spring. We need to fix the throttle cable again and we need some water available to water down the sand as we compact it. I managed to find a throttle cable that is used on a concrete cutter that allows you to set it at various locations and the cable will not retract with vibrations. I have ordered said cable and it should be here this week. I am sure I will have to fabricate some type of holder to hold it in place but if the throttle cable stays in place it will be worth it. I just need to get a tarp and cover up the compactor for the winter. This chewed up five hours trying to get things up and going before we finally just called uncle and gave up. There is a plan in place and we will pick it up in the spring.

I have several other items that need to get done before the ground freezes so I have to pivot my to do list to get these items knocked out soon. If I were not sick they would have been done now but I have been having to rest. Rest is a four word cuss word when you are talking to a farmer/rancher. It is fairly derogatory and tends to get in the way of all progress. It is not one I like to hear in regard to my work output. I have been hearing it a lot lately from a lot of different directions. Ultimately, despite my will I have been forced to rest and recuperate.

Haying more done

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In a self defense move, I rolled all of the completed bales to the outside of the upper field. I was pretty certain I was going to have to pick them up alone and I wanted to make it easier on myself. I also wanted to leave the upper field clean so after I moved all the completed bales I went through the entire field again and raked it up a second time into four long rows. I managed to get another 20 bales out of the leftover grass from the first baling.

I left the bottom for an around a week, the Gingerman went over and raked it up into rows so I could sleep after working the night shift. It rained a 1/4” of rain later that week so I let it sit for a few more days before turning it again. I then let it sit for another five days in the hopes that it would dry out.

When I went over to bale it I had loaded up on shear bolts so the toolbar was all ready for me to repair any issues. I broke almost 25 shear bolts just baling the small bottom area. I would get close then an entire section of wet damp grass would jump into the baler and break the shear bolt! There was a very large amount of swearing involved in getting that field all baled up. By the time I was done it was taking me about three minutes to replace the shear bolt and get the tractor up and going again.

I had Mr Rainman for two days last weekend and we concentrated on getting the lower bales picked up one day. We were able to load up 30 bales into the back of the pickup, strap down each of the three rows and then creep up the steep rocky road in 4wd low. We only lost part of one load when the strap popped loose. We put 30 bales into each cow feeder at the house. So we filled all three feeders, one for the female pregnant cows, one for the feeder cows below and then one in Alcatraz. Currently, the only animals in Alcatraz are our three rams. Eventually, we will have to sort off the bull and put him in there with the rams.

We took the wettest bales and dumped them out for feed to be immediately eaten. Unfortunately, despite the farm looking like a food desert the cows and sheep are ignoring the lush green grass available in the feeders. Obviously, they know something we do not.