Mr Rainman

Predators 5 / Farm 1

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We have been leaving the dogs outside at night this summer. The puppy has been raising Cain some nights but the few times I have gone outside to look, I have not spotted anything. The side effect of the dogs being out is that the sheep from the upper and lower pasture come in next to our yard in the evenings so the puppy can watch and patrol the yard. We have not lost any sheep to a predator since we started doing this, stupidity yes but not a predator. You cannot fix stupid.

We picked some plums from our orchard today. Another side effect of the puppy patrolling the yard is the deer are not coming in near the house. Every piece of fruit in the orchard is untouched by four legged animals, this is amazing! A first for us since we started the orchard. I had thought up plans to raise the fence another four feet and just leaving the dogs out at night has fixed it. We don’t even have the dogs in the orchard. My fence raising plans are on hold now. Because we are storing our fruit ladder in the orchard now we can selectively pick the fruit as it ripens. This will stretch out our fruit supply. The ancient pear tree (120 years we think) is going to die. It survived splitting but now it is getting some brown all throughout its leaves. I may get lucky and get one of the shoots to survive. I had one that was about five years old and I thought it was going to be a replacement and it up and died on me. As an added bonus I spent 15 minutes tossing fallen apples from orchard over the fence for the animals. They are starting to realize that the fruit is falling so they come check the alleyway twice daily looking for sweet treats.

I was switching sprinklers on the front hillside this week and found a dead possum. This is the second possum that has been killed. It was just dead. It either fell out of the tree or the puppy broke its neck. She doesn’t maul them or anything, she just protects her yard. Mouse (older border collie) just hides under the bridge footing. He has dug a nice hole under there to hide and stay out of the heat.

Wednesday night the puppy, Chance, was just going to town and would not shut up. This woke me up and even without my hearing aids it was annoying enough to get me out of bed. It was pitch black outside and I needed to retrieve the pistol and flashlight from the car, so I just ran outside in my slippers in the buff, the uniform of all night time farm predator responses. I ran out to the car, grabbed the flashlight and started panning around the farm. I spotted both herds of sheep and the alpaca. There was a cat under the flatbed trailer but nothing requiring my attention. I went over to the side of the yard and spotted the chicken coop and yard to make sure nothing was trying to get at my chickens, nope. Just before going inside I decided to pan the flashlight over the back garden. I spotted four pair of eyes on the back hillside near the creek. I whipped open the gate and ran down the sidewalk toward the creek and spotted four raccoons! I opened fire with the 22 pistol. It does not take long to throw ten bullets downstream at four targets. I was hitting them, at least two for sure but they don’t go down easily. I ran out of lead. This has now required me to break out the second clip to carry out with me at night. I got up the next night due to Chance’s barking but there was nothing but skunk smell. Luckily, it did not get on the dogs. Annmarie doesn’t credit me for any predator control until there is a body. I tell her its not like fishing stories but somehow she doesn’t believe me. Running around naked in the summer is a lot more pleasant than the winter!

Predators spotted so far this year are raccoons, skunk, coyotes and possum. I have two raccoon traps at the mother in law’s house but so far they have not yielded anything. They are eating her cat food and she knows they are around. The coyote has not been spotted in over two weeks.

Alpaca shearing time

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It’s getting hot! The alpaca needed shearing about a month ago but with vacation and haying they seem to always get put off until July. I thought it was going to be easier this year. I honestly think this every year and seem surprised when it isn’t. I had three unused blades and had kept all of my used blades from last year. I figured I could use the old blades on the old alpaca as their coat is fairly thin compared to the young alpaca.

Mr Rainman and I pushed the alpaca toward the barn lot. I had picked some green apples off of the trees and had attempted to bribe them to follow me but they were not buying what I was selling. So instead we steered/chased them to the barnyard. When everyone was in the front of the gate I tossed the green apples into the barn lot and they all ran in to eat them. So I guess the apples did help just not when I wanted initial results. We had one of the alpaca from last year with a missing eye that was again starting to drain. It did not heal up over the winter. Before we let everyone out I put him down so the flies didn’t get into his head literally.

We sheared Snoop first, he is the calmest and mellowist old man. He just laid there and let me shear all his fiber off. He is so easy in every way, even when he is being antisocial toward his buddies he likes us. We have treats! We caught one of the older brown alpaca (I cannot remember his name) and sheared him, again very easy.

Then we caught Padre. Padre was not happy, he was less impressed when we held his head, turned his eyelid inside out and got the cheat grass from under his eyelid out. We then irrigated his eye and cleaned up all the gunk. He is halter trained so he did follow us into the milk shed and stood next to the shearing table. But he is huge, by far and away the largest alpaca we own, probably around 150#. It was all Mr Rainman and I could do to get him up onto the shearing table. Once he was up there he started to growl. Mr Rainman equates growling with getting spit on. He also has a weak stomach and dry heaves at everything nasty. So the more Padre growled the more Mr Rainman thought about gagging and dry heaving. I honestly think the alpaca knew what he was doing. The old blades did not work at all. Padre has very thick hair and required 1.5 blades to get his whole body cleaned off. Unfortunately, the last little bit was hard to get off with a dull blade so his hair cut did leave some questionable styling. We finally just had to be done as Padre kept getting more and more agitated. He was basically sounding like a motorcycle and jumping every time he was touched. We suspect that someone was fairly rough with him when he was younger.

Annmarie had me make some hobbles from a piece of rope that are self tightening and they worked great. We were doing pretty good on time about 20 minutes to shear Snoop and 40 minutes to shear Padre. I did cut Padre’s toenail a little too deep and made him bleed. We had to use the clotting powder which sort of worked.

Once that was done, we were done as there were no more sharp blades. I went in and printed a sharpening order and packaged the blades up and had Sarah ship them off that day. They should be back in 7-10 days. I did order some more ceramic cutters. I like the ceramic ones better than the metal ones. We then went out and fixed the fiber tumbler so it could be stretched out on its side and the leaf blower used on it to blow the loose fiber and dirt free. I even attached two eyebolts to the machine shed uprights so Annmarie could stay inside the machine shed and blow the fiber clean.

She tried this the next day and it worked great. Now she wants to be able to wash the fiber. I just need to find the skirting rack we made a few years ago. I am not having much luck with that task. I have looked everywhere now except the barn and the woodshed. I even checked in the root cellar! There were a lot of spider webs but no skirting rack. She processes the young alpaca fiber and we use the old animal fiber as matting to toss down and keep the areas weed free. It works pretty good for that.

Catch up

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Last weekend was utilized as catchup time. After being gone for a couple of weeks we still had more things to complete to get ready for summer. Annmarie went and got two huge pots for our front entrance. We have a few volunteer lavender plants coming up in our patch and wanted a place for them. We are also going to put a wooden post in the pots so we can hold open the porch gates. We really only need them closed when the sheep are in the yard. Both dogs know how to open them both ways! So they are not a deterrent to them when it comes to getting on the front porch. The planters were heavy and did not provide a great spot to grab onto when moving them.

On Friday I drove over to LaGrande and picked up our second ram (Remie). I just put the animal pickup enclosure on and he rode in that. We want the sheep to lamb in a timely fashion and believe that if there is competition then all of the ewes will get impregnated in a single cycle. So we will have 2 rams and 45 ewes. We put both rams in the corral for about 36 hours to make sure they would cohabitate nicely. There was a lot of butt sniffing but they never fought. We let them out with the ewes and they are doing just fine. I cannot see that they are doing their job but we will know in five months if they are.

Saturday was spent cleaning up around the farm. The footings for the bridge were started. They have to be dug out first then I can build the concrete wooden footings and put some metal in the hole then it can be filled with concrete. We are going to use my small electric concrete mixer when we do it. It will only mix about 200# of sackrete at a time. It’s going to take a while to get the footings poured.

The sprayer had to be cleaned out and set back up on the tractor. Mr Rainman worked on that. We had a couple of plugged nozzles from the last usage and he went through the entire setup and got it all cleaned up. He also greased and filled all tractor fluids on both tractors. Mr Flow is going to work on cutting thistles down along the back creek. It’s not glorious work but it needs to be done. Once the thistles are knocked down then he can clean out the chicken coop.

I was pretty sure we had a chicken predator as I could only find five chickens once we got back from vacation and was only getting one egg a day. So on Sunday, Mr Rainman and I worked on skirting the old house. I crawled under it first to make sure there were no dead animal carcasses. Lo and behold there was a passel of live chickens. We chased them out by me tossing rocks and Mr Rainman beating on the outside skirting. Otherwise, I would have been crawling and chasing chickens under the building. Once the chickens were out we locked them up in the coop and proceeded to skirt the building. We also built an enclosure around the laser vent fan to keep the weather off of it. Once that was done we built a rain lean to over the fan enclosure and outlet to prevent water from getting on any of it. This was supposed to happen a while ago but got put on the back burner.

I have started working on the freezer room floor. I need to cut diagonal floor supports to make the floor level. The only problem was I burned up the table saw blade and I have multiple replacements for the radial arm saw and hand skilsaw, but none for the table saw! I need to cut five more and we can then shim the floor level and get it down. This is the next big thing for the old house remodel. Once the floor is in I can slap up the wall from scrap plywood I have saved for this purpose. I can then move all three freezers and install some shelves into the room. Once that is done its onto my room! I think I have enough wood scraps for the walls to be sheeted so its pretty much installing two doors and finish the wiring and insulate two walls. I expect it to take me a year or more to finish my side. I really need to just focus on getting all of the switches and outlets installed.

Due to the heat I had to come up with a way to keep water and Gatorade cold. The front spring is 40F year round so I took an old broken bucket and placed it in the ditch and filled it with drinks. It doesn’t keep them ice cold but they are cool and easy to drink plus its free.

569/900 round bales

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We were trying to get things straightened out mid June on the farm so we could go on vacation for a couple of weeks. We were going to leave the country and visit our other daughter, Monica in Glasgow where she is going to college. Mr Rainman and I were trying to get all of the hay put up before we left but the rain was not cooperating. Nor was the paying job as it kept me away from haying. Despite Mr Rainman attempting to get all the hay done before he went on vacation also we had to leave 1/3 of field #1 on the ground as it was too wet to bale.

The Gimp came out one day while I was working and helped Mr Rainman pickup baled hay from field #1. They put it all in the lamb shed as the barn was ready to stack from seven foot to sixteen foot height and The Gimp did not want to lift bales that high. I appreciate the help and we need hay out in the lamb shed this winter anyways so it kills two birds with one stone. The Gimp did express some muscle soreness occurred the next day. They are no longer suffering from a bum leg but nicknames do not get changed, they are assigned on the first day and last forever!

While we were out of the country there was a large fire adjacent to our property. The neighbor’s field directly across the gravel road caught fire. Sarah did not call us because it did not come onto our property, someone else told us so we called her. She was taking care of feeding the animals while we were gone.

The puppy, Chance, is turning out to be a very pretty girl. She is very smart and probably our most athletic dog we have ever owned. She can jump the back yard side fence in the yard and now when she wants to eat the cat food off of the elevated table she no longer jumps up with her front paws only. She just jumps up onto the table like the cats and gets easy access to all of the food. She does the same thing in our raised garden beds. She is a menace, the only good thing is we have not taught this one how to go over/under/through fences. I am still amazed we did that the first time, it was convenient when we were out in the fields but so problematic when it came time to keep the dog in the yard!

I bounce

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Haying is still going on every day and night. I am able to crawl on the tractor in the evening and work into the night to get the hay cut or turned. Mr Rainman comes out and does the actual baling during the day and I am able to do all the prep work after the paying job. It does make for some long days. Of course since we are haying it has decided to rain some more. It never fails, if I want it to rain I just need to cut some hay and get it on the ground.

It of course rained today delaying the baling process for a few hours. Mr Rainman tried to get the wrapped hay into the barn to get it out of the rain. So when I came home tonight we used the moisture tester to sort out the dried bales from the damp bales and moved the damp ones out of the barn to sit upright outside to dry. I decided we needed to go to the ceiling with the next batch of hay. Mr Rainman did not want to walk on the edge of the leaning bales. So I climbed up on top of the bales and started to stack the pile higher. It was time to get down off the pile and Mr Rainman was outside getting more bales off of the trailer when I decided to get down. This was a good and needed decision, except my method of getting down is fairly questionable. I decided that jumping off of a seven foot high pile to land on a 18 inch wide bale. I was able to land on top of the bale then it promptly squirted out the side and I hit my right elbow, left arm, middle of back and right hip. I did NOT hit my head! I did make a fairly impressive thumping sound as I hit the floor and bounced off. Mr Rainman came running hoping I did not hurt anything. He was afraid of all the flack he would catch if I injured myself. The wife stated later she would not blame him for anything I did on the farm. She figures I will have done something to deserve it.

I am going to hurt in the morning. I can already feel all of the muscles tightening all over my back, right arm and side. I hope I can get to sleep tonight easily.