Mr Rainman

First hay in the barn

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It is time, haying season is officially here. I went out and inspected the fields last week. The cheatgrass is a menace. Fields that I tried to replant in the fall with new grass are nothing but solid cheatgrass. Fields that were full of cheatgrass last year are not this year. So we are mowing the cheatgrass down wherever we find it and just haying where I can find big patches of good grass.

The lower schoolhouse pasture looked pretty good this year so it got cut on Sunday. The new sickle bar mower cut through the whole field in under two hours. I then turned it after work twice in the late evening. I was able to finish just as the sun was going down so I did not have to use the work lights on the tractor. Wednesday it was ready to be baled.

Mr Rainman came out Wednesday to start baling. He had to wait until it warmed up a little and burned off the dew. He managed to get the first bale made but could not get the net wrap to roll out like it was should have. I came home to trouble shoot it, I should have known that the first time operating the baler for the year was not going to go smooth. I was hoping it would! I washed the feed roller, no go. I then verified net was installed correctly and finally I just pulled some of the netting loose from the roll. The roll was very dusty as it has been on the baler since last year. I think I may need to cover the baler with a tarp this year after we get done and get it cleaned up. Once we got the first roll wrapped the clean netting worked just fine on the next bale. He was off and going and managed to bale the entire lower field, 133 bales in a about 3 hours. I came home, we hooked up the flat bed trailer to the pickup and went out into the field and picked it all up. The first 83 bales went into the barn. The next 50 bales made it to the barn lot but not inside. Their were about 3-4 bales that had a moisture reading over 20%. So we spread the bales out on the trailer so the sun and weather could heat them up for a few days.

The weather was cooperating fantastically until last night. We had a storm come through last night and drop 11/100” of rain on us in under an hour. So now the bales will need to stay out in the weather a little longer. I had big plans on cutting new hay down yesterday but I had to prioritize the paying job an spent most of the day working. When I came home I was tired, took a nap in the yard for an hour and then Annmarie told me to just do it the next day. I took her offer and by the time the rain showed up I was grateful that I had not cut any grass. I will have to wait another day now before I can cut hay. This rain should give my field #1 a needed boost. That is going to be the field I cut last. There are 50 bales to a ton this year. The bales are 40-45# this year. The grass looks great and since we are only doing small batches it is very green and lovely hay.

Haying season is starting soon

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Haying season is starting soon. Our weather went from warm and wet to hot and dry in a very short time. This has caused the grass to shoot up and made me realize that I had better get ready for hay season. Unfortunately, there are always other tasks to complete on the farm and there is very little single task focusing allowed.

So on Friday I went over to LaGrande in the pickup to get four cut and wrapped beef. The fifth one had gone to Ascension Camp in Cove. I agreed to pick up the four that were on this side of the mountain. So I went over first thing and had them all loaded up into the back of the clean pickup bed. I had washed it out the night before in preparation for this task. They bag it! I was expecting cardboard boxes which is how I have always received cut and wrapped meat. The bags were easier to handle but wow did they not hold the cold very well. I made three stops before getting home and by the time I got home we ended up having round steak the next night due to the thawing that occurred from the bags.

The meat tasted great as always. It is definitely grass fed and it is obvious when you look at a steak. The meat is very dark and not very pink (fat filled). Our freezer is now full again but we have a lot of ground beef left over from the cow before this one. So more hamburger is on the menu.

While I was doing that Mr Rainman came out and starting to mow all of the cheat grass around the farm. Three fields I planted with grass are nothing but solid cheat grass. So basically worthless to use as fodder for the animals. So we are trying to get all of it mowed down before the heads become mature. I am also trying to see exactly how much needs to be harvested. Some fields that were wonderful last year are now mostly cheat grass and others that were mediocre last year are very good. There is no rhyme or reason as to why some fields have turned. Although, if I worked the field with the cultivator the cheat grass seeds are taking over! The fields that I left alone are the ones that are doing great this year.

I spent most of Saturday mowing and cleaning up the edges of fields that are going to get harvested. I saw lots of quail but not once did I spot a coyote or any other type of predator running around on the place.

Sunday once I got back to the farm, Mr Rainman and I put the new sickle bar mower on the Kubota so I could start cutting hay tomorrow evening after my real job. It went on fairly easy but when I ran the blades there was a horrible clacking. I turned it off and looked closely. It appears that at the end of last years haying season I broke the bar mower and failed to fix it all winter/spring. I don’t specifically remember this but it is fairly obvious that I did it. Because I have had to help repair this exact problem I knew what it was. It’s a broken bolt near the rocker arm. The only real problem is this is a special bolt that is shaped and rounded on one end then it bolts through the back half of the arm and onto a stop nut that must be inserted as you screw in the bolt or the nut won’t fit. I do not have any spare parts for the newer sickle bar mower. So I went and “borrowed” parts from the other small Italian sickle bar mower. The bolt was too long and the threads need to go down the shaft about 1/4” more. Luckily, I had gotten tired of this exact scenario a few years ago and had purchased a metric 110 piece tap and die set. My father was a machinist and I had learned how to create threads from him. I just needed to extend the threads. Luckily, I had the correct die and was able to extend the thread. We got it all together and got it all greased up. It is now ready to start cutting some hay!

If it fails to rain tonight I will be cutting hay when I get home tomorrow! Mr Rainman has figured out that if we use a leaf blower on the tractor and mower it is a faster than trying to use an air hose. The air hose is now only needed for the radiator. The rest is much faster and effective to use the leaf blower. I had to order farm diesel fuel which should be delivered this week.

I am now trying the electrolyte replacement powder “liquid IV’ in my water when I am out and about. My hope is it will let me tolerate the heat better than I did last year. It doesn’t taste that great but it did stave off any headache. I will use it a few more times and see if it really works.

Bee swarm success!

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The bees are helping us out. We had just purchased two more used hives with miscellaneous bee working tools and ordered a second full hive kit. I had just assembled the new hive and we were deciding where to store all of the stuff when Mr Rainman spotted a bee swarm. We were outside working and the bees started to swarm and he came over and asked me what was going on. They are very loud and become a cloud of bees before they settle down onto something. They ended up in a tree on an old magpie nest. Way too high to mess with trying to catch them. I thought it was a missed opportunity. About an hour later Mr Rainman spotted them all massed up on one of our lavender plants! It was one of the grey plants that have not yet started to green up but they were inside the bush.

I decided to give reclaiming it a go. I had never attempted it nor worked the bees. Annmarie does the bee work usually but I did not want to miss out on a free colony. I donned the bee suit, Mr Rainman had to help me zip it up as I could not figure it out once I had it on. He took some pictures and attempted to film it until he got stung on the forehead. I just knelt down and started scooping the bees out of the bush and putting them into a plastic starter set we had just picked up. I did that for a while until the bees were good and upset. I could not reach down into the bush and was only able to get about half of them and I figured the queen was still in there. I had a full honey frame that I slipped into the starter box in the hopes that it would attract the bees into it. It did attract the bees but they just went in and ate all of the honey! They took it back to the mound.

I was working on the driveway when Mr Rainman spotted them swarming again. They flew up into a tree near the barn, again out of reach. They came back to the lavender about an hour later on a different greener bush this time. I had the starter box out there already so I had Mr Rainman take the new hive box I had just assembled and put it out in the lavender with the hope that they would migrate into it.

By the time Annmarie came home they had not moved. My set out houses idea was not working. So she went out and took the super, removed some frames so there was only five in the box and set it on a diagonal over the bees with the lid on it. Just before we went to bed I put on a bee hood and gloves only and went out to check on them in my short sleeve shirt. They had gone into the box and were on the frames. So I picked up the box, put it on a bottom and put the lid back on. I was going to do more but working in a bee hood with a head lamp is not super conducive to actual work and the bees were starting to get upset. I realize that as we get more comfortable around the bees we will wear less protective gear. If you are calm and don’t hurt them they are pretty passive, you just have to stay calm and move in a controlled manner. It definitely takes some practice.

The next morning she went out, closed off the hive and moved it to the new area we set up out in the orchard. Eventually, we will get the hive from the lavender patch moved out into the orchard, but it is full of bees and heavy so it needs to be moved as an entire unit early in the morning when its cool.

Annmarie watched a You Tube video on how to clean bees wax and make wax pellets. There was a full honey super of no plastic insert frames in the used hives we just purchased. So I cut them all off and am now filtering the honey out so we can harvest the bees wax also. She cleaned up the little bit of wax we had collected last year and made pellets out of it. Once I get the honey out of this crushed wax mess we will take the wax out to the hive and the bees will clean it all up then we can harvest the wax. They are far more efficient at finding all of the honey then I am.

Spring catchup and yard improvements

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We are working on getting everything caught up and ready to go before our vacation. The yard is getting watered and all of the hoses are getting repaired and we are going to try and get the ram pasture back in shape and get some actual grass length on it. The sheep use it as a pass through spot and always eat it down to nothing every year. I am surprised it comes back annually, Mr Rainman has been cleaning up the garden area, he cleaned off the old house porch and burned both slash piles we created over the winter. We still have a bunch of dead branches down by the spring head that need cleaned out and tossed on the slash pile.

He brought a bunch of compost (sheep manure and straw) over to the lavender patch to fill the horse trough. We are going to plant strawberry plants in the trough so they don’t take over the entire patch of ground. All of the hoses got laid out and connected to automatic timers. Annmarie will program the lavender and berry timers. She has been working on the garden every weekend. It is all planted as of this weekend. The elevated beds have vegetables and all of the wine barrel halves have herbs in them. We are also going to plant marigolds in planters between all of the elevated beds. We are hopeful that they will help with the bug issues and keep them away. If nothing else they are more flowers for the honeybees. We also seeded wildflower seed over three spots in an attempt to get more flowers up and going for the bees.

I was able to offload the side by side today. I just need to run the wiring for the machine shed across two more bays so it is out of the way. I will now have room to easily park both tractors under cover. I also cleaned up in front of the machine shed and beside it. I moved a lot of alpaca poop and some piles of dirt. I want to bring the old lamb shed up next to the machine shed. As of right now I could start using it to store all of the scrap metal I use for welding repairs and the fencing tools. I can build some racks and shelves for the metal. This will let me move three more pallets out of the machine shed. My mother-in-law wants me to move the old Dinky tractor, the very first brand new tractor ever purchased for the farm, into that corner spot. It is currently hidden across our driveway in and amongst a lot of other stuff. Everyone would be able to see the tractor when they come over to visit in the new location. It will just depend on how hard it is going to be to move the old lamb shed.

The entrance driveway is over 1/4 mile long and was starting to get pretty rutted. I spent a few hours yesterday with the John Deere tractor and tore up the road with the box blade hooks until I had broken up the surface pretty good then raised the hooks and used the box portion to spread out the gravel evenly. I usually do this right after a rain storm but the little tractor was at my mother’s house last time it rained. The road is very smooth now and won’t need any attention for a few months.

Predators 3/ Farm 0

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Well the predators are definitely bold! We lost one lamb in the orchard in late January and we lost two more lambs in the orchard last night! The lambs had not had rigor set in by the early morning and neither were torn up but one was missing its entire abdominal cavity contents. I noticed the magpies fighting out in the orchard on my way to work and messaged Mr Rainman to check when he came out. He is coming out a couple of days a week to help out.

Due to this calamity between the houses we are no longer letting the sheep stay in the orchard overnight. They are getting moved into the barn lot at night. We think its a coyote, both of our dogs sleep in kennels inside at night. We are going to look into some solar motion activated lights. I think there is a solar set of red eyes that you mount on the fence at predator eye height to scare them away. I will need to do more research on that item. The funny thing is I have not seen a coyote this year at all. Our 11 month lambs running around on the back hillside have all survived, only the lambs have been killed. We have woven wire fences already.

I am mowing the yard again with the sheep. It’s just easier and more environmentally friendly! Again, the sheep poop is very wet and slimy due to all of the green grass but they are working on the yard. They like the hillside better as the grass/clover on it is shorter. They like to eat the short grass first before eating the tall grass. It’s pretty weird.

The puppy Chance is doing well when we use her to work the sheep and cows on a lead. I had the sheep in the front yard so the dogs are in the backyard. Our side fence is low and temporary and Chance decided yesterday that jumping the fence and playing with the sheep was fun. It was fun for her but not the sheep. She totally went crazy, running around, running into the herd, biting everything she could touch. She would not listen and would not follow “down” command. There was zero off switch. I had to wait until she grabbed a sheep then grabbed her. She spent the rest of the day on the overhead run. No way to get loose and as long as the sheep stay away she cannot harm anything. We spent a lot of the day going into the “down” command with me across the yard or from the road. There will be a lot more training to teach her that she is to herd the sheep, not chase or bite them.