Rambler

Cleanup day

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Sunday we focused on getting the Rambler set up to grind grain. I walked him through it for about 20 minutes then cut him loose. We had two 55 gallon drums set by the grinder and we set it up next to the chicken coop so he could just carry the buckets into the back of the coop and dump them into drums. There is no way to move the full drums into the back of the coop so this has to be done a bucket at a time. He did pretty good but as soon as he was close to getting finished we brought over two more drums full of grain. He thought he was done and Mr Rainman and I told him there was more after this and he just needed to keep going. We ended up loading four more 55 gallon drums into the back of the chicken coop and we still need to fill 2.5 drums. I am sure once they are all full we will be able to go eight months.

I have an old grain bin that can be mounted outside the coop and a feed hole can be cut into the side of the building. It should hold about 800# and can be loaded from the outside. It needs a new bottom welded on it. I am thinking a piece of 3/32” sheet metal. I am sure the grain gate will need to be altered so it can be manipulated from inside the building. I may even move the gate to the bottom of a long chute so it can be placed inside the coop. I won’t really know until we have the bin moved over to the machine shed and we can take some measurements.

Once the Rambler was set we went to clean up the old house. Annmarie wants the porch cleared so we neatened it and removed the scrap wood. The inside still had tools and materials scattered about from the bathroom project. So we created a huge trash pile and started to put tools away. Tools went into the old house, the old chicken coop, the machine shed and the fencing shed. The Gingerman brought out some more concrete chunks and we dumped them next to the culvert in an attempt to harden the one edge from the flooding water. Hopefully, we will not see any more flooding! But since the weatherman has a hard time predicting the weather, who really knows if it will flood.

There is a little frog living in the root cellar! It is bouncing between the top three stairs. If it likes spiders then there is a lot of food down there. I had to clean out all of the cobwebs before I could go down the stairs. The entire stair area was full of cobwebs. It had been a while since I had been down there. I store all of the construction materials that are unique and we may need to repair in the future. I put some bathroom tiles and metal trim down in the root cellar.

The sheep have been hollering like they are dying. No one likes to get weaned. We had a hard time driving the tractor through the barn lot as the sheep on both sides kept trying to bum rush the gate every time it was opened. The babies had managed to crawl under the creek crossing so we went out and lowered the panels so they cannot get out.

After that we went out and cleaned up amount 75% of the machine shed. We had filled the trash can up already so there is a large pile in the machine shed. I will keep throwing some in every week until I make it vanish. There were parts bins and tools all over from when I was repairing all of the haying equipment. I also replaced the outlet on the wall. I had been too aggressive with a screwdriver the day before trying to reset the GFI trip, it does work again.

We then trimmed the trumpet vine away from the roof and the house siding. I am trying to get a runner onto the new section of trellis around our living room window. It is looking promising. I would like to get a few branches trained then I can kill all the other suckers coming out of the ground. We tossed all the cuttings over the fence for the sheep. They love to eat most plans and trumpet vine is no exception.

I spent the last half an hour with the Rambler. He had stopped grinding to think about a more efficient way to grind grain. So we were so efficient with my system that he could hardly keep up with the grinder unloading and loading and moving the ground material into the chicken coop. He was covered in flour and looked like a ghost. He had it out with the sheep early on as they kept sneaking up on him to stick their nose in and get some grain. Before he knew it he had 20 sheep pushing in and trying to get a mouthful of grain. By the time I came over in the afternoon there were no sheep around. They decided it was easier to find a meal elsewhere. We did end up dumping out one bag of grain that had too many rocks in it. The sheep do not care and will eat it in any fashion offered. I may take the sheep in to the auction. We know someone who took little ones in and got $120-140/each. I would gladly take that price. I need to look at my work calendar to decide when it will be feasible to take a Tuesday off to drive them over to the auction.

I did find out that the dead raccoon was on the fence and had not been moved out to the bone pile. So I had to use a shovel to scoop it up and toss it in the tractor bucket for its eternal resting trip.

Our plan in two weeks is to work the cows to tag and band the calves. There are still only three calves from our six cows. One of the cows was fairly young so it is not surprising she does not have a calf. We did have one of the cows slough a baby, it looked malformed and incomplete, so there is really only one slacker.

Sheep sorted

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Mr Rainman came out on Saturday to help me out. He is only coming a few days a month now. So I had some things planned out so we could get as much done as possible. He brought a new helper out a young man who was excited to come out to the farm but has never really been exposed to farm life. He will be forever known as the Rambler. Great kid but is prone to large amounts of nonstop prose. We pulled the cracked grain 55 gallon drums out of the barn and took them around to the chicken coop. The Rambler had to move them a bucket at a time into the back of the chicken coop. The plan is to get about 2000# of cracked grain done up for the winter. We now have three 55 gallon drums and three metal trash cans out in the back of the chicken coop. I think I can fit at least two more 55 gallon drums, maybe three. That should get us at least six months, probably eight months.

The plan was to have the Rambler crack grain all day. I had to buy a new grain cracker for $200 as I could not just buy the mill half of the contraption. We have saved over $2k in feed so $200 is a great investment. I have sorted the rocks out of four drums worth of grain so the Rambler was going to be able to go nonstop for hours just grinding grain. Unfortunately, someone in Pilot Rock hit a telephone pole and knocked out the power. Before we figured that out I had brutalized the outlet in the machine shed and played with the feeder breakers. When the power came back on the outlet did not work. We will move the cracker and grain over to the chicken coop area so the Rambler can just crack it all in place.

So instead of doing that we went out and picked our rose plum tree. The thing was loaded and sagging down. It only broke one branch but I had about 8 2×4 branch supports in place to keep them from breaking. We picked about 150# of sweet tart plums. They are pretty good, but the tree next to it had these huge round blush plums but there were only about 20 on the entire tree, they were there last week and there were none this week. The yellow jackets have been eating them once they sugar up.

The tree growing in with the apricot tree that I thought was an apricot tree is a plum tree. I think they grafted the apricot tree onto the plum roots and the suckers that came up are actually plums. We were able to pick two plums from that tree and they were very good. This late fall we are going to butcher a lot of the trees to shape them and top them. We ran out of boxes and had to start using paper bags. We finally gave up and left about 15# to the yellow jackets. They were too hard to get to and we already had more than was needed by a long shot.

It is time to put the rams back in with the ewes so we can have lambs the end of December. But first, we had to rearrange the barn so we could sort in it and then we had to get the sheep up into the barn. This ended up causing us to use the dog to get them back into the ram pasture. She did great then we got them behind the barn and needed to push them inside. The dog was not a lot of help. She got too excited and did not listen, we had to put her back in the yard.

The Rambler had never worked animals and was surprised when we grabbed the sheep by the neck to sort them while inside the chute. He thought we were being mean. There was a long calm discussion about how this is how you sort them. He finally got it and ran the second chute gate while we sorted. We made two herds, keepers (ewes that need bred, 29 total) in one. The second one carried the cull ewes (16 total) and all the lambs (62 total, some will end up as replacements when we sort for market) They will hang out on the lower portion of the farm while the ewes hang out in the top portion. This will give the rams time to do their job. We found one chicken out in the barn with one little black chick. We found her nest in the barn and it looked like she had hatched out 10 chicks and only one was left. The chick was only 2-5 days old. We left her out with the chick. It was a 50% chance it would be a rooster so I just left it with her to see if she could keep it alive.