Well it is definitely winter time as we ended up killing four stinging assholes in under 24 hours. They were fairly sluggish due to the cooler temperatures but they still would have stung us if we had stepped on them. Since this weekend we have not seen a single one, so weird. They were all wasps. We are down to 12 chickens, two roosters and ten hens. Now that we have the double chicken doors the raccoons should not be able to kill them as easily. So if you know anyone who is getting rid of chickens let me know we need more!
I fueled the tractor up and mowed for two solid days over the weekend. I was tired of going around in circles up in field one so I drove down to the schoolhouse for a change in scenery. I did not hay the area around the schoolhouse this year so it was very tall and I had a patch out in the field that needed to be mowed. Somehow I managed to hit an absolutely huge rock with the old mower/new blades setup and the noise that had worked itself out earlier came back. I think I hurt the blade some but it was still cutting grass so I ignored it. I figured it would fix itself or scream “uncle” and it fixed itself. I noticed that the fence needs to be moved to accommodate me running the mower alongside the top of the creek bank. The floods caused one of the curves to eat into the bank more than normal and now I cannot get a five foot wide tractor between the fence and the drop off into the creek. The real problem is the drop off is about 12 feet and I really don’t want to drop the tractor down a 12 foot embankment. I know that seems fairly cautious for me but occasionally I do see the wisdom of some safety choices. If I move the fence over I can drive by safely and I won’t be losing any hay ground as the hillside is too steep in that section to mow and hay anyways. I am not sure why that did not occur to me when I was installing the fence the first time.
After I got the bottom all mowed I started working on knocking down the sagebrush on the hillside. About every five years I go up on the hillside and knock down the sagebrush. It lets the grass grow back and stunts the sagebrush for a few years. It was easy to spot the parts of the hillside I had worked on clearing the loose rocks. It was super easy to mow but as I climbed up the hillside and got closer to the gate I started hitting a lot of rocks. I finally had to just randomly drive around and miss all of the rocks and hope I made a dent in the sagebrush. I really need to spend about a day picking rocks on the hillside to finish getting the area cleaned up. All little projects are just 1-2 days! The trouble is there a ton of them all over the farm.
On Sunday I went up and finished mowing field one. It is all ready to make hay in the spring. I am staring in on a road on the back hillside. I can only drag it after it has rained as the ground is too tough for my tractor at any other time. I have about 50 yards of road finished. My plan is to cut a road so that I can redo the fence down by the runoff stream. The stream-bed is dry currently but in the spring it will have water in it. I would like to be able to move the fence up the hillside. This would allow us to open up this area in mid summer so the animals can tear down the weeds while it is still green. The sheep will be able to go everywhere at that point as the creek will be dry again. This will help with our weed control issues.
