The bull enclosure is progressing faster than I anticipated but not fast enough. Annmarie walked into the old house yesterday to look for some string and just about could not get around. I have tools, boxes and various buckets full of tools and items laying all over the floor. It’s quite the maze. She feels like this is unacceptable and needs to be neater. I make a point to do it 1-2 times a year. The more projects I do the worse it gets. An alternate solution is for me to do no projects and it would stay clean. I am pretty sure that option is not on the table. I need to get the bull enclosure done and the barn dug out then I can take a solid day and dig out the old house. When I dig it out I can cut the shelves for the coat closet inside the house at the same time. This will make the day feel more productive. 
The bull enclosure is done all the way down to the water. I have the gate hung and woven wire behind the wooden rails and cow panels over the powder river panels. If I don’t do this the sheep will get in and out of the enclosure and we want to put the ram in there occasionally also.
This will give us a dual purpose area and it will make sorting animals easier. We are going to fix a fence on the back side and install another gate making it impossible to run around the barn lot in a circle. This is a favorite move of the sheep and cows when we are trying to get them into the barn or the corral. We may even add one more small segregation fence next year depending on how the animals sort this year. We are doing everything we can to make an easy sorting and handling process. We are not getting any younger and if it is not easy we won’t be able to keep doing it after we retire. 
I will have to take the tractor and dig down about four inches on the barn side of the new gate. It won’t swing both ways and I need it to swing over to the other gate so that they can be latched together to allow access to the sheep barn. This may have to wait until we get a few days of rain which could be a while.
I found out that Bubba is looking forward to digging out the barn and not moving rocks for cribs. Trumping his fear of snakes is an even bigger scare of spiders. There are far more spiders under the rocks then snakes. I wonder sometimes how the next generation will survive. 
Sarah and I spotted our very first grasshopper of the year this week. It really looks like a stick. I know there is a special name for this type of grasshopper but I cannot remember what it is. So I will call it a “twighopper”. It was very patient and let me get right next to it with the camera. Its the only one we have seen all summer. I did end up with a baby prying mantis on my hand while weeding the elevated garden beds. It was less than one inch long. This one did not bite me! Usually the adult mantis try and take a chunk out of my hand.
We scoped out the orchard yesterday and looked at the fruit trees. This is their third year and they are looking good. I will have to trim them this winter and try and get them raised up off the ground further and to bush out higher off the ground. Otherwise the sheep are going to be eating all the leaves when we remove the surrounding protective fence. Each tree has a cow panel wrapped around it with a 2 foot extension on top to keep the alpaca and horse from going over the top. We thinned out the Asian pears and there is a bumper crop of them for such a little tree. The tree ripened pears are so much better than the ones in the store. Next year we want to get another five fruit trees. We would like to get a couple more plum trees and a couple of apricot trees. Another apple or two and I would love to grow a couple of nut trees and some Nanking cherries and a few other things, maybe even some cranberry bushes! 
The nephew spotted a honey bee hive in our walnut tree this year. They have had a hive here once before and died out a few years ago. We spotted several bees going in and out and you can see the wax and honey glaze to the wood here. For some reason the bees did not winter in this location well. I hope they do better this year. We really want to get a bee hive but we have to create a little more bee friendly atmosphere. I am working on 2-3 locations to grow wildflowers in for the bees. The real problem is they need water and it needs to be fenced off so the sheep cannot get in and eat the flowers. I have a couple of locations picked out now and just need to build some more fence for it. 
We have looked into alfalfa and yep it’s going to cost us. To plant dryland Round Up ready alfalfa I am told it is $400/50#bag and you need to plant 20#/acre. I went up yesterday with my cell phone and used a cool app called AGRIplot that lets you put in boundaries and way points and it uses your phone GPS to calculate acreage. We have 20 acres that we need to plant. I had thought it was 22 acres. This $4 app just saved me $400! So basically, the seed alone will cost us $3200. This does seem steep but we only have to plant every 7 years minimum if we seed correctly. Plus, our chemical expenses will be minimal. In the long run we will come out ahead, everyone I talk to who planted alfalfa and chose not to use Round Up ready due to expenses has said that it would have been cheaper and easier to maintain in the long run if they had just paid the money up front.
I went up there and the weeds are coming back so in the evenings this week I will be spraying. I kept chasing a pair of twin whitetail fawns all over the field. They would not run very far and their mom just kept wandering around the field. I did have to let the upper prime pasture cattle have access to the barn lot yesterday. The water coming up from those two springs has dried up and is no longer running. the only water coming up from the ground now is the main spring in the barn lot and a few little springs down by the schoolhouse that dump into Stewart creek. Those springs are not enough to make Stewart creek run just enough to make pools here and there. I found a dead sheep in the upper prime pasture. It had been torn apart and was probably only about four months old. The carcass is dried and it was in the tall grass but it is from this year. Most likely a coyote as we have not seen any stray dogs this year. We are getting ready to sort the cows and sheep again to make two herds. We are going to put the ram in with the sheep so will have to pull off the female lambs we don’t want impregnated and put them with the heifer we don’t want impregnated. We will toss in one of the steers to be with the heifer so she is not alone. The sheep and cows don’t like to be alone.
I dug holes until Sarah called me into the house for my Father’s Day presents. I ate lunch while we planned out the rest of the week. She is going to come out and help me put posts into the ground starting tomorrow. I have been looking around at what to use for posts. I only have about 15 railroad ties on the farm, but I have a whole pile of old heavy duty cedar posts left over from the farm. I am going to use those not on the corners and high stress points on the fence. I think I will be able to get all the posts into the ground without having to buy any new ones. I have all the 2×6 boards and just need to get some cow panels and woven fencing. I even think I have about 12-15 cow panels over in the pile so I may have enough of those to cover the metal panels. It is all starting to come together. Getting those posts in the ground and set is the single biggest hurdle I need to overcome. After that things will start to just fall into place.
Once this was done I had the boys help me remove all the wood from the L shaped granary and pile it up in the barn. Mr Consumer stood by the barn door and tossed all the scrap wood I handed or tossed his way outside to be burnt. The Brothers had to carry all the large pieces out to the barn floor. I am positive that Mr Consumer had figured he had the best job until I spotted a large black and white fur ball on the floor hidden under some wood and informed Mr. Consumer that he would be disposing of the dead skunk! He did bitch slightly but I told him he had made a choice to take the easier job of the three and his choice may have been the easier choice but the consequence of said choice was that he got to move the dead skunk as his job was to remove the trash from the barn. We had a couple minute discussion on how sometimes our choices lead us down paths we don’t expect but it was our choice and we have to live with our personal decisions. I had to keep digging through the lumber to get to the body as it was buried. Turns out it was just a furball from the packrat! He did not have to deal with a dead skunk but the anticipation and dread served its purpose. 
The Brothers reminded me of lunch time at 1205. They have worked with me before and know that one must be vocal if one wants to get fed on time. Mr Consumer brought his own lunch. I did not expect this and ended up with an extra 18 inch hoagie in the fridge. We ate on the front porch as Mr Consumer and Thing 1 had started digging feces covered straw out of the barn and did not smell the best. As we ate lunch I watched two different washed and cut fruits in separate bags emerge from the lunch pail. Meanwhile, the Brothers and I are wolfing down meat and cheese hoagies and Doritos. I enquired as to whom had prepared his lunch? Drumroll please! What 16 year old boy puts TWO types of fruit in his lunchpail? You are all correct, his mother did it and a name was born, Mr Consumer. He ate every bit of his lunch. 
It was an incredibly productive day and now I need to get the fields mowed and disced again then I can start in on the bull enclosure. Those fields need to be ready in the fall for alfalfa. A friend of ours is looking into getting me 150# of Round up ready alfalfa. I have a Monsanto ID number now so I can buy it. I am told it is very expensive but we need it as I will be able to spray Round Up on it to keep the weeds and cheat grass under control as it establishes itself. We only need one cutting from it next year. 
