This weekend some time had to be devoted to the sheep. It was time to worm everyone. We have to wait until the lambs are old enough to do it and no one else is going to give birth. So we ran them all into the barn and proceeded to run them out through the chute system. Mr Rainman did the snagging and holding while I used the oral drenching kit to just pump some wormer down into the back of their throat. This thing works so much better than drawing up syringes. We also knocked V shapes into the ewes we are going to cull after the lambs are weaned. We marked nine ewes for culling. When we go to pull those nine off of the herd in July we will cull anyone else who is not fat. They will have had access to all you can eat green grass and their bodies should have been able to put the weight back on by then. We already have some ewes getting fat on the green grass. We want to cull hard this year so lambing next January will be easy on everyone.
Mr. Rainman found a two week lamb that was weak and being ignored. We ended up taking care of it for 24 hours as our normal go to person was out of town. We managed to keep it alive despite it not really wanting to eat. It is now with it’s forever home and if it is gonna make it will be there.
The barn got put together, we tore down all the jugs and hung the panels on the walls, put up all of the buckets and feeders. When we go to clean out the barn we will just need to take the feeders out.
We also got the alpaca shearing area all cleaned up and ready to shear. Hopefully, we can shear the alpaca in the next week. They just need to be dry, it rained off and on all day today. We got 1/3” of rain and it was needed. The garden and grass fields needed it. The parts I ordered for the new pump are still not here. I am afraid the tariffs and shipping issues may have delayed its arrival. Hopefully, it gets here in the next two weeks.
Date of update- May 11, 2025
# of Lambs born – 73
# of ewes who have delivered babies – 42
# of ewes still pregnant – should be ZERO, but I saw one today that was so fat already. It would have to be an immaculate conception or a through the fence encounter.
# of single lamb births – 13
# of twin lamb births – 27
# of triplet lamb births – 2
# tagged male (weathers-neutered) lambs-35
# tagged female lambs-30
# of bummer lambs – 3
# of lambs who died in first two weeks – 6
Total # of lambs on farm -63
% birthing rate- 174%
% production rate -150%
% survival rate at birth – 100%
% survival rate at 2 weeks (bummers count as death as they need help and leave the farm) – 86%
Well we had more snow and ice yesterday so Mr Rainman turned around and went back home. I focused on getting the ceiling up. At least part of the ceiling is needed to hang the vent fan and then more is needed to hang the bathroom heater. I was able to break out the DeWalt laser kit. I had forgotten what was in there, as I had only remembered it being a laser for vertical and horizontal. I had forgotten that there is a laser tape measure in the kit! I did not trust it at first but it is pretty handy when you work alone and are reaching across the room trying to take a measurement. The DeWalt laser marker has a self leveling feature so it made getting the ceiling level quite easy.
I managed to get enough ceiling installed to be able to install the vent fan. This turned out to be a miserable endeavor. When we took out the old fan part of the ductwork up in the wall fell out about a five foot chunk. The real problem is that duct work is hidden in the walls and goes through the upstairs bathroom in the walled off section next to the toilet. To gain access where the pipe came apart I would have to rip down a 3×6 foot wall in the upstairs bathroom. Once I had a spot built for the fan frame I attempted to get the duct lined up and could not oven slide it all the way up into the wall, there was a piece of insulation blocking it. I had to go get a telescoping pole, push the insulation out of the way and try to magically fit the two pieces together, after ten minutes holding my arms over my head I gave up.
For my second attempt I was able to turn the 90 degree elbow into a straight shape. I had attached one of the joints that is comprised of four pieces that are offset on one side and can be turned. This lets you change the angle from 0-90 degrees. I then put a flashlight inside the duct and stuck my face and one eye at the bottom of the duct and was able to guide it onto the existing pipe in the wall fairly easily. I congratulated myself too early. I still had to get the elbow bent into a 90 degree shape and get it on the fan body and attach the body to the ceiling. This proved harder than an anticipated and ended up dropping the duct out of the ceiling again. I also ended up with a lot of dirt and insulation on my face!
The third attempt was going to be the one or else I was going to have to quit and work on something else. I went out and got a piece of hanging metal pipe support and screwed it onto one side of the opening. I also cut a piece of 2×4 I could screw in place after I had the duct installed so it could not fall down! I worked it until I was just about ready to give up when I finally managed to get the two ducts together up in the wall. I was able to screw in the other side of the strap and get it under the elbow on the duct. I took a short break and then got the duct corner moved to 90 degrees and attached to the fan frame. The fan frame went up and I spent 15 minutes getting it level and 5/8” hanging down (plywood and metal ceiling). Once I had it level I installed the wooden piece under the duct and readjusted the hanging strap. That thing is wedged in there and is not going anywhere!
The wiring was again one thing I had kinda anticipated but I thought I would have to move one or two items, that is not the case. I am having to rewire every thing in the bathroom and run new wire for about half the items. It is sucking up my time. I had to go to Home Depot today and pickup more electrical supplies and some plumbing supplies. I still need the parts to fix the drain but I am not sure exactly where the drain hole needs to go and that is in the part of the floor we need to cut out so I can figure it out on Monday.
Two of the switches go into the old door space but it is our only access to the room until the pocket door frame is delivered and installed. Once we have the frame installed we will be able to cut out the new door. So I am holding off on installing the boards to block off the door. I have drilled all the holes I need to run the wire.
Today, I worked on installing the new electrical heater in the ceiling. I had to install the ceiling joists in a weird pattern to get around the ventilation duct work. I did not want to lower the ceiling another four inches to avoid the duct work. We are right around 93 inches now for ceiling height. The heater can only really go in one place due to the ductwork, wiring and plumbing up in the ceiling. I had already read the installation instructions for the fan and ordered a 220 V switch and a 100 feet of 10/4 wire. I was ready to go, but as I was unboxing the heater and taking apart the covering to get to the wiring I realized that the wiring was too small. The heater is only designed to be ran on 110 V! So now I need to run a new stretch of wire back to the breaker just for the bathroom heater. This did open up a world of options for a heater timer for the bathroom. I ordered a fancy one that has multiple times already programmed and you just hit the button you want for the time you want. I also discovered that the bathroom vent fan control switch is wireless. So I will be tearing out the switch wire. So now I only need to get one set of outlets installed into the custom cabinet.
I was able to get the entire ceiling installed. I will focus on the wiring and getting that all done tomorrow. I still need to install the rough opening for the pocket door and I have about six more pieces of support to install for the shower shelves and a little more support around the chimney. Once that is done it will be time to cut out the floor! Our custom vanity top is cut, polished and ready to be picked up. I will have to go to the Tricities to pick it up, they only charged $416. That is less than we paid for the upstairs granite and it was a bigger piece. It only had two holes like the upstairs and does have a triple curve in the front but the one upstairs does also.
The snow looks like it may be here to stay for a couple of weeks. I have been moving it first thing in the morning so the sun can melt the leftover on the driveways during the day.
The last of 2024 was painful. Our progeny brought home Covid for the holidays when the entire county is drowning in Influenza. I think I would have rather had the flu. We did manage to get Christmas dinner on the table with a lot of help and we did get to eat said dinner. Otherwise, we slept a lot and took a lot of over the counter medications for symptom control. The Gingerman was the healthiest of us all so he kept the animals fed and even managed to get both large burn piles lit over the course of a week, despite the downpour of intermittent rain we continue to receive.
I have been able to do a few small things around the house. I was able to get the entire driveway torn up and leveled this weekend. An inch of rain really helps soften up the road so I can tear up the top few inches and then drag it smooth. Ideally, it would dry out for a week or so and let the newly moved dirt settle but it just keeps raining. We have already gotten 1.2” of rain in 2025 and it is not even the first week of the year. Our snowpack is at record highs, over 150% so I sure hope that it does not warm up fast this spring or things will be messy. The back creek bed is over twice as wide as it used to be due to the last two floods we had. I am hoping this is enough to keep it contained. We have implemented a couple of other flood control and diversion ditches but none have been tried yet and honestly, I would like to just think that they will work as designed and not have them utilized. Sometimes, it is the thought that counts!
Our sheep are doing great! That fattening up they had in Nov & Dec is holding them over well. We are feeding 6-7 bales every night and they are maintaining weight. I have been feeding for over a month and this last Friday I spotted two raccoons in the barn. They were in the front hay room hiding in the walnut boards that are air drying. There is no way out so they had to stay there the entire time I was feeding. I of course did not have a gun as I have not been taking one out when I feed. It did occur to me to go back to the house and get one but every time I was away from the room for 30 seconds they kept trying to sneak out and I knew they would be gone by the time I got back. It never occurred to me to just call the wife and have her walk the pistol out to me, it was muddy, dark, raining and miserable outside. So now I carry my predator pistol and two clips out to the barn at night for feeding and of course have not seen a single raccoon. I thought we only had one out in the barn, they avoid all traps so shooting them seems to be the only way to get rid of them.
We are taking the last of the animals to slaughter this week. We are taking in eleven lambs for meat for new homes. I have one customer who is opting to do their own cut and wrap. This will be the last of the animals for sale until the lambs from this summer are ready around July 2025.
We have been ordering stuff and getting it ready for the bathroom remodel. We have decided to put in an overhead electric heater, so I am going to have to wire in a 220V service with a timer switch. A 220V timer switch is fairly industrial. So now the wife wants me to hide it in the custom built cabinet. She also wants me to wire in an outlet into the cabinet so that I can hide all of the electronics on one shelf in the cabinet. Both of these things are possible since I am building everything from scratch but it does tend to complicate things. This does not seem to be a consideration when detailing changes. It doesn’t help that I agree with her, having all of the electronics hidden will make for a cleaner, more organized bathroom with more countertop space. I need a 220V breaker, a tile drill bit and a new tile saw blade. I always start a new tile job with a new blade. I am sure I will need more stuff as I know the house is plumbed with Pex but I won’t know if its Pex A or B until I tear into the wall and can look at the connectors. I think it’s Pex B but not positive until I inspect the connectors. There is always something to throws things off. I am going to block off the hallway and set up the tile saw in the hallway after setting up plastic walls outside the bathroom. I will have to bring all of the tile inside and let it warm up to room temperatures before it can be installed. I already told Annmarie that our house is just going to be a construction zone for one month and there is nothing I can do about it.
Today we went and picked up the sheep from Hermiston. They probably could have gone a couple more weeks but we can maybe start a little earlier next year. It was a success for the land owner and the field looks great. Their first cutting of hay next year will look very nice. We brought all of our light panels from the barn and were able to form a chute to the trailers. Initially, we had a Y setup but the stupid sheep did not want to go through the chute system so we had to push them and do one trailer at a time. We took down the temporary fence and rolled it all up, we will reuse it next year. The field was so wet that no one used the water trough, they just drank from the various low spots that had a few inches of water. We ended up just loading up all of the sheep into the two trailers then drove them to our house. We backed up to the corral and then unloaded each trailer into the corral area and then we sorted the sheep off into three batches. One group went back into the trailer-those were Wil’s, one group to the back pen-all boys, and last group was all females and the two rams. Since we have three pens that worked great and all of us managed a single gate to move them in or out of the chute as they were moved in. This worked great and took us about 45 minutes.
Once Mr Horse Tamer had his and left we sorted off all of the lambs and put them back in with their mothers. We also sorted off the two rams and moved them into Alcatraz. Then we sorted the boys and took 13 off that are already sold and turned them in with the mothers. They won’t get slaughtered until early January. That left us with 18 lambs that will go to the auction next week. This will be the first time we have ever taken any to the auction so we hope it treats us well, but you never know. We had to move the feeders back into the barn and filled them all with hay. We won’t have lambs until early April 2025.
Mr Rainman and I worked on getting the bee shelter completed this week. He got the posts set and frame built. I made a trip to Home Depot and got three sheets of roofing tin at $45/each. The prices for materials these days are amazingly bad. Now is not the time to build a new building. We were able to use up the last of the 1x8x8’ boards on the shelter. We had to go to a board and batten siding pattern as we did not have enough lumber to go over each side twice. It is very loud inside the enclosure when someone is working on the roof with an impact driver. If the bees complain of the noise we can line the roof with plywood to dampen the sound. I will wait for the complaint department to voice an issue before doing this. We did have to put up a panel to keep the alpaca and cows out of the shelter, they had already found it before we had the roof on it and were hanging around. I had opened up the orchard to allow them to come in and knock down the foot tall grass. Now that there are no leaves on the trees they will leave them alone.
We were also able to but the boards on the new rock crib on the corral. It used up the last two rough cut 2×8 inch tamarack boards I had left from building Alcatraz. We cobbled it together and Mr Rainman will fill it with rocks tomorrow and put a panel over the new gate so the sheep don’t crawl under or through it. We used the old gate today to keep them from going through the new gate, by propping it on the inside of the new gate.
We have finally started getting eggs again, we are getting about a 30% production rate which is normal for us in the winter. Wil is hatching 30 chicks for us so that should get us 15 more hens. By mid summer we should be back up to 30 hens.
After all of that today, I needed a nap and I got one!
Annmarie has a friend that offered to let us put our sheep on about five acres of grass. The grass is over a foot high but the ground gets pretty wet in the late fall and he wants the grass knocked down so he will have a good crop of hay in the spring but he doesn’t want cows in there tearing up the ground. We went and looked at it last week and it has woven wire all around the outside and just needed a trough and some wooden stays to pull up the woven wire where his cows pushed it down trying to eat outside the fence last year.
We have never tried this before and did not know how many animals would fit into the 16’ stock trailer as the field is about 40 miles away. In all reality, we didn’t know how many sheep we actually had. But I figured we would count them before moving them so all was good. A month on good green grass is wonderful, when they get back we will sort them, keep our 13 lambs that are pre-sold and then take the rest of the lambs to the auction. They will be 10-11 months old and at their heaviest weight all with just grass feed.
So Mr Rainman and I cleaned up the farm on Thursday and got wooden stays and tools together to fix the fence and move sheep on Friday. I needed to buy another box of staples for the DeWalt fence stapler. I love this thing, it’s awkward and heavy but it slams out fencing nails like it is nothing. I was able to finish wiring up the power to the Gazebo and he got the lights strung up. We need a remote control to turn the lights on and off, it is already ordered and coming. The shelf supports also lean a little too much so I will need to add some spacers to make the countertop/sitting/shelf only tilt a little towards the outside. This way the water will run off outside the Gazebo. My customer from Tricities came over and bought a cow/calf pair that afternoon. We found the calmest pair possible out of the herd that were not polled and that is who we sent with him. They loaded fairly easy and he messaged me back saying they are doing great. He has them in with his small herd of goats. He brought out the heads of the two steers that we had taken to the butcher the previous week. Their heads will go on the old plow to just sit and let Mother Nature remove all of the skin and hide from them.
Friday morning we ran all of the sheep into the barn. There were a lot of sheep! I counted them as they came out the end of the chute to get into the barn and there were 93 sheep! This included the ten baby lambs that we got this summer. There was way too many to go in one trip. So we only tried to load 1/2 the herd into the trailer. Well, not all of the sheep thought that was a great idea and after they got 2/3 of the way down the chute they decided to turn and try and crawl over the backs of everyone still coming. All this did was create a logjam and Mr Rainman had to wade into the chute and grab them individually and toss them the other direction before pushing them into the trailer. This meant it took us about 20 minutes to get them loaded instead of five if they had cooperated. There was still some room, but not more than enough to fit another ten sheep, so dividing the herd was the right way to move them.
Off we went! Did I mention that when I started hauling the cows the trailer spare tire was flat so I had taken it to the shop to get repaired? I had not yet picked it up. We got to the outside edge of Pendleton and one of the stock trailer’s tires blew apart. I knew what it was the instant it happened so I pulled over and we called the tire store. I reminded them that my tire was already there so they put together another tire and brought them both out for us, we only waited 45 minutes. It was less than five minutes once they got there and we now had a spare tire. Of course we did not have a jack or tire speed wrench so I am not sure how much good that would have done us but that is not their fault. I will be buying a scissor lift and tire wrench to be mounted inside the trailer for just this reason. I am pretty sure both sides have the ability to mount a spare tire, and having a spare spare is a really good thing.
We had looked at the weather the previous day and it said rain most of the day so we packed rain gear just in case. It rained the entire time we were building fence. The DeWalt stapler does not like the rain. About 3/4 of the way through the job it started acting up and not wanting to staple. We fussed with it to keep it going but it was starting to slow us down. We ended up losing one of the lambs on the first trip, it got suffocated. I think it was when we blew the tire out the sheep ended up laying down for an extra 45 minutes and just laid on the lamb. We had to make a second trip to get the last of the sheep and they traveled without any problems but there were only two lambs in the second load and mostly larger sheep. Our rams are in with the sheep and Wil put his eight sheep in with ours also. He turned his ram loose into the herd so we are both hoping rams cross groups. By the time we showed up with the second trailer load of sheep both of the herds had finally started to co-mingle. Initially, they were staying separated.
I had Mr Rainman drop me off at the tire store so I could pickup “Little Dumper”, 1957 one ton truck. They had finally finished the brake job and some wheel bearings. The trouble is it would not start, so the owner and I tried for about five minutes before someone finally told him it was out of gas. They took me down to get two gallons and it started right up! I drove down to the gas station and put 16 gallons of non ethanol premium fuel in it for the drive home. It was starting to get dark and I don’t think the headlights work. I had just gotten to the edge of town when it started to act up. Like it was not getting enough fuel or getting too much. I kept milking it and slowing down then speeding up. I was driving the back gravel roads and waving everyone by me. I had called a friend whose house was on the way and asked her if I could just park it there until I could tow it home, she said yes. The problem was as I was coming down the hill towards her house it was running great! So I just took a risk and kept on going! It died within sight of her driveway and I could not get it started again.
I had called Annmarie when it started acting up and asked her to drive the back way in case I got stopped somewhere. She had heat and lights in her car. I had two people stop before she got there asking me if I needed any help. This is so nice in a rural area. I told them I was fine and help was on the way. We called my nephew again and he went to the farm and grabbed my heavy duty tow strap, purchased to pull the tractor out of the mud, and brought it out. He towed me back to the farm and I messaged Gingerman. He will tear out the carburetor and do a clean and rebuild. He said one of the floats kept sticking when he was getting it started the first time. The brakes work great and since they are 100% manual, no power was required to operate them on the tow home.
Stewart Creek Somethings 