spring

Visible progress

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It is coming along nicely. I have sold myself on the idea that I need the help doing the trim so I have crossed it off on my to do list and am moving on to other things. Yesterday, I started to mow the property. I mow different spots through out the farm in an attempt to keep our herbicide usage down. I have still not managed to get rid of the cheat grass that is everywhere. I am told there is a fancy spray that may do it but with my luck I will need an applicators license and that is just one more hoop. The mower works if you use it often. My ideal mowing conditions are windy and rainy. This may seem odd at first but after 6-8 hours on a tractor with no cab getting bounced around and breathing dust all day it makes perfect sense. The rain keeps the dust down and the wind ensures that if there is any that it will blow away from you if you have adjusted your mower trajectory to take advantage of it. It started to rain just as I went out so I thought I would get lucky, no deal, Mother Nature only teased me and did not deliver the goods. Using a little four foot wide mower it takes about 4 days to mow the entire place. I put in a solid day yesterday and got the barn lot done, the area around the houses and out buildings and driveway. I started mowing the upper prime pasture and got it about 30% done.

My tractor, the mistress, needs some TLC, I need to hammer out her hood, give her a good bath and an oil change. I may even shoot some paint onto her scratches and rusty spots! She needs to stay in working shape as next year its haying time at this time of year.

I really need to remember to take a wire brush and some WD40 with me when I go to hook up the mower. The PTO gets a little dirty and slightly rusty and the mower connector does the same. This makes for an incredibly hard fitting connection. It almost wants to go but just will not slide that last 2 inches! This took me almost 20 minutes to get connected. I had already cleaned off both pieces with my gloves and gotten all the dirt and surface rust off. It just would not go and its a ten minute turnaround to go get spray lubricant. I also have a can that the propellant is dying on so it may not work. I thought about spitting on it but figured that would just make the rust worse. I ended up using the oil dipstick from the tractor to get enough oil to slick it up so I could get it to slide on! This had an added benefit of letting me know its time for an oil change. I think I still have about 40 hours of run time on the meter but its coming up quickly.

This tight work on the back of the tractor can lead to some unintended consequences. I decided to wear my Apple Watch yesterday as I am on the volunteer Quick Response Team (QRT) for the local fire department and most people are out of town. I cannot hear or feel my phone in my pocket when on the tractor. The Apple Watch always gets my attention so I thought it would be a good idea. When I went to hook up the PTO for the mower I discovered some hay baling twine wrapped around one of the back tire shafts. This stuff is bad around moving parts as this is how I lost my U joint in the pickup two years ago. So I was leaning over the tire whacking away at it with my semi sharp knife when I get a phone call. Its the 911 dispatcher wondering if I am okay. She can hear the tractor in the background and I am on headphones with a microphone so I can talk on the phone. I tell her its an accident and I am okay. If you didn’t know, constant pressure on your Apple Watch will call 911. I cannot remember if its 15 or 20 seconds but it does work. This is the second time I have done this. My phone is also set up to alert my medical provider and she called me about 10 minutes later to see if I was alive. I assured her I was, I should have texted her after the 911 call. So yes, those emergency features on your iphone and Apple Watch really do work! As in all things good there were a couple of casualties. We had purchased a round pen last year that I used to protect the large bales. I had moved it and thought I had every piece accounted for, but I was mistaken. The mower found a piece hidden in the grass. I “fixed” it with some bailing twine. Its almost as good as new just don’t get your ankle to near the fix. I had brand new mower blades this year installed by Muscles, luckily Mr Experience double checked and got them right. After a few hidden rocks they don’t look so new any more.

I am looking more forward to the welding class this fall the farther into summer we get. I need to start a list of all the things that need to be welded and fixed. I want to make our back fence for the garden, custom porch railings for the front yard, custom upright pole braces for the back yard deck clear cover (this one is very last), stair railing, more horse shoe gate latches, multiple gate repairs, custom fence made from thousands of horse shoes (I need the horse shoes and a location for said fence but I am doing it just not sure where). The possibilities are endless! I now know where I can get things powder coated and I have a 16 foot trailer so I am set!

I spent Friday picking up the wood for the Bull corral and to reside the bad parts of the barn. It is too nice! I found about 15 pieces out of the 50 that are amazing looking. It would be a crying shame to put them on the outside of the barn. I may have too but honestly I think I only need about 12 full pieces to get the entire job done. I am also thinking about hammering out the front barn addition this summer. I will have the boards left over from the bull enclosure and I have the leftover boards in the barn that I can cobble together and make a path from the mother enclosure to the L shaped grain enclosure on the other side of the tack room. If I was smart I would have put the tack room in the L shaped area and used the other for the sheep. I just didn’t think we would need the sheep space that badly. This actually works out better as I will be able to build a platform to stand on to install the upper window in the end of the barn. I will use scrap tin for the roof and I think I even have enough of that laying around. Screws will be the most expensive part of the whole project. The pieces are all there. I even have a couple of old windows I can put in that end of the barn! Mr Experience makes headway every day. I have a picture below of the before trim with dark curtains to hide the window frame. This worked well and was cheap! It did not keep the bugs out.

This is what the windows look like now! A vast improvement I must say. Now we don’t want to put up curtains. It is bright in the morning, there is no sleeping in as the sun blasts in and lets you know its here. Luckily, we don’t sleep in but a few times a year. So we are now looking at a cloth, paper like blind that mounts inside and can stay up most of the time. They are not super cheap so we will be doing one window every few months until we are done.

Honestly, the house looks like a house now not a construction project. When I get the spare bedroom floor finished this fall I think I will do a quick sand job on the breezeporch and paint the floor with the stain we used on the outside fence. The floor was red at one point a long time ago. Once that is done I can build my custom reloading bench! Guns, dog kennels and live plants, maybe even a hydroponic garden will be my man cave area.

Zeke is causing problems again. He knows without a doubt now that he can dig his way out of the fence. So if we are not inside the house and he is off the run he just digs a hole out. He did it again yesterday when Annmarie went to her mother’s house. He could see her car so he just dug his way out. This means that I will have to take some time tomorrow to bring in 50 large rocks and line the fence. So if he digs down the rock will just slide down into the hole. This has worked in a few of the holes so far so we hope it will work for the whole fence. He is so painful.

Birds are here

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Life is happening every day around us. We keep seeing more and more birds and are now pretty sure that this pair of ducks have been coming back for several years. I spotted them up the creek last week when I was discing and Annmarie saw them down by the house the other day. If I can get the shallow ponds dug this summer I may line a 8×12 foot section of bottom in the lowest spot with a pond liner. This should act as a very durable weed barrier and allow a small open spot of water to be visible in the spring in both ponds which will hopefully entice the ducks into nesting.

We looked at the spring head again yesterday and the watercress is starting to fill up the waterway again. I have to pull it out several times a year. I think that two domestic geese are our answer. I don’t want ducks as they are not tough enough. I think the geese will survive the predator attacks better. Unfortunately, I don’t want super mean geese that bum rush us whenever they see us. So far I have only found one pair that someone is willing to part with and they are super aggressive. I don’t want them chasing the sheep or cows. So maybe next year I raise my own.

We had not seen the quail in a few months and were afraid that they might have all gotten eaten. But yesterday Annmarie spotted them on the back hillside. Hopefully this year we get the quail back in droves. We only usually have one to two coveys on the place. This is why my mother-in-law doesn’t want the hunters to shoot quail. The pheasants are like weeds, no matter what we do they come back and are plentiful. Eventually, when I run out of tasks and hobbies I would like to contact the ODFW and try and get a remote setup to raise quail with minimal human interaction so they are wild and turn them loose on the property. I am going to start putting cow panels around the rose bushes in an attempt to create more habitat.

Annmarie spotted five barn owls on her 2 mile drive home yesterday. We have lots of hawks of different varieties but the owls are usually an occasional sighting phenomenon. We only see our great horned owl every few months now that it has moved down to the schoolhouse. There used to be a mated pair but we have not seen them together in years and I am not a birder, they all look alike to me.

We are also now seriously talking about a large subterranean greenhouse heated by passive solar energy. All these food scares and bacteria outbreaks really make you conscious of the food chain. The shorter the chain the better.

Now that the weather is changing the working dogs have started to get overheated. An hour out working the animals and they start wandering over to the creek to lay in it, drinking is secondary to immersing their bodies. Last year we shaved them and they did great all summer. They were much more comfortable and worked better for us. Sarah shaved them for us last week and they are getting used to it. Mouse thinks the process is humiliating and hides for a day or two afterwards. They both look kinda funny for about six weeks until they get a little hair back. It also makes it much easier for us to find ticks on them. This wet weather has caused the ticks to come out of hiding and we have found three already. Gizmo is taking his cues from the big dogs. I make them wait and sit before they can have food and he so wants to come eat but he keeps looking sideways at the other two and they are holding still so he waits.

We sent out a deposit on a new ram for out flock today! We figured that May was our six month mark and we should be safe to get a new ram. Yesterday during our walk around we spotted as brand new baby lamb born hours earlier, they just keep coming!! We are going to get a full blooded Katahdin ram this time. He has good genetics and the breeders are doing genetic culling and comparing them in a national database for growth and disease traits. Way more work than we want to do but so handy for us to look at when choosing a new ram. If this guy works out good for us we may keep him for several years and use that farm in the future. Here at Muttville Central we want happy healthy animals that are super self reliant. This is a harder task than you might imagine as the industry has bred self reliability out of a large portion of the breeds in an attempt to concentrate on size, growth rate or fat marbling. We are looking at disease resistance, ease of birthing, twins, growth rate, size and ease of handling for us these characteristics determine how many animals we can raise and how well they do.

This is why we have a mix of three main crosses, Katahdin, Barbados Blackbelly and Dorper. There are certain characteristics of each breed we like and we keep mixing in different rams and keeping the sheep that meet our above requirements. Its working well for us. We don’t vaccinate, we worm every 1-2 years as a precaution. We have never had any type of infection go through the herd that killed any animals. We had ORP, basically a oral herpetic type disease, go through a couple of times it came in on some sheep we purchased. That is it, no other problems in 8 years. We totally attribute this to our low bioload. The animals have so much pasture to roam on that they just don’t sit in one place and live. This also accounts for why our animals are such good grazers. We also allow the animals access to shelter year around and in the winter we lock them up in the barn every night. The barn gets dug out every year and fresh straw laid down throughout the winter. Now that we have upped our barn cat population I have not seen a single rodent in the barn!

Alone time

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Now that the easy part was done and the field is burned off it needs to be disced. My little tractor can just pull a double set of four foot discs. It doesn’t like to do it and I have to use four wheel drive and if the ground is too wet I cannot get enough traction to pull the discs. The field was a little wet but I managed to get it done over the course of two days. I always have something else to do on the way to pull the discs. I stopped on Saturday and pushed the burn piles together with the tractor and got one end of the double downed trees burning again. I hope they burn up the entire tree but I am not holding my breath. All the extra limbs are now on fire so it should be pretty easy to work around. I then went and dug the front ditch out for another 25 feet in the upper prime pasture. If I don’t clean it out it starts to grow in and spread out. It was also eroding the ground behind the large blackberry bushes and I just about could not get the tractor past. I am using the dirt from the ditch to backfill a new passage by the blackberry bush. I looked at the upper prime squared pasture and it needs some more ditch work. My initial digging is helping but I need to extend it out and dig a new exit channel, but I had already messed around long enough so I hooked up the disc and started to drag it around the field. I also made a vow to pick up every single rock I found. I had an offer from a friend to bring in a big piece of equipment that would smooth out the entire ground. The trick is rocks are a killer on this machine so I vowed to pick them all up! I just tipped the front bucket upwards and every time I spotted a big rock I jumped off and threw it in the bucket. There were not very many rocks, I bet I got less than ten in the few hours I went in circles.

There were lots of voles and mice throughout the entire field. I almost regretted not bringing the dogs as they love killing them, but they eat every one and after 15 or so each they get some very smelly farts. So I left them in the yard, knowing that Zeke was off the run and hoping he would stay put. I kept spotting various wildlife but I never could get a picture! I chased up a vole and this hawk swooped down out of the sky, snatched it and landed on a nearby wooden fence post. I watched that bird for almost a minute before deciding it would stay put for a picture, as soon as I reached for my phone it flew away, vole clutched in its talon.

I spotted a four foot bull snake partially in a vole hole, again I stopped the mistress and watched for 30 seconds then reached for my camera. The picture above with no snake but various vole holes was taken 2 seconds after it disappeared down the left most hole.

I spotted various baby killdeer running around and had to stop once to let them get out of the way. I really wanted to get that ash layer down into the dirt before it rained so it could get absorbed into the soil and not washed or blown away.

I was circling around and suddenly a hawk jumped off the ground on the far end of the field. I looked over and spotted a nest with eggs! So I skirted around the nest and left a patch of grass and weeds for the hawk and its nest.

The amazing part of this is driving the tractor is a very good core workout. I hear the scoffing now but try to stay on the seat with the tractor bouncing around and trying to throw you off constantly. I finally put the seat belt on and tightened it up across my upper thighs but this does not stop you from keeping your stomach and back muscles tightened the entire time.

I disced the far side and was working down near the upper prime pasture end when another hawk jumped out of the grass and there was another nest with eggs! The amazing part of this is we burned the field on Friday but both nests were placed such that fire could not get to them but the birds could see predators coming. I finally ran out of fuel and had to drive back to the house.

I ended up getting more diesel then digging out the barn lot front creek by hand. I will keep digging a small patch at time until I get it cleared all the way up to the spring.

Sunday I did the same thing, as in I procrastinated in going right to the discing portion of the day. I stopped in the upper prime pasture, as there was no fire to play with and started working on my ditch network. I had tried to dig a small pond but there was too much water and it was forming another swamp. I needed to dig a channel connecting the side ditches with the main ditch. I did this then dug the side ditch down and extended it out into the field. I really need to dig out the center of this area as I have dug a horseshoe shaped ditch. I started digging the dirt out of the middle of the horseshoe with my box blade on the tractor but I only got about ten loads out before it got too muddy. Once the tractor tires fill up with mud and the ground turns muddy I cannot use the box blade. This is the seventh year on my original tractor tires. I am going to try and milk them along for another 2 years. It will be an expensive fix to replace all four tires, probably around $1500-2000.

I did manage to get the entire field disced except for the two hawk nesting areas and the upper end where the super wet low spot is located. I have circled the wet area on the picture below. It is probably almost an acre and it is still too wet to work with my light tractor. What I want to do is let it dry out a little more then get in there and drag it down about 18 inches and use that dirt to build up the entire surrounding area to keep it dryer and let a natural swamp occur. The real trouble is it always dries out in the summer which limits the type of plants we can plant. I would like to plant some type of native grass that can survive the wet time and the dry time. I want to place tall “pecker poles”, 2-3 inch wooden posts that are 8 feet tall. These will be easier to see when the alfalfa is planted, therefore allowing us to avoid the damp area with the haying equipment and tractor. I may even put up some bird nests for the red winged blackbirds. I would love to put up bluebird boxes but I have only ever seen one bluebird here, we are too low in elevation.

I started dragging the dirt out of the swamp area but the predicted rain turned into a deluge and I was loosing traction and body heat fast. I stopped long enough to hike up onto the rock bluff to take pictures. Zeke decided that he had enough confinement time and had dug his way under the yard fence and joined me. He did kill lots of vole and mice while he was busy getting covered in mud.

Every time I go up on the hillside and see the old rock wall I want to rebuild it. Since it has taken me multiple years to work on the one behind my house this will have to wait until I win the lottery or a parent needs a summer punishment for their child. The child must not be afraid of snakes and must be able to move 150# rocks. This probably limits my options way more than they were before which was slim to none before the lifting requirements were added.

Next week I attempt to get the yard mower running as I told Perm Boy that the fuel container was in the old wood shed. Turns out he found the only can of diesel not out in the machine shed. I had to drain the gas out today and managed to get the mower to start once and then it died. I put fresh fuel in it after emptying the tank. I also need to spray some weeds! Oh and the trim inside the house needs to be finished. I did no trim this weekend as the field took precedence. I will now be able to spray both fields and then they can sit idle until this fall. I suspect I will need to spray one more time this summer.

Name Game

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It’s that time of year again, in the search for cheap help that works hard I have yet again reached out to my neighbors and friends. I have scored another new helper. As is tradition here at Stewart Creek Somethings he needs a name for the blog. The longer I do this the more pressure there is on me to actually pick something good! This pressure could be self induced but it is still there and even before my help arrived I was aware that today was the day I would bestow a new moniker on another fellow individual. I enjoy the permanence of the written word, once the moniker is in play it can never be taken away.

On the proposed work schedule for the day was picking up boulders from the back hillside to line the yard fence so that Zeke cannot dig under the fence. He has to go on the overhead run every day still. Mouse and now Gizmo cannot get out of the front yard. Zeke is a firm believer in making your own exit plan.

The trouble with this plan was on Thursday there was no wind and it was a beautiful day. It was the perfect burn day and I still have a 8 acre field to burn. If I wait much longer then everything will dry out and I will have to wait till next year and I don’t want to do that. Thursday night someone told me it was supposed to rain over the weekend so it was a total do over on the priorities. Zeke was going to have to spend a little longer on the run when we go to work.

The young man came out early, dressed for work, rubber boots, jeans and T shirt and a bottle of water. He only forgot leather gloves but I have come to expect that so I always have extras stashed at the house. We loaded the propane tank into the back of the pickup and went to get more propane. They could not fill it, it kept leaking. Now this is the newer propane tank, I think the gas station needs to fix the washer on their propane nozzle. I was hoping we had enough gas to get the job done. Now this young man was a fire newbie, and had never intentionally set a fire before. I had him run the hose out, gave him the 2 minute safety speech and then had him light the outer edges of the field as I drove around the edge. He walked and started with the torch, I didn’t think about just having him sit on the tailgate. He is young and can use the exercise! We lit the whole outside and then waited 30 minutes and started to light patches here and there. At one point he starts playing with his hair saying how it has “so much body”, and its fluffy. His hair is touching his shoulders, he calls it a mullet (not long enough yet) and I couldn’t take it. I told him the reason his hair was frizzy was because its burnt!! He got too close to the flames and his hair curled up on the ends! Now he wasn’t that close, I kept checking his arm hairs to make sure they were still present every time he got back in the pickup. He finished the day with arm hair and eyebrows intact so it was a stellar day. After the burn revelation he kept playing with his hair and saying how he was going to get a perm. Hence a name was born, “Perm boy”.

Perm boy and I burned along the creek, burned a stand of blackberries that really took off, we lit two piles of dead trees that had been there for years and we lit all the old patches of hay on the ground! We even burned up a broken hay bale over by the grain bins! I almost drove up on the hill and burned the old old fallen down barn but it still has a lot of dead tall grass all around it and I didn’t want that to get away. I need to get the sheep in there first and eat it all down then I can safely burn the broken up board pile that has not been a barn for 40 plus years.

Blackberries burning are pretty hot. I went down to look after it went out and discovered that they had totally filled in the entire waterway. I really need to burn out three more patches that are touching the water. If we had had a bad runoff year they would have acted as a dam and caused us problems.

We had an hour to kill before Perm Boy had to leave so we dug out the front creek in the yard by hand. It looks a lot better now. I need to continue this all the way up to the spring. Perm Boy splashed some mud onto his blue jeans and had a slight panic about them not ever getting clean again. We had the its only mud speech. At one point we had a discussion about the large dent in the door of his pickup and how to get it mostly out easily and quickly. I told him it added character to the rig. Besides every dent in my pickup was put in it by various teenagers at one time or another. He informed me that he would never put a dent in it, strong words from someone who just got his drivers license two days ago.

We got a lot done, I am going to spend the weekend discing the field so I can then start spraying weeds. Perm Boy did good, I asked him back as we still need to get rocks so Zeke can come off the run.

Squirrel!!

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I was supposed to be fencing all day today to keep the bull away from the heifers he is not to breed. He has a different plan and it starting to become highly annoying. I spent two hours yesterday with the dogs moving him away from the heifers. It was an exercise in patience. I finally started tossing dried cow poop patties at him. He didn’t like that and it seemed to move him better than anything else I had tried.

I started out fine, went and got my drill so I could install the gate hinges. I found all my fencing tools in the pickup and needed the tractor to move rocks. So I chased the sheep into the front yard to finish mowing the lawn and then alternated driving the pickup and tractor to get them both through the gates into the barn lot. I did get Zeke to load up in the pickup, he always wants to ride and then on a fluke I told Mouse to load up. Damned if he didn’t do it on the first try! So I had both dogs ride in the back of the pickup through the barn lot. We then unloaded and took the tractor up to the far upper bottom pasture to get the smooth wire dispensing bucket and some wire. Well there is a lot of water running on the wheat field side of the bottoms. Usually, there is not very much water on this side. I ended up digging out the ditch in a section in the upper prime pasture. When I got into the next pasture it was even worse. I had to clean up two sections of the ditch I dug earlier and then tried to dig four channels in a swampy area. All the dirt I take from the swampy area I put on the edges of the swamp. I will try and build up some of the low spots in an attempt to keep them from getting so swampy. I am going to have to dig a couple of small ponds. They will only be about 18 inches deep and 6×10 feet across. I just need the water to settle someplace and then evaporate. I may have to see if I can find some used grape poles to build a visual ring around the water so we don’t accidentally drive the tractor or equipment into the water or swamp.

I then drove up unto the middle pasture that has not been burned yet. WOW! There is at least 2 acres of swamp. There is running water through the middle of the field. It looks like a ditch may end up separating the field in the middle. This isn’t such a bad thing we just need to be able to get by the ditch on the upper and lower side. I think I am going to have to install one of my new culverts up here to ensure cross field access. There is no question that we will not be doing anything in these fields in the spring after we plant them with alfalfa. Not even spraying the first year until we can see how the field and alfalfa does. I am hoping it takes up some of the water. I managed to get stuck again in the upper pasture and could not get out. I have only ever pushed myself with the tractor bucket backwards in an attempt to get unstuck. I had about a 30 foot liquid mud trail in front of me and i was pushing myself further into the swamp. So I figured out how to pull myself with the bucket! Its not as easy as pushing but it is possible. I then went to load up the wire and realized I needed to drill some post holes for the gates up here. I had the auger on the tractor and ended up digging 7 holes. Which made me aware that I need to dig holes in the barn lot ASAP. This was nice all dirt bottoms and each hole took me 5-7 minutes to dig. I cannot let the barn lot dirt get any harder or I will never get a hole dug. No hole means more rock cribs!I managed to get started on the fencing at noon. The dogs got to terrorize the hillside, the CRP, the creek and occasionally the chickens. Mouse had a thing for chasing the chickens today, I had to call him off three times. Zeke ratted him out every time by perking up his ears and slinking toward the sound of distressed chickens. Zeke either runs away or stays close, he never does anything halfway.

Mouse loaded up into the pickup a second time on the first jump. I had to talk him into it and make Zeke jump out and show him how it was done. He was a little light on the jump but managed to scramble in without assistance. I got the upper gate installed. I had to create a chain that is attached to hold it open so you can drive through. Otherwise the gate is angled such that it automatically closes. I managed to get the tractor to finally hold a roll of wire such that I can just walk away and it unrolls without any problems. I have been trying to figure out how to do this for four years. The trick is the bar has to touch both sides of the tractor bucket and the chains hold it level. The horseshoe is one of my gate latches. I am running out of them again. I usually have them welded ten at a time and I keep using them up. I didn’t get all the fencing done. I still have the lower gates to install. I had some gate posts hooks but they are too big for the ones already installed on the gate. So I will just buy smaller ones it is easier. I need to fill one rock crib, so three hours of hard labor with the mistress doing all the heavy lifting. I have one spot just to the right of the rock crib on the right side of the picture that needs a rigid panel installed to keep the animals from crawling through the gap. I am pretty sure I can use a piece of scrap from the horse enclosure that is still propped up in the front yard. I keep using those scraps in an attempt to get rid of them.

The sheep finished mowing the front yard! I will now have to get out a hose and wash down the sidewalk, bridge and our front porch in the morning before our Easter guests come for brunch. This takes care of mowing and fertilizing all at once. The only problem is we have to watch the dogs go potty for a week or two as they love to rub sheep poop all over themselves. I thought about this today as Annmarie kept hollering from the back porch to get my opinion on Iher attire for tonight. I enjoy doing this stuff, its hard to explain to people why I have a full time job that pays so I can have a full time job taking care of the farm. The farm is always there and forces you to constantly change and adapt. When you think you have it figured out, someone or something changes to prove that you do not. It keeps you moving, there is no time to sit around and be lazy. I get to work with animals and fix stuff. I love doing the 90% on projects and most farm projects are complete at 85%! Not the ones inside the house, I know dear. I love to reuse and cobble things together. The farm keeps me healthy and whole.