spring

Rock cribs contain rocks

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I realize that this may seem like an obvious statement but have you really thought about it? I had lots of time today to contemplate this reality. The panel would normally cost $24 and the post around $14. Then after filling a couple of rock cribs I can say it takes three hours to fill one! Three hours of knocking rocks out of the ground with the tractor and then hand loading them into the bucket and dumping them into the circle with the mistresses help. She is as hard worker and really needs a bath. After said bath I need to take a hammer and beat out some of the dents and spray a little green paint over her rusty spots. She deserves to be pampered a little every once in a while. I only had one close call today. I had managed to get this humongous rock into the bucket then felt it necessary to throw in more rocks until the bucket was full. I backed down the hill to the rock crib and then lifted the bucket high in the air as I approached the metal circle. Just as I was attempting to tip the bucket forward the tractor went onto three tires and tired to tip over. I managed to keep the three tires on the ground but could not empty the bucket. I finally managed to back up enough to dump the bucket out onto the ground. I had to make three loads with the tractor to get it all into the rock crib. I am now only grabbing one rock when it fills half the bucket. It’s just too hard to control the tractor with that much weight on one side of the bucket. This is exactly why I keep the roll bar up on the tractor and wear a seat belt.

I had Annmarie do the math, there is 84 cubic feet in each rock crib. That is a lot of rocks! A whole lot of rocks. I am hoping to get the last 1.75 cribs filled. Once that is done then I can go put the hole post auger onto the mistress and see if she can drill two holes up on the very top of the hill for the upper gate. If I can get both those holes in I can install two railroad ties and build a H brace. Once the H brace is in I can run fence the entire length of the hillside. This will then let me install the upper and lower 12 foot gates. This will then just leave a ten foot open section on the bottom of the fence near the house. I will need to add another 4 foot circle and fill one more rock crib. If I can get the cribs filled and the H brace built tomorrow then I will be on schedule with the work. I need 35 T posts and 34 wooden stays. There is one more spot I am not sure I can drive in a T post.

Stop the bull

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Friday was the day to start back up outside. Yes, I still have painting to do inside the house but we still have baby chicks in the dining room and Annmarie doesn’t want me poisoning them. So that leaves chores outside. I considered working on the bull enclosure in the barn lot. I need to drill a bunch of holes in the dirt if I can. The trouble with this is the Bull is still causing me troubles by trying to get to the isolated heifers. So the fence up the back hillside has become a priority. I will run a fence from just behind the house up the hill to the rock crib you can see in the below picture. This is going to be brutal as the the entire hillside is one big rock pile with a solid rock bluff in the middle. Before I could make it to the back hillside with the tractor I decided to try and level off the land behind the barn. It is still too muddy, but while I was back there I decided to dig down both old paths that got worn down. This will make it easier to get to the barn when its muddy out. I did notice that my board keeping the dirt ramp in place is starting to break. I am going to have to tear it out and put in a couple of railroad ties soon. I need about another 35 railroad ties. Unfortunately, they don’t give those things away. I have been watching facebook classifieds and Craigslist but have not scored yet. I found one place recently but the poles were used in a vineyard. Those are usually only 3 inches in diameter and I need at least 6 inch.

I spent almost seven hours dragging the old road to clear it of rocks and create a wide spot for a gate. I am thinking about installing a 12 foot gate, another 4 foot diameter rock crib and a 6 foot human gate near the house. I will put another 12 foot gate on top of the hill. I also drug a path down the hillside and tried to clear out all the rocks in the way. I managed to get all the rocks cleaned out of a small four feet strip.

Once I had the fence path cleared and I attempted to create a few level spots for the wire cages I went and got some old cow panels. I was able to reuse the ones I had just gotten from the same place I purchased the culverts. I drug five panels up onto the hillside behind the tractor. I then cut off just the end vertical piece. This allows me to kinda roll it up like a piece of playdoh. The problem with this is it doesn’t want to go into this shape. I also have to put a lot of effort and body weight into the process to get the metal to form a circle so I can then bend the horizontal ends around the opposite vertical creating a ring. This ring then gets a wooden post nailed in it and filled with rocks. Once it is full of rocks it is virtually indestructible. I was bending the third one when I made a mistake. I had kinked it in half and was trying to get it to form a circle. It just was not going so I jumped on it and ended up rolling up onto it and down the hill. Did I mention I was doing this on a steep hillside? Luckily, I did not go over the entire top and get thrown over the top and onto my back. Instead, at the zenith I went off the right side and came down onto the ground on my hands and knees. I did mention the entire hillside is covered in rocks? It hurt my knee a lot, I hollered and rolled around as the song Tainted Love played. It hurt something fierce. I finally managed to get it to a dull roar and just laid out on the hillside after finding a rock free location. I almost went to sleep but I was afraid that Annmarie or my mother in law would spot me and think I was injured and call the ambulance. So I gave up on the dream of a nice pleasant nap and got up and finished two more wire circles.

Gotta get out of the house

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The little tractor that could! I have a culvert on the bucket and pulling a small set of discs for the upper field. The dogs are giving the cows the stink eye after moving them away from the gate. This way I don’t have to worry about them making a break for it to get back to the bull. It’s a two way street, both parties would go to the other if they could figure out how to get out of their respective enclosures.

The culvert is for the upper spring, this way we can drive over to the back half without having to go all the way around. I have three more culverts left and need to install two more in the lower bottoms so I can easily get the tractor in and out of those fields even when it is fairly wet. Driving through the irrigation ditch when all the surrounding dirt is muddy is a good way to get the tractor stuck in the ditch.

The moving water in the upper prime pasture is half way through the trees now and starting to cut a ditch in amongst the trees. Its pretty slow going and I don’t know that it will make it to the fence. I can really tell in the front creek that there is a lot more water coming out of the spring than we have had in the past.

This is the upper prime squared field before I did anything to it. I had burned it off and it had a disc drug through parts of it once by someone else. My real goal is to just knock everything down into the dirt so that it can start composting and breaking down. We will then keep it down and sprayed with roundup so that it has some forced idleness this year and plant it in the fall. I had only taken my outer coat shell and it was just not enough to keep the wind at bay. I had to zip it all the way up and put the hood on to stop the wind on Saturday. I am getting stir crazy in the house and I cannot paint because of the baby chicks.

One of the things I noticed dragging the disc set around was that the back part of the disc was not digging in enough. It needed some weight. I backed the discs up and changed the angle on them so that helped but the soil is still very wet and I had a hard time getting any traction with the tractor. I had to make the discs easier to pull a couple of times until I got the right amount of earth movement and tractor traction. I was glad when my alarm went off to go feed the animals as I was cold and ready to be done.

Today I went out early in the morning after a freeze last night. The real problem with this is I added some weight to the discs today. I knew I had some old tractor weights kicking around the farm. Every time I have found one on the farm I have tossed it into the machine shed or in a pile over by the grain bins. I found eight 50# solid metal weights and tossed them into the bucket. Once I got to the discs I ran a chain through the weights and chained them to the disk over the second set. There was a welded piece of steel there already as it looked like someone had been piling up rocks for weight before. This added weight caused me to have to adjust the disc angle a couple of more times as they were now digging into the ground better. I failed to take into account that when the ground thaws it becomes super slick on top! I had a couple of times where I thought I was going to have to unchain the disc set just to get the tractor unstuck but I managed to get it out every time. I got almost the entire field done and only found one 30×40 yard patch that still has standing water. I need to mark this area and the couple of spring heads that are visible. I think I can dig trenches and connect this waterway up to the spring ditch that is already running. If nothing else, I may have to create a small pond to corral all the water. I will try some ditches first.

It was a beautiful day today and it only hailed on me once. I remembered an extra layer and a neck warmer and had to take the neck warmer off it was so pleasant.

The tractor is the perfect time to just contemplate life as you go around in circles. The ground is so rough that I over tighten the seat belt so it holds me in place and I don’t get thrown from the tractor. I also eat the pickle flavor sunflower seeds. They are the best, except the seeds are too small unless you get the Biggies!

I had plans on getting a overall picture and hiked up to the top of the bluff, looked out over my work and went to take a picture and my phone died.

The written word of my awesome job will have to suffice as testament to my hard work!

Chicks are here

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Annmarie and I were commiserating about our lackluster effort by our chickens on Thursday night. We came to the conclusion that we were going to have to start pullets instead of trying to buy adults. Pullets take a minimum of six months before they start laying. It was decided that sooner rather than later was good timing.

She called me on Friday morning to say that she had purchased 18 Easter Eggers! The local feed and supply store had just gotten them in and she snapped up half the easter egger pullets. They let her pick her 18 and she paid for them so they held them all day for her. I knew the brooder needed to be bleached out but figured I would have time after I got off work. I got off late and was bleaching the brooder, lid, waterer and feeder when she got home. I had pine shavings down in the root cellar so I figured all was good. I dried it all off and filled up the brooder with pine shavings from the root cellar. Cedar shavings are bad for chickens. I placed all this in the library downstairs and somehow managed to do it without Annmarie noticing then went out to do chores. She smelled the brooder and said it smelled like chemicals. I told her I used bleach only and it should be gone by now. It was then that Annmarie asked me if I was still storing herbicides in the root cellar and how long had the pine shavings been down there? After killing off most of my chicks one year by using varethane inside the house at the same time they were present we are more cognizant of chemicals. So I had to throw out the bedding and used a cardboard box and newspaper to get us through the night until I could go back to the store and get fresh bedding.

This also put the kabash on any painting dreams I had. I tell myself that I was going to tear it up and finish the entire house over this weekend but now we will never know because I was thwarted by baby chickens.

We like the easter eggers as they are very calm. They lay multicolored eggs and have been the best breed in longevity, laying habits and non broody.

50 yards closer

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Yesterday I did not do any hard manual labor, my right elbow hurt too much. I have tendonitis in my elbow and I am trying to rest it and take some Motrin. This is a very slow process to heal it. It aches all the time and we have to go to a dinner for the fire station. Someone will want to shake my hand and inflict terrible pain on my elbow. They did and it happened about three times. I took a walk up the pasture with all three dogs to see if the water was running down by my fence crossing. It was not, it got to the trees and just stopped. I will check it tomorrow. All the dogs wanted to do was eat sheep poop the whole time. Gizmo found something stinky to roll around in that did not stick to him, just the smell.

My mother came out to look at the new floor and we spotted the eagle again. It was sitting in the top of a dead tree staring at the sheep just below it. It stayed there for over 30 minutes before leaving. Hopefully the sheep are old enough and big enough to ward off an attack from the eagle.

Our old hand dug well enclosure is falling apart. I really need to pour it some new walls and build some type of roofed enclosure around it. That needs to happen sooner than later

Tonight when I went out to do chores it was an amazing sunset. Sometimes life can be overwhelming and you just need to step back and realize just how amazing and lucky we are to be alive and on planet Earth. It truly is grounding to see the beauty around us on a daily basis. The older I get the more I appreciate it. Maybe that is my mortality creeping in, who knows. I just know that I have two broody hens who both think sitting on a wooden egg will net them a chick and they are very persistent despite me tossing them out of a nest every night for the last five days.