A local feed store and some alpaca farmers organized a shearing event for today, held in the parking lot of the feed store. It was a great deal- $16 per llama or alpaca, much less expensive than hiring a shearer to come out to the farm to do one animal. I had been wanting to shear Dolly Llama soon, and was dreading trying to do it myself, she was one shaggy monster. So I was thrilled to see a flyer for this event last week. Continue reading “The Llama’s New ‘Do”
We’ve lost, and bent, quite a few things that reside under our New Holland TC30 tractor. You see, this tractor has a lot of exposed stuff on its underbelly. And that’s not good, because when you have a farm, and an old farm no less, you run over things. To start with, there is 10 foot tall reed canary grass, and then there are even taller blackberry vines, and big things can hide in there. Things that have been found hiding in our weeds, from past farm denizens and flood deposits: logs and lumber, boulders, whole trees, a truck bed, broken or bent-over fence posts (with barbed wire still attached) a clawfoot bathtub, hundreds of feet of 6″ aluminum pipe and fittings, steel barrels, huge bent gates, culvert pipes, refrigerators, a couch, an RV door, and old broken tractor implements. Those are just the few that immediately come to mind- there were many more! Our neighbors have an entire collapsed garage, plus all its contents, under there somewhere, just waiting for the next owner of the property to say, “honey, I was thinking I’d mow that patch of blackberries over there in the back pasture today.” Continue reading “‘Neath the Tractor Woes”
Quite some time ago, we bent the hydraulic power steering shaft on the tractor- a New Holland TC30. I’m not sure how or when. But, it compromised the seal, so the thing has been leaking power steering fluid like crazy. We’ve been procrastinating on fixing it (we never want to stop using the tractor!), and were just topping off the fluid all the time. Continue reading “Bent Power Steering Shaft”
Mrs. Pete was taking a nap on the warm tractor seat this morning. Behind her is the newly cleared hillside. I have covered it with 50 lbs of grass seed, and a layer of straw to discourage erosion.
Kirk has been enjoying the use of our new road up from the pasture, using the tractor to haul up debris from down there that was a bit too scary to drive on the street. Much of what he’s retrieved are standard-sized logs, metal chunks etc that have probably arrived here from past floods.
But this mammoth looks like it may have been something from the original farmstead, back in the 1800’s. I know that the homesteader family logged the hill and had an on-site sawmill from which they cut boards to build the barns. It took Kirk some finessing to get this onto the tractor bucket (you can only see the tractor’s roll bar and Kirk’s head behind the log, it’s so big). But he did, and got it up the hill and into the to-be-processed scrap pile. Our little 30-hp tractor does pretty well carting big loads like this around.
We’re thinking of what we could do with this one, to keep it around for posterity. Maybe we’ll make it into a bench or something. Any creative ideas?
The sewn-up duck has healed well- she still has a barely perceptible limp, but I almost can’t tell her apart from the other adult ducks. Amazing!
Her adopted babies are the result of my next generation of duck egg incubation attempts. Still not good: 7 hatches out of 36 eggs! :-{ Again, I had a lot of eggs that appears to be fully developed, but never hatched. Continue reading “Status: Duck Incubation and Sewn-Up Duck”
I ordered two more rolls of Electronet from Premier. Now I have four 164′ sections of netting. Now, I can give the sheep a pretty big rectangle, and not have to move it so often. It also gives them a more comfortable grazing section, that’s not so cramped. I like for them to be able to do a bit of walking each day.
I spoke with a neighbor this weekend who said she is having a terrible time with domestic dogs chasing and/or killing her livestock. So, she’s been shooting them (this is entirely legal, btw). I don’t blame her, this kind of predation is perhaps the most frustrating of all, because it doesn’t need to happen. These dogs have kibble at home, they aren’t trying to make a living like a wild predator, they are just out having a good time! Continue reading ““Shoot, Shovel and Shut Up””
This weekend I caught all the lambs individually. I wanted to trim their hooves and weigh them. Continue reading “Weighing Lambs”
This week we had a little earthwork done for the farm. I say a little, and for the farm, because in our state, under the “right to plow” law, if you are moving a reasonably small amount of dirt and it is for farming activity, you don’t have to get a grading permit. Continue reading “A Little Earth Moving”