Broken fence

I was going to rebuild this fence anyway, but not until later.

Some of the cattle are into instant gratification - they don't want to walk around a fence.  When I put hay into the feeders - especially the feeder by the barn - some cattle pushed through the fence to get to the hay.  Here is today's result after a few days of this behavior:

New header

In honor of my new cattle I changed my blog's header to this photo.

More cattle photos

Here is my one boy.  He likes to groom and look good for the ladies.

This little girl must be a punk rocker.  Here she is rocking a rough shaggy look.  It will be interesting to see how she looks once she gets sleek for the summer.

My "clown" seems to be a sweet gentle heifer.

Cattle again

I am back in the cattle business.  This past cool and rainy Thursday Dan and I drove to Missoula for the cattle auction.  We got to the auction grounds at 10 am but the cattle auction had not started as planned.  There weren't a lot of cattle so they were taking their time.

Walking back to the holding pens to take a look I didn't see many cattle.  With the smaller numbers they were being held in the center pens.

There were some good cattle in my desired weight range of 500 to 650 lbs.  It looked like I could put together a group of ten.

The auction started at 10:40 am.  There weren't many slaughter cows so we got to the feeder cattle relatively quickly.

As is typical with me at auctions it was difficult for me to bid on the first real prospect.  It was a single steer and my doubts about eventually getting ten head, about what was the right price, etc., etc. held me back from bidding and then the steer was sold.

After a couple of misses I finally bid and I won the bid on three heifers.  After that it was easier to bid on cattle in my desired weight class.  Another four brown heifers.  A red steer.  Another two black heifers.  I had ten head.  I was on a roll.   When another black small heifer came up at a good price I bought her.  She was less than my weight range as she weighed 425 lbs.  But since she was small I figured I could get one more head.

When taken together the cattle average 535 lbs.  Ten girls and one boy.  It is hard to get steers.  What steers there were at the auction sold for more money which held me back from buying them.

Evan was at the auction.  To save money he asked if I was willing to hold the cattle at the auction until Tuesday,  He was coming up to the Flathead on Wednesday to get cattle for next Thursday's auction and I could save money by waiting.   But then he saw another guy who lived closer to the Flathead and he asked Kenny if he would haul the cattle today for me and he agreed.

The feeder cattle were done being sold at 11:40 am.  Dan and I left and returned home.  Here are some photos of the Mission Mountains on our drive home.  It had quit raining by the end of the auction.  The photos don't do the mountains justice.

While waiting for the cattle to arrive I decided to move the metal feeder from the coral to the NE pasture as I plan to use the wooden feeders.  The metal feeder is very heavy so the only real way to move it is to tip it on its side and roll it.  The feeder on its side is much taller than me so getting it up and then back down was a challenge.

I also put the boards back into the wooden feeder.  I finished this puzzle piece after the cattle arrived.  Minutes after the cattle were unloaded from the stock trailer it began to rain.

When Kenny brought the cattle I learned that seven of the cattle were ones he brought to the auction to sell.  Three heifers he was interested in buying back from me when I sell them in September.  In fact he said he would be interested in buying all the cattle.  It is nice to have an option outside of the auction.

Here is my rainbow herd shortly after they arrived.

This herd is calmer than most new herds I get. A few cattle are jumpy when they see me, others already are coming up close to me.  The steer is the "odd man" out.  The seven heifers from Kenny know one another.  The other three heifers seem to be fitting in. The steers is feeling like a third wheel.  He is missing his friends and often looks around and bellows as if calling them.

Kalispell Antique Flea Market

Tammy's antique flea market was held from 9 am to 6 pm last Saturday and 10 am to 4 pm on Sunday.  The weather forecast was for good weather on both days but fortunately the weather on Saturday was cool and cloudy.   I think that brought in a few more customers to Tammy's event.  On Sunday the weather was sunny and warm.  That, combined with it being a Sunday and the event's second day, meant the number of people who came on Sunday was much less than on Saturday.  On Saturday there were 470 people and on Sunday there were around 160 to 170 people.

On Saturday morning we were at the building over an hour early and still there were a few vendors waiting to get in and do their last minute set up.  Even though the event started at 9 am we had customers at 8:45 pm.   Most vendors were ready.

Here is the banner Tammy designed to advertise the event.

Tammy and I made signs to advertise event and help direct people to the correct location on the fairgrounds.  We had three of these signs.

In addition to Tammy's Tastefully Simple booth on the left she let me have a space to sell some of my stuff.  The customers that came were more interested in the flea market stuff than in the home-based businesses like Tastefully Simple, Scentsy or Watkins.

Saturday night I looked through some of the boxes stored in the bunkhouse and found more stuff to bring to sell.  I also brought several more tables to put the stuff on.  I sold a number of things.  Good thing Tammy didn't charge me for my booth as I didn't sell enough to pay for my booth.

The event as seen from the main entrance.  The wood floors were more forgiving than concrete floors but my legs were still tired by the end of the day.

This vendor had a number of neat signs.  I thought of my Uncle Curt as I think he is into stuff like this.  The signs weren't cheap, so while the vendor sold some of signs, they weren't flying out of there.

Tammy had a couple of food vendors outside the building.  This photo was taken on Saturday.  Sunday didn't have any clouds.

It was cold inside the building on Saturday morning and we had to get the heaters going.

We had a steady stream of customers on Saturday until mid to late afternoon.  The event went until 6 pm but it was dead after 5 pm on Saturday.

On Sunday morning Tammy and I actually got to the expo before any one else.  We had a couple who came a little before we opened at 10 am and I let them come in to look around.  This worked out for me as they bought a number of things from me   It was pretty slow until after noon as many people were at church.    We were open until 4 pm on Sunday and it was dead after 3 pm.

The Pampered Chef vendor staffed her booth on Saturday even after a long day on Friday traveling around Montana including coming back from Williston, ND.  On Sunday she had a team mate staff her booth while she caught up on her sleep.  He snuck out around 2:30 pm and other vendors and Tammy were upset that he left early.


This is what we brought back from the event including the signs, our tables and stuff.  The brown box is holding food to be donated to the Food Bank.  Tammy listed that we were taking food donations in one of her ad listings but forgot to list that we were doing so in the other listings.  We know who saw the one listing as they brought food.  We only collected a little over 31 pounds, much less than the 120.6 pounds we collected at her Woman's Expo in March.

It was a long weekend.   Overall the vendors were happy and many vendors want Tammy to continue this type of event with future dates in August and November.

Antique Flea Market setup

Now that Tammy has a few Women Expos under her belt, she was encouraged to organize and re-start an antique flea market at the Flathead County fairgrounds.

Unlike the people who are home-based direct sellers, Tammy doesn't have contacts in the antique and flea market community.  She was introduced to the woman who used to organize the antique flea markets until she quit a few years ago.  Leslie helped Tammy in re-starting things though she couldn't find her book with her contact information and only could provide some names from memory.  Needless to say it has been a challenge for Tammy to organize this event.  Add in that:

• some vendors had been burned by another person who organized these type of events, and
• they don't know Tammy

and it was tough to get people to sign on.  Then at the last minute a few vendors changed their mind or had "family emergencies" to prevent them from attending.  With all the family emergencies you'd think some major event had occurred in the Valley.  I haven't heard anything of the sort in the news. 

Friday was "set up" day.  Tammy told the vendors they could come from 4 pm to 8 pm to set up their display.  Tammy and I planned on getting there before 3 pm to get the keys to the building and to measure and tape off the vendor locations.  There were four or five vendors already waiting for us when we got there.  So we had to balance finding their vendor location with measuring and taping everyone's location.  We had to move some fairground stuff to a corner we weren't using and also had to turn on the heat as it was colder in the room than outside.

At 4 pm many of the vendors came and it was a crazy time.

We were in the grandstand building and it is an old building.  The fairground had just replaced all the doors with modern doors that also had windows in them.  One end of the building had doors at ground level.  This side had an alley that made it hard to allow many people to unload their vehicles at once.  The main side of the building - with the parking lot - had three steps to climb to get into the building with no ramp.  A hand rail is only on one side of the wide entrance.

A number of vendors are quite old and I ended up helping some of them carry their stuff inside the building to their location.  It was amazing how much they could pack into their small pickups or other vehicles.

Tammy and I planned on using my pickup to haul our signs to the fairgrounds but my pickup wouldn't start.  For sure, the battery was dead.   Once things settled down after 7 pm I went to Walmart and bought a new battery.  This is the first time I changed the battery in the pickup and I found it was more complicated than unhooking the terminal and lifting the battery out.  As a result I didn't get back to the fairgrounds until 8:20 pm  to a Tammy who was mad that I wasn't back by 8 pm.

Antler

While cleaning up some tree branches the other day I came across an nice antler.  I seem to have found more antlers this year than other years.

Cleaning the pasture

Thursday I spend some time cleaning up the pastures.

If you remember from my burning I had chopped apart a stump that had caught fire. I cleaned that up.

I also cleaned up some small piles here and there of dead branches and sticks.  When cleaning up around one old fallen tree I noticed the bark was falling off the tree trunk.  Some parts of the trunk under the bark has started to decay as this tree trunk has been dead for a few years now.  I pulled off all the bark from the tree to prevent the bark from holding future moisture against the tree trunk.

Here is the tree trunk after I stripped all of the bark off it.

When I drug the harrow around the middle pasture I accidentally snagged a dead tree stump.  Fortunately the stump was rotted and it broke off instead of breaking my harrow.  Here is the stump after I loaded it on the pickup.

This is what is left of the stump after the harrow broke off the top of the stump.  I'll dig/burn or pull the stump later.

While gathering the branches and stuff I either let the pickup run or turned it off.   At the end of the day after I unloaded all the branches I discovered the battery was dead.  What?  That was sudden.  Then I thought of how old the battery is.   It is the original battery from a 2000 model year pickup.  12 years isn't too bad for a battery.

I had to get my car (and Tammy) to jump my pickup to start it.  Even then the pickup was reluctant to start.  I drove it a little bit on the highway to charge the battery.  I'll see tomorrow if the charge holds or if the battery is a goner.

Singed trees

Now that some days passed since my big pasture burn I can now see the effects of where the fire got close to some of my pine trees.  The heat from the fire, and not the fire itself, was enough to affect the trees.

Here are some of the trees that were affected.

Finish the harrowing

I finished harrowing the hayfield and all the pastures today.  I'm tired from being tossed around.  The ground is not smooth.  I realized that I had not drug the harrow last year, and even though I raked the pocket gopher mounds smooth after trapping the pocket gophers, the ground seemed to have "gone backwards" since I last drug the harrow.

Tammy came out yesterday to bring me a little water and lunch and ended up riding with me for a little while.  Unfortunately the time Tammy rode with me was when I worked the middle pasture.  The middle pasture is the roughest pasture by far.  We were tossed all around as I drove as we had lots of hills and holes.  It was similar to being on a carnival ride.  After an hour or so Tammy decided to go back to painting her Antique Flea Market signs.

The grass took a beating from the harrow but it shouldn't be long until it is back to normal and bright green.

Here is part of the reason for dragging the harrow: manure. Big piles don't dry and break down back into the soil very fast.  I've noticed that the manure I had broken up with my rake last week after the big burn is well on its way to deteriorating back into the ground.  The harrow did a good job in breaking the manure up and is much faster than raking them all by hand.

Starting to harrow

I started dragging the harrow Monday.  I am behind schedule as I should have drug my harrow across the hayfield and pastures weeks ago. The grass is growing and I should have drug the harrow before the grass started growing.   Even so, I have lots of cattle and horse manure that needs to be broken up.  Also, even though I raked flat most of the pocket gopher dirt mounds after trapping the pocket gophers, there is still some mounds that need to be knocked down.

Here is the 2012 version of my harrow.  The only drawback is gap between the two sections of harrows.  I've noticed that the manure that slips between the harrow sections is not broken up.  Still, it appears over 90% of the manure is broken up.

This shows 'before' and 'after'.

Stunned bird

Sunday morning I heard the sound of a bird hitting a house window.  That happens on occasion and I didn't think any more of it.  A short time later when I went outside I found this bird standing in my tulip flower bed next to the house where the window is located.

The bird must have still been stunned as it kind of flapped its wings briefly but didn't fly off.  Later when I came outside again the bird flew off and up into a pine tree.

I don't know what kind of bird this is.  A young owl or hawk?