Stump 6 for the year

A few weeks ago, during a very windy day, one of my neighbor Jan's evergreen trees blew over.  She hired someone to cut up the tree.  The stump was left.   After I got my tractor back from my mechanic who was looking into why the tractor's fuel gage doesn't work (he has to order a new fuel sender unit as the unit the John Deere dealer put in last Fall was defective), I decided to use the tractor to get Jan's tree stump out.

Evergreens out here tend not to have a tap root, just side roots. Due to how the stump looked I figured it wouldn't be hard for the tractor's bucket to push the stump out of the ground.   Nope.  I figured out why the tree blew over.  There were no side roots on one side of the tree.  There were some side roots on the other sides of the tree.  The tree was a decent size, but the side roots didn't seem all that large.  But a few of them were tough and didn't want to break.  I had to go get my spade and an axe and dig and chop a number of side roots.  Then I was able to push the stump out of the ground.

Mailbox nest?

Over the past few weeks I have noticed grass and small branch sticks inside the box I built around my mailbox.

I had built the box to protect it from the snow that the snowplow clears from the road.  At 35+ mph the snow goes flying.  The county doesn't pay for the damage the snow from their snowplows can cause to mailboxes.  Over the years my mailbox got bent from the snow until I had to replace it.  Then I put boards up on the sides.  I then had to make the "protection" a box to protect the "protection".  And then a roof on the box as the falling snow would then sit around the mailbox.

A few weeks ago I noticed grass and sticks up near the front of the box.  I would pull them out.  And more sticks and grass would show up days later.  The area is small.  I can barely get my arm in the area to remove the sticks and grass.  Today I had to use a crowbar so I could reach all the way to the back of the box.  Some of the grass is quite long.  If there is grass behind the mailbox I can't reach it.

The post is a metal pipe.  So I don't think a mouse is trying to make a nest.  So possibly a small bird is doing this.  Why?  Isn't there a better place to make a nest?

Stump 4 for this year

I may not be posting every day, but I am doing things.  Mainly I am digging around some tree stumps in the middle pasture since the ground is softer during this time of the year.  I plan on burning a pair of stumps (stumps 3) so no photos yet until the burn is done.  I am almost done with stump 5 I am digging out, so photos for that stump yet.

Stump 4 was the easy stump to "remove".   Another old and mostly hidden stump that I came across after I dug around stumps 3.   At least this time the stump was decaying and soft at the top.  So all I did was to dig and break apart the top of the stump to be a little bit below the top of the ground.  Then I called it "good" and moved on to the next stump.

Couple of photos of Little Beulah's calf

Here are a couple of photos from last week.

Instead of linking to the older blog post about Little Beulah's calf, I included older photos of the calf.  You can see how her color has changed and she is getting more of her mother's color.

As you can see, once the calf got dried off, the next day she was more of a light gray.

Upside down corral panel

This afternoon I noticed Toby the bull had somehow flipped one of the extra temporary corral panels I had stored in the south corral.  You can see the one bungy cord is still holding the corral panel against corral fence.  How Toby did this?  Who knows?

Tree trunk cut up

In yesterday's post I mentioned I hauled and stacked some of the logs of a tree trunk I recently cut up.  Here are the photos of that tree trunk.

This is a tree that fell over seven(?) years ago.  It fell over onto a pile of wood I had previously used when burning tree stumps.  Every now and then over the years I cut up parts of the tree trunk when I had time and gas for my chainsaw. No hurry to cut the entire tree as it rested on branches and not on the ground.  So it wasn't decaying much.  This time I finished cutting the tree.  Since I had to use the chainsaw on a tree stump I had dug up nearby, I kept on going, even though it took me parts of a few days to entirely cut this tree.

I measured this.  It is exactly 24 inches in diameter.   My chainsaw blade is 21 inches long.  So I had to cut from each side to complete the cut.  I was careful and watched how I was cutting through the tree.  Still, the cut was not identical across the log as you can see in later photos below.

The length should be short enough to fit in my woodstove when the log is split.  But since the cuts weren't identical across the log, parts of some logs looked to be a little too long for the wood stove.  So I cut some logs again to make sure they would be short enough to fit in my stove.

The last of the tree trunk rolled off the wood pile. Which is good since it was hard to cut the tree when it was laying on the wood pile.

Looks like a fairly straight cut, right?  Nope.

I even cut off part of the tree stump.  I left this part of the stump for now.  The cattle can scratch on it.

Another burn and then wind

Saturday, after Donna helped me put up the electric fence for the cattle, she helped me burn the rest of the one neighbor's ditch across the road.  The light wind was in the right direction for a safe burn.  Because the property and the ditch hadn't been burned since I can remember, the grass was thick.  So I raked a row between the ditch and property to clear an area of the dead grass.  Even though the wind was in the right direction, fire will go against the wind to burn.  Donna watched the cleared row in case the fire did want to cross it.  A few times the fire did but I was able to easily put the fire out at that spot.

The ditch is now cleared of old dead grass.  Even though I watch and clean the ditch of garbage people toss out of their vehicle windows as they drive by, after the fire I found several beer bottles and several aluminum cans.  I also found three short (20 feet or so) sections of barb wire, parts on the ground and parts in the ground.  I pulled the wire out of the ground and then got rid of them also.

Sunday afternoon a strong cold front came through.  The wind was blowing 33 mph with gusts to 46 mph.  I was in the middle pasture loading some recently cut tree trunk logs into the pickup.  I avoided driving near some of the standing trees as they were swaying and bending in the strong wind.  I didn't want one to break off or fall over on the pickup or me.  I'll see tomorrow if any trees fell due to the wind.

Here is a video of a metal lawn ornament by the house.  The wind really made the bicycle wheels turn.

https://youtu.be/CVbTsI9JQCc

Donna and calf 110

After Donna looked at Mama's new calf, she helped me put up my electric wire.  This prevents the cows from pushing on and bending or breaking the temporary corral panels.   While Donna was putting some of the posts into the ground, calf 110 rubbed up against Donna.

https://youtu.be/0IJXaYhVYD0

Calf 12 - Mama's

This morning Mama had her calf.  Last year her calf was born May 26.  So this year's calf was born about 5 weeks earlier.  Soon Mama will be back on the normal calving schedule for the cows.  Beulah, who should have had her calf by now, has slipped back as she hasn't had her calf yet as her calf last year was born April 3.

Mama is the over-protective mother for the first 3 weeks after her calf is born.  Fortunately I already had Mama in the south corral with Toby and Muscles.  So I don't have to worry about Mama fighting with other cows who get close to her calf.  Mama knows better than to try to fight with Toby.

Of course Mama's over-protectiveness also means I can't get to her calf.  I looked through the fence even though Mama would either charge at me to scare me from the fence, or else get her calf to walk away from the fence where I was at.  So I couldn't tell if the calf was a male or female.  I put it down to 40% chance it was male and 60% it was female.  Donna came over in the afternoon and looked through the fence.  Eventually she thought it was 100% chance the calf was a female.  That meant we didn't have to try to separate the calf from Mama so we could band it.

I'm not going to separate them either to ear band the calf.  All the other calves have ear bands.  Even though this calf looks like the other calves, not having an ear band will mean the calf is Mama's calf.  This makes life easier.

It was hard to get good photos of the calf as I has to take them outside the south corral, and when Mama was not charging me.  Eventually I got a number of photos.

Most of Mama's nipples are very large.  Fortunately the calf was able to drink as several of Mama's nipples are smaller where the calf can drink from them. 

A few times the calf was in Toby's way and Toby pushed it aside.  Otherwise Toby was fine.  And he likes to eat.

Fruit tree area burn

Donna had me fertilize part of her field today.  We were waiting this afternoon for the fertilizer trailer to come back to CHS for me to use.  CHS forgot to call to call me when the trailer arrived. Donna called after 4 pm and I got the trailer after 5 pm.  It took less than an hour of driving around Donna's field to fertilize it.

While I was waiting for CHS to call earlier in the afternoon, since the wind was light (for once this past week), I decided to burn the dead grass in the fruit tree area.

Before I started the burn, these 8 turkeys decided to hang around my front yard.

Before

After

After the burn I noticed that one of my old fence posts caught on fire.  I had a 5 gallon pail with a hole in the bottom.  No problem I thought, I don't need much water.  The pail was 2/3rds full and by the time I walked - fast - from the cattle water trough to the fence post all but a few drop of water had leaked out.  I had to find a 5 gallon pail with no leaks.  Then I put the fire out.

The fence post had rotted earlier and I couldn't crawl over the fence as the post would start to lean a lot.  Now the post doesn't touch the ground.  Another thing for my to-do list.

Since the burn went well, I decided to also burn a small area with tall grass and weeds in the ditch near my mailbox.

Tree stump 1 removal

I spent parts of the last so many days removing the tree stump I found in the middle pasture last year.  I figured this wouldn't be a big job as the stump was one that I had burnt many years ago.  15 years or more?  And who knows how long the stump was a stump and not a live tree?  But I found out this stump was from when I first started burning tree stumps.  In the beginning I wouldn't dig much around the stumps thinking that the burn would keep going down into the ground.  Well, it doesn't really.  Maybe the stump will burn a little below ground level.  Back then I thought that was ok.  Since then I learned that the stumps will slowly be squeezed up out of the ground a little bit.  And that is what happened with this stump.

I found out this stump was for a full blown larch tree.  It is hard to get larch to start burning.  And does larch really decay?  I wonder.   This stump's roots were mostly rock hard solid even after decades after the tree died.

So it took me a number of days to dig around this stump.  Since I didn't expect the stump to be large I tossed the dirt a short distance away.  Of course I then found out as I dug the tree stump had sections under the dirt I just tossed and I had to then moved that dirt over.  And after more digging, move over the dirt pile a bit more.

The stump was large, but had multiple almost independent sections of roots that went down and sideways.  To make burning go better and not have this stump show up again this meant digging around the tree root sections.  To get around the roots and make digging easier I ended up using an axe to remove tree root sections.  It got to a point that it was better to chop out the stump sections than burning them.

I got all stump roots chopped except for two sections.  By now it was pointless to go through all the work to bring in branches for a fire.  So I got my chainsaw and cut the final two sections.  One section was a decent size.  The section's wood was rock hard.  No decay there.  It took some effort to chainsaw through it.  Then I had to sharpen my chainsaw's chain as the wood was so hard it had an effect on the chain.

But I'm done.  The stump is gone and the hole is filled back in.

What I thought the tree stump originally was.

The pieces I chopped out from what I thought the stump originally was.

Look, I found more of the tree stump.

I had removed some of the extra stump sections.

Ever after all these many years, there is still sap in one of the stump's root sections.

I had to chainsaw these root sections to remove them.

Very hard wood

All gone.

All done.  There were more stump root sections than what is seen. I had already hauled off over half of them.

Bull calves banded

I finally got the two bull calves banded for castration.  I asked my neighbor Larry for help.  Larry has lots of experience working with cattle in the past.  So that we could catch the two calves I opened the south corral and the loading ramp area gates so the calves could run over there.  Instead the two cows, the bull and then one calf ran over to the loading ramp area.  Larry and I were able to corner the one calf in the south corral so we started to work on him.

Larry was having a hard time finding the second ball/testicle.  And when he did, the ball/testicle would go back up before I could get a band over his scrotum.  Over and over we went.  Eventually we decided to try doing this when the calf was standing.  By now the mother cow saw what we were doing and came running over and mooing at us.  So I had to herd her out of the south corral and close the gate.

Over and over we worked on finding both balls/testicles and then keeping them down long enough to band them.  Finally I got the band on.  The second ball/testicle is smaller than the first one and it seemed like the second one was partially under the band and not all the way below it.  So I ended up putting a second band on the scrotum hoping to put it higher.  Not really.  But with both bands on the scrotum it appeared both balls were below the bands.

I then checked the calf's ear tag.  This was the calf (LR-8) on which Donna and I could earlier only find one ball/testicle.  So this was a good thing Larry and I found both.  We let the calf go.

By now the cows and bull had left the loading ramp area and we were able to quickly catch the other calf, 70-7.  This was the two testicle calf Donna and I worked on earlier.  Larry and I were able to easier get both balls/testicles to stay down long enough that I could band the calf.

I am happy I finally got both calves banded.  Then I let them out of the south corral so they and their mothers could join the rest of the cows and calves. Of course some of the cows wanted to fight with the new cows but eventually they seemed to get over it.

Since "Mama" cow looks like she is getting closer to giving birth, Larry helped me herd Mama into the south corral to be with the bull and Muscles.  Since Mama is very over protective of her calf for three weeks after giving birth, it will be easier for both of us if Mama is in the south corral.

Calf 110, the one that likes to rub against me, then decided to rub his head against Larry's legs.  This evening when checking on the cattle calf 110 ran over to me and started to rub against my legs.  He wouldn't stop, even when I tried to get him to stop.  I had to leave the corral.

Late afternoon I helped Donna burn the ditches by her place.  Those ditches hadn't been burned in almost 20 years.  So it was good that we cleaned them up of old and tall grass.

Photos of the calves after they were banded,  It was hard to get them to stand still long enough to get a good photo of them.