May sunset

At sunset on Saturday there was a break in the clouds and the rain stopped.

Retreating up the mountain

The snow is slowly retreating up the mountains.  Here is a view of the Big Mountain ski resort on May 18.

Robin egg

Having Daisy around hasn't deterred the robins from having nests around here.  Wednesday morning I found an eggshell on the driveway near the road where a robin dumped it.

Fallen tree and rainbows

We had a windstorm a few weeks back and another diseased and weakened spruce tree snapped off.  Monday after checking how high and fast the river has risen I spent some time cutting some of the branches from the tree.

Then a cold front passed through with strong winds and a little rain. Many of the tall trees were bending and whipping around in the high winds.  In case another tree was weak and would snap and fall on me I hightailed it out of there.  The back of my shirt was very wet by the time the wind blew me home to a house without electricity.

Then a double rainbow came out briefly.

Trapped for now

The hayfield is once again cleared of pocket gophers - that I know of, and for now.

I thought it was a tad early for the gophers to be on the move after shacking up and raising their young.  I guess the three pocket gophers I trapped this week were early achievers.  The gophers were all found on the southern end of the hayfield.  They must have come from the neighbor's land.

I am busy with fences so I haven't taken the time to walk and check the middle and south pastures for pocket gophers.  A few random walks in those pastures haven't seen signs of them yet.  I'll give it a few more weeks.

I am up to four pocket gophers trapped this year.  Not many.  Hopefully this is a sign that they are under duress and few remain.

More tulip photos, and more

Here are today's tulip photos.  The temperature reached 80 degrees so we are finally above average for a change.

Remember that large bale of hay I had gotten for the cattle? And my hopes and plans it would last nine or ten days?  It lasted exactly four days.  Holy Crap!  The cattle mowed right through the bale just like it was candy.  I am glad I bought three bales and not my planned two bales.  Dan helped me roll another bale into the corral.  I've been working on fences and, while I could move the bale by myself, I wasn't up to rolling a 1400 lb bale by myself all the way across the corral.

When we got the bales they had been stacked two high over Winter. My previous bale was a top bale. This "new" bale was a bottom bale.  Dan said one of the bales he fed his cattle had 20% rotted.  The other bales he got were fine. His cattle are not going though the hay as fast as my cattle did.   So far I think this bale is fine though the bottom on which it rested is dirty.  The cattle are not going though this bale as fast.  So perhaps the cattle were "catching up" on their food when eating the first big bale.

Before getting the big bales I fed the cattle three 60 lb bales a day.  They could have eaten another bale a day but I was trying to make my hay last.  180 lb divided by 11 cattle (I am counting Baby as a full animal and not a half) is 16.4 lb of hay a day for each animal.  A rule of thumb is cattle need 2% of their weight each day.  600 lb cattle would then need at least 12 lbs of hay a day.

1400 lb divided by 11 cattle divided by 4 days equals 31.8 lbs of hay for each animal each day.  Whoa!  No wonder the cattle look fatter.

Hopefully the cattle will back off a bit from the amount they are eating. Otherwise my three big bales won't last until the end of the month.


Lastly, I put three pocket gopher traps out in the hayfield.  This morning as I rode my bicycle past where I trapped the last pocket gopher of last year I noticed a fresh new mound of dirt.  I should have carried all the traps out but I only felt like carrying three and it didn't take long to find three areas to set traps.

New hay

The Spring has been cooler than normal once again and the grass is behind schedule.   Overnight record low temperatures of 20 degrees sure put a damper on the grass's growing ability.  So I will need to keep the cattle on hay until the end of May.

I miscounted the amount of hay bales I had left and also forgot that the one stack in the back was straw and not hay.  And the new cattle are a bit heavier and eat more hay.  So I was going to run out of hay before the end of the month.

Dan has lots of hay but this year he was worried about running out of hay too.  He has a number of contacts and said he could find a large bale of hay for me.  But that turned out to be a problem as other people were getting short of hay and it is harder to find this Spring.  Dan found a couple of prospects but one admitted his hay wasn't that good and the other wanted $65 for a 700 lb bale. That comes out to be $185 a ton.  Wow.  A cattleman can't make money with so expensive of hay.  Dan put an ad in the paper to buy hay but after a day he had no calls.

My neighbor looked to have 20 bales but when I asked him he said two bales were hay and the rest were straw.  He needed those two hay bales.

Another absentee landowner down the road had a half dozen or more bales in a field.  I tracked him down and asked if I could buy a couple of those bales.  He told me he sold them the other week.  But he had some hay at his place south of town.  He had a few 1400 lb bales at $100 a bale.  That is about $143 a ton.  More than I am used to paying but cheaper than the other prospects.

I needed a way to transport the hay as I do not have a flatbed trailer.  Dan has a trailer and is looking for hay so Saturday morning we went and got the hay.  The rancher had a dozen bales and they looked to be good hay.  I planned on buying two bales as I felt with my remaining bales I had enough hay until June 1.  But since he had a dozen bales I bought three bales and Dan bought the other nine.  So now I should have enough hay.

Dan's trailer held three bales and his flatbed truck one bale.  After hauling the first eight bales to his place we hauled three to my place.  The bales are packed tight and are heavy.  It took both Dan and I to roll the bales off his trailer.  Two in the NE pasture and one in the corral.  I have no tractor to move the hay bale so the challenge will be to roll the next bale into the corral once the cattle need it.

The cattle ate and ate the hay. Between 1 pm when they got the hay and late afternoon in the second photo that is how much hay they ate.

The cattle slowed down after the first day and their hay consumption has slowed down.  Now to see how long this bale will last.


Here is a video when the cattle started eating the hay.  The video also shows Daisy in the corral with the cattle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbTIk3jrZOQ

When I was previewing the video Daisy was sleeping in the chair next to me. When she heard the cattle banging on the feeder she woke up with a start, looked at the computer and me, and when the cattle banged again Daisy jumped off the chair and ran into the other room. After a bit she returned and then walked around the computer and table checking all around and also looking out the window near the computer.  Then she climbed back into the chair and went to sleep.

Sorry Daisy.

Tulips 2013

It has finally warmed up and the tulips are flowering.

Red feeder hole

A side effect of having all the cattle together in the corral is that one of the cattle apparently stepped in the empty red feeder as it now has a hole in it.  How is this feeder on the way to anywhere?

Reunited

Last Saturday started with the cattle (Momma and Baby) separated.

It has been almost 7 weeks since Baby and Momma were separated.  Momma's bag should be - and looks like it is - dried up.

So I opened the gate and let the cattle to mingle together.

There was lots of running around (as you will see in the video below) and some fighting.

Initially Momma and the herd ran to the south side of the barn and Baby and the one heifer ran to the north side.  Once the heifer and Baby were north of the barn and they stopped and looked at the cattle at the south side of the barn.  They looked puzzled as to why the other cattle went south of the barn. While the cattle's instinct is to be together, they also have this desire to go through gates to check out new areas.

Eventually they all came together.  Until they did Baby - the ever independent girl - wandered off on her own for a while.

Here is a 2 minute and 29 second video of the cattle's first moments together, followed by some fighting, followed by Baby checking me out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6sVRrjuICU


Now a week later I have caught Baby on two different days nursing from Momma. What?!  It's been 7 weeks!  At first I thought Baby wasn't getting any milk and what I saw was saliva.  So I went into the corral and tapped Baby on the shoulder.  When she looked up I saw she had a milk mustache.  Mommas was fine was Baby nursing.

Now this evening Tammy and I caught Baby nursing again.  This time we had our camera and got evidence of her misbehaving.

Tammy took this photo of Baby and her mustache.

It has been 7 weeks apart and Momma still has milk.  Dan can't believe it.  He had seen Momma a few days before Momma and Baby were reunited and he thought Momma's bag was dried up.

Momma is an amazing mother.

Northern Flicker

This year this big bird has been eating some of the suet.  I believe it is a Northern Flicker.  I like the "lipstick kiss" on the side of its head.

Playing in leaves

A week or so ago Bob and Jan had their yard cleaned of leaves and their lawn de-thatched.  I had them dump the leaves and grass in a low area by the loafing shed.  I thought the cattle would enjoy picking out the grass among the leaves.  I didn't realize they would go crazy playing in the leaves. 

After playing with and leveling the leaves the cattle enjoy laying on them.

Here is a 1 minute 59 second video of Momma rolling around in the leaves.  Also, at the end of the video, taken a week later, I videoed a steer rolling in the leaves before it hightailed away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS8pPFvIXQM

Cutting branches smaller

The past few months I slowly worked on the huge piles of tree branches I accumulated last year.  An hour or two many days I would saw the branches into short pieces that could fit in my wood stove.  I have sawed them all up.  I have some larger branches and tree trunks left but those need a chainsaw.


Here are some branches closer to the start.  As you can see I also peeled bark off some of the trunks.

My wood pile when I still had some branches left to cut.

The wood pile is a temporary pile in a temporary location near where I do the cutting..  So I just tossed the cut branches in a stack - and it caught up to me when the pile collapsed.

After I re-stacked the wood after a second collapse.

When I re-stacked the wood I added the two steel posts on one side to help hold the wood in place.

The wood pile when most of the branches have been cut.  Now to let them dry more, then find a permanent place to store them until I burn them. In the right foreground are some wood pieces I had gotten down the road.  They are very dense and quite heavy and need more drying and then splitting.  In the background are some of the stumps I have to split later this year.

On the left side are the larger pieces left to cut. The branches on the right side have been all cut since I took this photo.  That pile was over twice this size when I started and this was one of two piles.  The other pile was smaller though closer in size to what is seen in the photo.

I think all this cutting messed up my right shoulder muscles for a while.  A month ago they began to act like they did after the bicycle accident in 2000 where I suffered an oblique non-displaced fracture of my right collar/shoulder bone.  Back then I had some shoulder/neck muscles that wouldn't easily "turn off" or relax which caused soreness.  After a summer of therapy and exercises the muscles returned to normal.

Even though I saw using my left hand, the upper back muscles are connected and I think they got imbalanced from all that sawing and somehow the right shoulder/neck muscles got turned on non-stop.  First they were sore/tight in different spots ranging from my mid neck to outside my upper shoulder depending on what I did or didn't do that day.  The only comfortable positions to sleep were on the left or right shoulders and not on my front or back.  Driving was a 'bitch' as sitting and driving was uncomfortable whether for a long drive (like to get the new cattle) or a short drive uptown.  Later the constant "on" position began to limit my range of motion as the opposing muscles got tired of fighting the muscles that were suppose to be relaxing during arm movements.  Doing the kitchen/dining room remodel looked like it would be an even greater challenge.

So I found my old exercise guide and did exercises a few times.  I soaked my shoulder in hot water in the shower and did some self shoulder massages and stretching.  As Tammy doesn't believe in massages I only got a short shoulder/neck massage from her one time. She also doesn't like the smell of the Bengay lotion - which surprisingly to me helped the muscle soreness - so that limited my use of the lotion. Her advice was to go see a doctor even though I knew what my problem was.  I started to take some glucosamine & chondroitin sulfate vitamins and vitamin E as I believe they help with joints, muscles and healing.

Mainly I continued to use my shoulder muscles, working through the pain.  I'd like to say I took it easy but the last few weeks I've been rebuilding the loading corral and other fences by installing heavy railroad ties.  I also cleaned the cattle's water trough which meant moving and lifting the very heavy cast iron trough.  They don't make water troughs like this anymore.

And between everything, my muscles appear to have recovered.  The pain and soreness is gone and I got most of my range of motion back, though I still do stretches after warming up the shoulder muscles in a hot shower.  I wonder if the fence work was the 'nail in the coffin' as that work overloaded and tired out all my muscles and that perhaps enabled the troubled muscles to finally turn off and relax.  We'll see how long this lasts.

Harrowing

I am so behind on my blogging.  So much is going on.

A few weeks ago I completed the harrow work for the year.  I didn't harrow the entire property like I did last year.  Instead I drug the harrow around the NE and North pastures and a third of the middle pasture.

In the NE pasture I dumped the manure pile I had dug earlier this year.  http://tallpinesranch.blogspot.com/2013/02/shoveling-shit.html     The dark piles are parts of that manure pile before I drug the harrow and spread them out.


The NE and North pasture were important to harrow because the horses would use selected areas as their bathroom and these areas had lots and lots of manure that needed to be broken up.

Since the harrow work on the NE and North pastures went well and I had time left that day I also drug the harrow over the east third of the middle pasture.  The cattle 'go wherever'  so their manure is dispersed over the pasture and there is no great need to drag a harrow to break up the manure.


The cattle had fun watching me drive in circles dragging the harrow.  They can be easily amused.

New cattle video

Here is a 2 minute 8 second video of when the new cattle arrived in the corral.

The video starts with Tammy and I unloading the cattle.  I didn't realize I had the camera turned on so that is the reason for the crazy poor images.  How did you like the clouds?   Then we go to Tammy feeding an apple to Momma before ending with Daisy in the corral.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUYmTV73-40