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Loaded up the tractor trailer yesterday with our cattle.  They loaded well and are on their way to their next home.  We have decided not to replace them this year, opting instead to get some more sheep and concentrate on that side of things.  Which means we’ll have to figure out how to adapt the cattle feeder to feed another 100 ewe’s when they come on Saturday!!  It will probably be temporary, because with all this sun, we should be getting some soybeans harvested!

 

We hope to start corn silage tomorrow, so this afternoon, I took the harvester over to Cousin Bob’s so we’d have it all ready to go.  Last thing we check after hitching it up to the Tractor is that the electric controls work for aiming the spout into the wagon.  This time, the spout wouldn’t turn!

An hour and a half later, and the 3 of us were stumped!  We had power at the electric motor, but it wouldn’t run.  Switching that motor with the other one on the feedroll reverser that worked resulted in exactly zero difference.  So after supper, I ran wire from the one that worked up to the one that wouldn’t, and presto- it ran! 

Tomorrow I’ll have to remember that the switch to reverse the feedrolls actually turns the spout!  and if I want to reverse the feedrolls, I’ll have to go disconnect and reconnect some wires back there! (with a little luck, I won’t need to!?!)

Last year at the church auction, Dad bought a plane ride!  Luckily for me, there was room for 3 passengers!  Bob Stone is a chicken farmer just north of us who has his own plane.  He took us up on a beautiful summer evening.  We got to scope out lots of crop fields, and our neighbour’s houses and everything!  Plus we could see how bad our two corn fields look with the drowned out spots showing up much more than from the road. (I’m not sure I wanted to know!)

Here’s a link to a few pic’s

http://ow.ly/6ptMm

 

 

So, I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, mostly due to becoming the twitter and facebook dude for @durhamfarmfresh… (you should follow!)

So, in a nutshell, the last month or so has been busy with wheat and barley harvest, and hay and straw baling, in between rains…  The new (to me) combine has performed better than expected, so getting the grain done between rains was a little easier than it could have been, but trying to make dry bales with the frequency of the rains has been challenging!

Now that we can put away the haying equipment, we move into fall, where the weather is a little less of an issue.  Currently we are stinking up the neighbourhood with some wonderful organic fertilizer! in between fixing a feed cart that is bound and determined to throw the chain off the sprocket, and, well, a whole bunch of other jobs that were on the ‘sometime this summer’ list!

The old Knee High by the 1st of July is a good rule of thumb, but it’s always amazing just how fast it grows after that!  It is actually one of the few plants that can literally grow overnight!  It can store energy it gets from the sun, and continue to grow in the dark. 

We took a pic of Karen standing in the corn on July 2nd (which I forgot to post) and we took another 10 days later.  Double the height?..

We finally had all the fencing in place good enough to let a few of the sheep out.  Our goal was to let them eat the grass around the barns so we didn’t have to cut it! 

We opened the gate to the barn and just let the group of them wander out on their own.  They didn’t make it more than 20 feet from the door, and all ran back in every time we went by!  The afternoon they were back inside the whole time!  I guess shade beats grass for a not-too-hungry sheep!

If I’d know that, I could have let them out without any fence at all…  have to see how adventuresome they are on day 2.

The old saying is that corn should be knee high by the first of July.  These days, it is really rare that it isn’t.. 

This year, most of it is up to waist high! except for the wet spots where there isn’t any corn at all, and the edge of the wet spots, where it is quite a bit shorter.  Some fields will have a lot of variation in them! 

But for the most part, things are growing really well considering the backward spring we’ve had.

I bought 4 rams this spring.  They were yearlings and had never been sheared.  The rest of my ewes however, were already sheared.  Rather that get my shearer to come back for 4 rams, I bought a set of electric shears and we did them ourselves yesterday!  My very first sheep that I have sheared!  ( and no, I don’t think I’ll be doing them all next time!)

They should be cooler for the rest of the summer, even if they’re not looking exactly handsome!

Here is a pic of the first 2 done, and the next 2 waiting!