Measure Twice, Cut Once

Thanks to Miss Rachel for featuring my post about Dexter Cattle over at her blog for this week’s Homesteading Carnival.

If you are interested in country living and homesteading, head on over for some great photos and posts!

When we first moved to our homestead we wanted to have a milk cow and meat goats. After doing a little research into livestock we found that to start with it would be best to first go with cows and when we had better fences we would add goats and sheep.

Why Dexter’s? We have been great fans of the heritage breeds movement for sometime and we knew that we would be picking one of the older breeds, so that narrowed down the search. We first wanted a Kerry cow but we couldn’t find very many of those - a bit too rare. The next runner up was the Dexter, a very old Irish breed. There are a number of breeders here in Canada and one of them lives just up the road in Colinton, Allan and Rita Nelson are the breeders we purchased from, and they have been breeding Dexter’s for over twenty years.

Our first visit to the Nelsons was all we needed to make up our minds on which cow breed to go with. The Nelsons have never milked their Dexter’s but they have sold some that are being milked. The Dexter’s are one of the most gentle little cows you will ever handle. As we walked through the herd of fifty or more cows we picked out one we wanted for a family milk cow. Once we got home we decided to buy two cows, and selected another from our short list of potential cows. When Allan delivered them a couple of weeks later our herd of two had already grown to three, and not long after they came to live with us in their new home we had our first Dexter calf born on our homestead.

Our milk cow had never been milked before and so I was in for a bit of a rodeo. Now I had help in the past with breaking range cows to milk on my sister’s ranch - she ran Simmentals. After some time with a very good rope and two well-anchored posts they all made not bad milk cows. My Grandfather had always just cut out one of his Herefords to milk and so I felt I had the knowledge and experience to take a three year old range cow and make her into a gentle loving family milk cow. Well there was no rodeo, she took to milking right off - she has a bit of an attitude but she loves her rolled oats and she has only kicked me the one time (and that was my fault). It turned out that getting two of them was the way to go; we milked one (Nicky) and put both calves on the other one (Tilly).

Tilly raised two big calves that first summer and we had all the milk and cream we needed, in fact - more then we needed.

We were very happy with our Dexter’s and still are, we now have ten of them in our growing herd. In the fall of the year when we purchased the first two, we also leased four cows and a bull from the Nelson’s and had them for over a year. From that we got two calves – it was a calf-share lease so we kept half of the calves; we chose heifers. So this summer we have our two cows Nicky - the milk cow, Tilly - the nurse cow (one of her grandma’s could raise 4 calves at a time), Brownie and Blue - they are for meat and are big steers now, and four heifers from last year. The two cows also each had a heifer calf this spring.

The herd is growing fast and we have sent the lease cows and bull back, now we need to get our own bull. We will be looking for a nice little Dexter bull later this summer to add to our herd. One thing we have learned with Dexter’s, and the Nelson’s did tell us this, don’t try chasing them. The way to handle Dexter’s is to call them; once you have them trained to come to your call they will follow you anywhere. My Dexter’s aren’t very big most of them are around 39 to 42 inches at the shoulder and weigh around 600 lbs but they are perfectly proportioned, they are classed as a tri-purpose breed: meat, milk and draft. I just love to be out walking among them watching them graze or lying in the sun chewing their cud. I’m very happy with them and would not trade them for any other breed, however I have thought of getting a few Highlands to go with them.

When we first moved to our homestead we had all kinds of ideas for building a cheap road, for we needed about 1/8 of a mile of it. Most of them involved a lot of digging and picking rocks and then placing them carefully by hand to give a solid base to drive on.

The before top and the after shoot of the road across the hay field, still waiting for gravel.

We have now been living on the homestead for two years with no road - only a rough trail across the hay field. It was time to build a road that would be all weather. The first thing was to breakup all the sod and move most of this along with the topsoil off of the road bed. Next ditches needed to be cut along the sides so the water would drain off the road; a crown needed to be put on the road so the water would run off the road and into the ditches. You could do this by hand if you didn’t have anything to do for the next ten years. You could hire someone to do it for you but you would still need ten years to earn the money to pay for it. The next thing to do was to borrow a small tractor with a couple of pieces of equipment.

1. Blade to move the dirt
2. Chisel plow to loosen the dirt
3. Set of harrows to smooth everything out

We finally had all the equipment borrowed and then it started raining, and so we used this to help us too. The ground under the road was very dry and so as we worked up the sod we found that with the rain (2-3 inches in two days) we could mix the thin layer of topsoil in with the sand and clay that the chisel plow was bringing up.

Day 1
We just kept plowing the roadbed bringing up more sand and clay mixing it all together letting the rain soak it up.
Day 2
The rain quit and we left it for a day to mellow out and let some of the water in the low places drain off.
Day 3
We put on the blade and began to move and pack the dirt. We did blade some of the topsoil off but most of it was now mixed into the clay and sand. By moving the dirt with the blade from one side to the other it began to dry out, it was almost perfect for packing and moving. We soon had most of it bladed to the middle and packed down hard. Next was to cut in ditches and to set how wide the finished road top would be, the borrowed tractor was small so it took allot of passes to cut the ditches in deep enough, but in time we had the road looking pretty good. Next we had to back blade the other side of the ditch, so that we could drive thought the ditches if we needed to. Once this was done with many more passes we hooked the harrows on behind the blade and started to drag and blade any rough spots. Then we packed the road with the pickup truck finding all the soft spot and really packing them down. Then back to the tractor and blade, we filled in all the holes and pulled the edges of the road back up after the truck had pushed them out. By now the roadbed was pretty firm but it still had two or three soft spots so we left it for a couple of days to dry out. Then we loaded the 400-gallon water tank into the truck, filled it, and packed the road again. Now the soft spots showed up and we just keep packing and then blading dirt back into the holes and pulling the edges up until no more soft spots were left.

Finishing touches

We still needed to know if the ditches would drain the water away from the road, we again were blessed with more rain, about an inch of it in less then a hour. That filled up any low spots in the ditches to show us where we needed to cut them down a bit more. It also showed us when to cut in side ditches to drain off any water along side of the road.

Now we have a well draining road and ditches, this is very important - for if you have water sitting in the ditches or along side the road it will only soak up the road bed and soften it, you will soon have a soft spot and then ruts. Now that the road is pretty much finished we still have one low spot along the road that needs to be drained; a major ditch needs to be cut in or a culvert has to be put under the road. We decided to cut a major ditch and use the dirt to build up a low spot, it worked out very well.

The last thing we need was to put on some gravel or sand. We had a neighbor put a couple of inches of sand and small rock on top, and then we packed that down and smooth it out, and now we have an all weather road. When we had the sand put on it is deeper in some spots then other’s so I just take the wheel barrow and move it around as any holes show up.

The financial cost was very cheap, the sand and rock on top cost 2 days of work traded to the neighbor helping him move a barn, but the rest was my own time and very much enjoyed this job and then about $50.00 for fuel in the tractor. Over all I am very happy with the price, as we had bought one 17 tonne load of gravel from the local pit and it cost $420.00. It didn’t go very far, it only covered the approach off the county roadway. We had heard that it could cost as much as $10,000.00 to $15,000.00 to have someone make the road and gravel it for us. I won’t say I would want any big heavy equipment to come over the road but for our pickup and minivan it will give us many years of service in all weather.

A planting we did go.

Rhubarb today.

I can still remember my first garden; I was all of about 8, maybe 9 years old. The gardening bug bit me at a very early age and I have tried just about every kind of garden you can think of. I’m one of those that can sit and look at seed catalogues for hours, and then - when I can’t stand it anymore and the garden is still locked in the dead of winter. I just sit down in front of the computer I use a wonderful old computer program called Mac Draw Pro and I can plan and layout just how I want to plant the garden in the spring.

This winter I didn’t do too much computer gardening I used my allotted computer time working on my self-heating house plans. But now that spring is here it is time to be out planting and forming new garden beds. I’m still working on my self-weeding garden system, which I think is going to be a great success this year. I have all the mulch I need from the cleaning up of the hay fields. After much digging and first working up the new garden patch with the tractor, I have new beds ready for planting. My oldest daughter and I have been busy planting some seeds in six packs to seed in the garden. We seeded the squash - I like to just start them in pots for a week or so - more just to crack the seed. I find this gives them a great start. Many plants that are started by seed are greatly helped in this way by just using a cracking chamber to get them to go. This is how many of the big greenhouse nurseries start their plants. I have found a very cheap and easy way to do this on a very small scale (watch for an upcoming post).

Today we have some rhubarb plants to set out, we managed to get some plants from a very old farmyard. We have tasted this rhubarb before and are very happy with it. My wife and I both love rhubarb in baking - one of my favorite recipes is rhubarb cobbler and I’m very happy to have been able to go back to the area I grew up in and bring a small piece of it home.

Rhubarb is a very heavy feeder and can stay in the place you plant it for a very long time, I’m just guessing here but I would say the farmyard we got the plants from is well over 75 years old. So it has proven itself to be very hardy. I first dug a good deep hole and filled it half way with good compost I then mixed in some garden dirt and planted the rhubarb it had four pieces all with healthy leaves. I mixed up some more compost with dirt and covered the plants up. I had a bit of a mound with leaves sticking out and the plant crowns just showing a bit above ground level. I then watered them in good and mulched with old hay, they will most likely be in this place for twenty years or until they need to be moved. The nice thing is that we now have a start of rhubarb and can cut off pieces and multiply it and share it with anyone needing a start.