Measure Twice, Cut Once

Summer is gone and with it the warm weather, we have been keeping a fire in the stove pretty much every day that we are home. We are just finishing up some contract work in the city so we have been staying with Jennifer’s Grandparents. But we should soon have that done and can get back to work on the house, and get a water well dug, we did get the road all finished thanks to our good neighbor Al. We are now just gathering up things for the well and the house and will soon decide where to dig the well. I’m thinking of putting it in the greenhouse that I will be building on the South side of the house it will be and old cast hand pump. We have been working up the two garden spots, as we have been told that a sure way to kill quack grass it to freeze the roots, last night it got down to -8 Celsius. The cows are needing a bit of hay, the fall pasture is all but gone now, we really need to do some more fencing to get the cows in the bush around the North and East side of the yard to eat all the grass. I have made a list of all the post and wire needed now to put it into the budget and hopefully get a start on it in the spring.

Frost has hit the homestead and so we dug our potatoes and picked our squash. A very small crop but it is our first crop and with all the grass sod in the garden I‘m very happy with it. My girls came out with their Gator to help their old Pa to bring in the crop and we had a wonderful time looking at all the shapes that potatoes come in and carrying the winter squash to the house.

I always like to think that God made everything for a purpose and I believe He did - even if I don’t understand why He created them. One of those thing is the pocket hole gopher, one of the best rodents for digging and turning the soil on the prairies.  However, if you are trying to subdue your little piece of earth that the Lord has blessed you with, you’ll find they sure can make a mess of a hay field or garden. They will even dig up a road in their endless pursuit of grass roots and shoots.

In order to get a better understanding of the animal that we would be hunting I got a copy of  “The Mammals of Canada” by A.W.F. Banfield. I highly recommend every home schooling family have a copy of this book in their library.  From our research we learned that the rodent we were after was the Northern Pocket Gopher and it makes it home in most of the prairies of Canada and Northern US states. A.W.F. Banfield had a lot to say about this little dirt digging beast - he has four pages covering everything: he is 9 inches long and makes his nest as deep as nine feet to get below the frost line.

I found a very interesting thing about this little critter - they hold the record for the fastest growing incisor teeth, which as with most all other rodents are constantly growing. The pocket gopher sets the record at nearly 1 and half inches of growth per year. There don’t really do damage to the pastures or fields but it is the dirt piles they leave behind, and the fact that they can eat up to a ton of grass per acre if their population isn’t checked. The fact of the matter is we are raising cows not gophers and that ton of grass is a lot of beef and milk.

Our purpose is to control them, and in that attempt I will share with you how we trap the little beasts. We use a trap that is very humane and the gopher suffers very little.  The traps are placed in pairs in the feeding tunnels, which are about 4 to 6 inches below the sod.

In this picture you can see the dirt mounds the gophers leave behind, they can push up several of these each night. First you need to find the dirt mounds the pocket gophers leave behind – look for the freshest mounds you can find.  The fresher the mounds, the looser, finer and darker the soil will be.  You will soon learn to tell which mounds are the freshest – the older mounds are harder and more compact, not as loose and fluffy as newer piles.

Now you need to take a small rod and poke around the mound or between the mounds until you find a tunnel.   You’ll need to push down firmly into the sod to see if there is a tunnel underneath the top of the ground.

Here are the tools we use.  A square nosed small edging shovel; it works very well for squaring up the hole in which we place the traps.  As you can see the traps are rectangular and need a flat bottom to sit on. Next we have a small thin rod about 30 inches long or so with an ‘L’ bend at the top to help in the job of finding tunnels.  We put a bright ribbon on the end so you can find the rod and traps – it help to spray paint the end of the rod a bright colour, sometimes the ribbon slides down or flies off, making the trap settings difficult to find.

With each pair of traps you will need a rod, and then you will need two traps per setting. I have tried using only one but you never know the direction the gopher will be coming down the tunnel. After much trial and error we have found that a trap pointing each way gets way more gophers. One thing you will learn is that if everything isn’t just right the gophers will pack your traps with dirt.  They are clever little fellows.

Here I have found a tunnel and I’m cutting out a sod square right over the tunnel. (Thank you Kaelynn for taking the picture.)

Now we have the tunnel opened up and we are looking for a through tunnel, you can kind of see the tunnel in this photo.  Some tunnels are dead ends – used only to deposit dirt on the surface of the ground.  We are looking for a traveling tunnel that runs in two directions.

Once you have the tunnel dug out you make it fit your traps. The traps we use have a small hole in the back.  The reason for this?  Gophers like their tunnels to be well ventilated and can sense if air is moving though the tunnel.  If no air is moving then they think it is a tunnel that leads to a dirt mound and they push dirt down those tunnels. So we want to have air moving though the traps so the gopher doesn’t fill the traps with dirt. To do this the trap maker has put an air hole in the back and you as the trapper are to set the trap so air flows though. I can never seem to get the traps spaced just right for sometimes the tunnel is curved or I have dug the trap hole too big.  In this case I just put a small piece of sod over the back of the two traps to make a little air way between the back of each trap.

The next step is to carefully cover the traps with loose dirt. The goal is making sure no light is getting into the tunnel from your digging a hole though the roof of it.  Here you see the dirt covering the traps and the rod in place to mark the trap setting.  You’re all done setting!

When you go out in the morning, you’ll be looking for the rods that mark your trap settings.  Oftentimes the soil on top of the trap setting will be distributed if the trap has been set-off and you’ve successfully caught a gopher.  Be careful retrieving the traps – you don’t want to catch your fingers in one…ouch!  Just keep your fingers away from the trap trigger in the middle of the open trap.  Here you have a successfully trapped pocket gopher, this style of trap closes around their neck/chest.

Enjoy your trapping!

That is the plan and after a week or so of fixing and hauling home some very old but much loved farm equipment, I think we are just about ready to start. If you have made hay before then you know that one of the most important ingredients is lots of sunny, dry, hot weather.

The weather man is saying we will get 4 days of it so I think I will cut the first field - 5-6 acres today - and then see if the sunny weather holds. Then maybe in a couple of days the second field 3-4 acres.

Our haying story starts when we first moved to the homestead and I thought I would cut all my hay and put it up by hand. Well I had good intentions and I did buy the right scythe from the right guy, measured myself and had the handle made to fit me. I cut some and made a couple of hay cocks, even carried it in on the hand cart but when I had the chance to get some free equipment and the use of a tractor for the summer (thanks Mom!). I put the scythe back in the shed.

I think cutting hay by hand is a wonderful way to make hay, but I have made allot of hay with equipment and I know how fast it can go. I can cut, bale and stack under cover my entire hay crop, 9-12 acres in a few days with equipment. By hand you would be looking at I would be guessing here, well over 3 weeks to a month. I just don’t have that much time this year and I need to cut my own hay. For two winters we have been buying and that gets tired real fast when you have to haul it home and pay for it. We had been spending about $1000.00 a year for hay and gas to go get it. So we figured we would buy a few pieces of older, cheap equipment and put up our own. We had the hay just no way to put it up.

The first thing we bought was a self-propelled swather, we got a Massey Ferguson 36 at a farm sale for $500.00. It needed a little work on the cutter, new guards and a few sections; the section bar also broke. So far it has cost around $200.00 to get it ready. We used it to cut the hay fields early in the spring. I needed to knock down two years of uncut old hay growth. It also works great to clip tall weeds and tall mature grass the cows don’t eat in the pasture. That helps allot to keep the pasture clean of weeds and growing even.

The next thing we needed was a baler and it just so happened that my parents needed to clean out some of the old farm equipment that they had been collecting. So I hooked onto my trailer and headed down for a visit. The first thing we hauled back was an old New Holland 269 square baler. All it needed was a tire fixed and a few adjustments to get the plunger to run square. Next was a hay rake, now this piece is vintage - not sure of the date but it is old. With a little TLC, and if I take care handling it, it will rake all the hay I have.

So now I think we are ready to have at it. If all goes well we should have some very nice hay for half the price of buying it, in addition to a line of older but useable haying equipment (not including a tractor). Anyone have a nice tractor for sale cheap?

Update:
We started cutting hay and everything went pretty good, we got all the hay cut with only one break down on the swather, the section bar broke again. We will be making a new one this winter much heavier. Then we raked it and waited for it to dry and waited watching the sky for any sign of rain. We had lots of cloud but we prayed and kept an open line to the Lord and he held back the rain. God is good. After all that waiting and walking the field with a pitchfork, the swather made allot of little piles of hay as it was cutting and there needed to be pulled apart so that the hay would dry evenly. We where then ready to start baling the hay into little square bales and that went very well, until I broke both hay needles. We did get one field finished and the hay stacked. Now we are off to get the baler fixed and we should be able to finish the rest in the next couple of days God willing and the creek don’t rise as there say.

GOD has blessed us by giving our family a beautiful little baby girl, she is my third daughter and I pray the Lord will continue to bless our family with many, many more children. She was born at grandma’s house with all of her loving family attending, however her two older sisters did miss her coming into the world by a couple of minutes as they had gone off to the park to play. They were getting tired of waiting for their mom to bring their baby sister into the world. But all went well and we are already planning for the next one if the Lord will bless us again. Our new baby was born Monday morning just before lunch and was a big girl at 10 lbs, her name is Sarah and she is much loved by her two older sisters. We are now working out the new sleeping arrangements, as the two older girls now have to make room for baby Sarah in our family bed. There has been a bit of sadness here, as the older one now has to move over to the boy’s side of the bed with papa.

In time all will be well again as we all have to change our ways to make room for the baby. We will hopefully be heading back home in a couple of days as we don’t minding staying at my wife’s grandparents, for they are truly the grandparents everyone wishes they had for their own. But it will be nice to get everyone home and settled in again, as there are many things to do at home, we will soon have to start cutting hay. The small garden we planted this spring will be in need of weeding and the potatoes are in need of being hilled, no end to all the wonderful things it takes to keeping a small homestead going.

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.