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!

Hello from the homestead

This post is an update of sorts, we are still haying, the baler is fixed and we can now see the end in site. Over all the haying is going very well only three breakdowns, all of them repairable so far. Now that we are almost done we have decided to share a few ideas I hope will help to boost the blog. The first one is to host a photo contest, it will be one in which anyone can enter by leaving a link to their favorite photo on their blog, they will be prizes and all those wonderful things. So to get a start on that here is my first unofficial photo entry.
My second idea is to host a photo tour of other blogs that have beautiful photos that they would like to share. Once I have the details worked out I will post them, but in the mean time please leave a comment with an email saying you would like to take part.

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.

Cats

One of the most important animals on the homestead is the barn cat; we got five of them the first summer we moved to our homestead on a full time basis. We started with four males and a female, all intact. With four to one you would think that the female would have had us a great pile of kittens. But in the two summers we have had them we have been blessed with one live kitten. The little female never took to mothering she would have a few, hide them well but then forget to feed them. She just would not mother her kittens, and so we had about give up on her. The males started spraying so I had to cut them - that fixed that problem. I thought that should slow the little female down from having more kittens but it didn’t. They managed to get her into kitten the day before they got fixed.

It was a complete surprise to us the day we came home from having our third daughter - the cat came running into the house with a live kitten in her mouth. My first thought was “How long will this one last?” She put it in the box I had setup for her (the last attempted batch of kittens) in the corner out of the way. She seemed to be spending a lot of time with the kitten, and she moved it around the house a few times before settling on a spot. She had me move her box next to the computer desk; she brings her kitten out into the middle of the floor to nurse it. Now my wife and the cat both nurse their new babies together. My wife looks over at the mother cat and smiles and the cat looks up at my wife and smiles. So all is well with the cats now, all I have do is hope that after she raises this one she will be able to find an intact male to get more kittens from and then we might be blessed with more then just one kitten at a time.

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.