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.

I’m a bit late with this photo but it is true the seasons are a turning here on the homestead, the other day we watched a few thousand sand hill cranes fly over. The girls where very happy and waved and told them all to come back in the spring. No pictures of the cranes, sorry I’m in need of a new camera the old one doesn’t take good pictures of things far away.

I never planned to be a homesteader, it just happened and so I have been trying to make the best of it ever since. Along the way I have learned some very interesting things, but I would have to say that the most important thing that I have learned is to have a well-laid plan and stick to it. For you will save allot time, money and grief as you begin your homesteading adventurer. Now that winter is fast approaching and the time for outside work is just about over, I find myself looking at adding on to our house over the winter. This is something that a well-laid plan might have avoided, for it will be a challenge to say the least.
Over the winter I plan to write a serious of posts on setting out a well-laid plan and things that I have learned, in hopes that someone might be helped by some of my mistakes. But for now its back to the grindstone to get a few more things done before the ground freezes as hard as a rock.

Two very busy days and the solar panels now have a new home, and from the voltage meter we will have allot more power. Due to the house getting a new roof  I had the to move the panel which where on the roof. Now with the help of my two little helpers the panel can be pointed into the sun as it cuts across the sky.

Here it is before we load it up with the panels, testing to see if it will turn with some weight on it , we still need to slide it up to the top of the post.

Now we are ready to wire it up and slide it to the top of the post.

All wired up and putting out 49 volts DC back to the battery pack.

All ready for more of those sunny Alberta days.

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.

Things are going slow but we are making sawdust and lots of noise, and a few things are starting to take shape. Here we have the new gable wall taking shape, we are going from the straw over to stick frame. Stick frame is very fast compared to the straw clay building method. As we go along you will begin to see the roof outline and notice that the South side of the house will have a very long slope. This is part of the passive solar collector part of the house. As we are buildingthe house to be a big solar collector that we just happen to live in, with the end goal to be a self heating  house.

A few days later and we have the panel board going up, we have scaffolding up to help makes things a  bit safer. We had to stop here and build a solar rack to move the panel to as they where on the other side of the new wall and mostly in the shade.

Busy as Beavers

Here on the homestead fall is in the air I saw a couple flocks of Canada geese go over the other day and that will get me into the fall work mind set. So I have decided to add a little more room on to our house, with a new baby and all it is time for an upgrade also on a few things.

One thing will be the drilling of a water well, I have found a little company in Texas that sells a do it yourself water well drilling kit. So that is in the mail and as soon as it get here we will be drilling or trying to drill. I will be posting on how that goes with lots of pictures.

The big change will be the house and I have some pictures of that project underway, I will keep the blog up to date on that project as well.

The other thing we did this fall is get a new bull for our growing herd of Dexter’s, he doesn’t have any papers but he is a full blood and we have named him Sampson.

I’m always in awe of all the wonders God has given his children, flowers are truly one of the most amazing ways that God has created to produce seeds. Man in all his science and knowledge has never be able to come even close, we can only copy an image of this most beautiful gift from our loving Father.

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!