Measure Twice, Cut Once

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!

Here is a very beautiful sunset that the Lord graced us with.

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.

On the homestead I like to walk around to do fence repairs and other small jobs, it keeps me in shape and I can listen to the birds and my children as they like to tag along with me most of the time. Now that my children are getting bigger 5 and 2 I can’t carry them and my tools, so I got an idea that has been working very well. I went down to the toys R us folks and bought them a little gator, ride on electric car.

The thing works great I would buy another one if I needed it very happy with it so far, we have been throught some pretty rough country and I only have to help with a push now and then. My daughters can even carry a few things in the box for dear old dad. The best thing is it is electric and it’s very quiet we charge the battery off our solar panels or wind mills.

I have always wanted an electric car but I’m still waiting for a new kind of battery to power one, I think allot of people are waiting for this new battery.

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.

Welcome to my new blog let me share with you my journey on living on a homestead and raising a family in Christ. Here you will find writings on a number of subjects leading to a simpler and more family based life with Christ at the center.