Weekend work progress.

Fence cleaned up and new woven wire stretched.

New rock crib #3.

Monica and I went up on the hillside and built rock cribs on Saturday.  Since I pulled the other a little bit with the fence puller we used a whole 16 foot cattle panel bent into a circle and locked into itself.  That takes a whole bunch of rocks to fill the thing up.  We had to scavenge rocks from the fence line after using all the rocks in the old rock crib we tore out.    We had to use some tractor power as a few of the rocks were so large I could not lift them over the wire.  It looks like the crib is holding steady but the wooden post is trying to shift inside.  It is hard to believe the post could move around that much. 

Today, we rolled up and removed the bottom three strands of wire and lifted the top four strands off and laid them on the ground.  After calculating how many times I was redoing the clips I decided to go with twice.  Once to remove the wire and one more to put the wire back in place.  Less cumulative work for me is a good thing.  We got the woven wire stretched and started to apply all the clips.  The old clips are stiff and hard to apply but at $0.25/each I am reusing as many as I can. 

Friday I sprayed all day.  The recipe is 8 cups of 2-4-D and 2 oz of surfactant to 25 gallons of water.  The thistles and stinging nettles are already starting to wilt!  I got all the property around the buildings and close pastures all sprayed.  I need to do the back hillside and upper and lower pastures.  After the major spraying I did last year the weeds just don't have a hold this year.  I am amazed by how well the weeds were controlled.  I spot sprayed four of the fields to keep my spray useage down.  I only had to broadcast spray two fields.  Eventually, I would like to just spot spray over the whole farm.  That is a ways off but I think very doable if I can stay on top of the weeds. 

I am going to take my rusty hay lift mechanisms to work and one of my coworkers is going to take it home with him and sandblast the rust off of them.  I am just going to have him shoot some black primer paint on them after the rust is off.  I will think about painting them at a later date.