Worst Job Ever.

Well I have done a little work on the farm in the last week, but with Monica leaving tomorrow we have put off any plans this last week and have just done whatever and some things that needed to be done to get her ready.  I did manage to start some water on the ram pasture.  The sheep ate it down pretty low so we locked everyone off of it and have started to pore on the water in an attempt to get it to bounce back.   I also planted three very little black walnut trees out in the ram pasture.  They were volunteer plants from Grandma Lane's garden hitchhikers in some imported compost. I will need to encase all three plants in a wire fence to keep the sheep/horses/cows/deer away from them for the next five years at least.  I have some time with the animal restriction in place before it has to be done.    I have a couple more wild roses to encircle and two small trees out by the grain bins.

I struck out on the sheep again.  I had a buyer on the hook for 20+ sheep but she backed out.  So now we are back to the drawing board.  We have three sold for meat and we will be eating three more.  That gives me five more months to find buyers for the rest of this years babies.  I am going to expand our craigslist add to the tricities and see if that doesn't help.

I had decided the pastures are drying up so they need some water.  Passive irrigation is my favorite way to water.  Of course this involves lots of manual labor, hard manual labor.  I decided the lower pasture needed to have the irrigation ditch redone.  I fired up the tractor and started to drag the ditch with the box blade.  I spent one day dragging the ditch and then tried to scoop out the ditch near the concrete weir.  The ditch walls got washed away years ago when the back creek got dammed up and jumped to the front creek.  Their was too much water to contain and it washed out the western side of the ditch.  This created a huge swamp!  I cannot drive the tractor out due to it sinking.  The plan was to try and get the most water back into a channel so the swamp will dry out.  Once it dries out I can maneuver the tractor into place and hopefully finish the ditch.  Today I went out and hand dug the ditch.  The channels were off by five feet so I had to hand dig the connecting ditch.  Digging ditches sucks a lot!  All those people that pay for working out need to come to our house.  I can provide a maximum effort workout with some constructive output for free!  I ended up jumping into the water and grabbing the weeds and throwing them to one side to clear the channel.  By the time I was done I could hardly move my legs or arms.  On a plus side, when I went out a few hours later to take pictures the water had made it all the way down to the horse fence.  I had ended my ditch at that exact fence.  It was running into an old flood irrigation path.  In a few weeks I will get back down there and finish the ditch down to the school house.  The water will be able to drain back across the bottoms underground and back into the creek.  No electricity needed. Now if the ditch would just dig itself...

Gannon, Zeke and I put the cows into the pen and dusted them for flies.  Hopefully, they will be happier now.  Zeke had a hard time moving the cows due to the babies.  Everyone kept pawing at the ground and charging him.  We did get the cows into the pen in 15 minutes.