July monthly chicken financials

 So July was the end of my profitable run.   I lost $119.73 for the month on an average 17 hens laying (still paying for all those raccoon dinners.) (for the year my net income is -$11.20/month.  I had $169.73 in expenses.  I spent $12.75 on bedding and $54.79 for three nipple waterer setups. These waterers will allow me to have water inside the coop without the chickens making a mess and getting the bedding soaking wet.  Plus, in the Winter I can just drop a heater in the bucket and keep them from freezing.  I also purchased some Araucuana chicks for $60for a dozen chicks.  They lay blue eggs!!!  Unfortunately, I had to buy straight run chicks and think I only ended up with 5 hens out of 12 chicks.  They are still pretty young, I will know their gender for sure in about 3 months.    For the year, my monthly expenses are $54.95 (not counting my flock purchases).  We collected a total of 348 usable eggs (80 less than last month due to my chicken killers) averaging 11.2 eggs/day collected (for the year the average is 11.7).  The chickens ate 0.57#food/egg (for the year are averaging 0.69#/egg my teenagers did not start laying this month)    In July it cost $0.12/egg or $01.44/doz for feed (my yearly average is $0.16/egg or $1.92/dozen.  This did not change since last month.)
I never did raise my prices for the egg cartons!  Since my production dropped so dramatically, I have not had any trouble keeping up with egg cartons.  I still have at least 25 of the original 30 cartons.  They have been used several times and keep coming back.  
This is really going to affect whether I can purchase an automatic chicken door.  The door is going to cost $200.  I still need to wire power to the coop.  I am about to get distracted with my daughter's swim team major fund raiser for the next month.  So it is going to be hard to get anything done around the farm.  

Here is the farm from the upper hill.  Farm house at 1200, old wood/coal shed at 0300, chicken coop at 0900 and old house (now my shed) at 1000.  Sarah took this picture. 

Predators 14, Steve 7

Sunday night when we were going to bed Annmarie asked me if I had locked the chickens up?  Of course, I was upstairs in our bedroom half undressed.  I had not locked the chickens up, so I trudged downstairs, grabbed a flashlight and some dog food.  I figured since I was going outside already I would bait the live trap.  I locked the chicken yard up and set the trap and baited it.  The trap is literally four feet from my chicken enclosure, so any critter getting caught in it has aspirations of a chicken meal.  We woke up Monday morning and are laying in bed talking when Annmarie says "Isn't that a raccoon chittering?"  I listen and then make an authoritative statement "No, just some birds".  We send Sarah out to the chicken coop to feed the babies and water first thing in the morning (she had not done it the evening before).  She comes running back inside stating "There is a raccoon in the trap".  I guess Annmarie was right and I was wrong.  I went out and dispatched the coon, then carried the trap to the pickup so they could drive it up to the boneyard for disposal.  I heard later that Sarah was moaning because she got a drop of blood on her shoe when she emptied the trap.  I still have not caught the other adult coon.

mowing pictures

Can you tell I spent seven hours on the tractor mowing?  Here are the before and after pictures.

Ram pasture before mowing

Ram pasture after mowing

We have started pouring water onto the ram pasture after the mowing.  Hopefully, the grass will take off.  You can see the green about 1/3 out from the chain link fence.  We would like that to go all the way out to the far fence.








If you look closely at the after mowing picture you will notice all kinds of stuff piled up along the fence.  The dog keeps escaping from our yard.  So I keep trying to add stuff in an effort to keep the dog in the yard.  It is not working.  Now one of the sheep and her babies have figured out how to crawl under and get into the yard.

Front of the house before mowing

This is looking out from our front porch.  You can see the corral gate that I had to wire a hog panel to the gate.  The baby sheep had figured out that they were small enough to slip through the rails and go out and eat on this hillside.  Well, the momma sheep just stood at the fence and bawled nonstop every night.  So I installed the hog wire.

Front of the house after mowing

Looks much better doesn't it?  I have to use the weedeater to get the stuff near the creek.  The hillside was too steep to get the tractor down there.  Yes, I did buy another weedeater.  I went for a cheap $60 electric one.  I can just throw it away when it breaks.  I hate weedeaters right now.

Orchard near house before mowing

This is the orchard from our front lawn.  See the dirt patch at the bottom of the picture?  That is where I had to dig up our water line last winter.  That was another back hoe experience.  Nothing like fixing pipe in the rain.  It rained the entire weekend I was outside fixing the line.  See the huge stand of Russian thistles?

Orchard near house after mowing

Looks much better!!  The mower was able to tear up the thistles, it just took a long time.  At the bottom left of the picture you can see the post I ripped out to make my gate.  I could have driven between the posts.

Me on the tractor!!  You can see the orchard before I mowed here.  Take a close look for the back fence, it is the one that is hidden behind all the weeds.  That huge mess of thistles behind the cab is the road into the orchard.  to the left and right is the front creek ditch.  

Orchard mowed

This is the orchard mowed.  The tall weeds in the center mark the path of the front ditch.  I couldn't get close enough to mow them.  If you look from the post in the bottom left corner of the picture to the post just right of the apple tree you will be looking at the new fence line.  I will start working on this again this week.

Orchard mowed.  See fence line!!

Boy howdy.  Look at that fence line.  The amazing part is that the field is green with no irrigation of any kind.

Tractor time

The weeds were getting out of control around the houses.  We had about 10 acres that needed some serious help.  I have broken three weed eaters this year already (no one wants to lend me another, go figure) so I figured I would try something else.  I looked into one of those weed power mower things like a D. R. Trimmer.  Someone told me that they can jump all over like a rototiller if you hit lots of stuff.  I weigh in at a whopping 160#.  Rototilling 10 acres seems virtually impossible not to mention I am not a masochist.  So that was out.  I went in to the rental place on Tuesday and grilled him also about my weed issue/problem.  He showed me a trimmer and then we talked tractors with mowers on the back.  The five foot mower was bigger than the four foot mower so being a guy he tried to get me to rent it.  I would have gone with the bigger mower (being a guy) but I needed a 3/4 ton pickup to pull it.  I don't have one, so I settled for the smaller one to go with my smaller pickup.  Price wise not too bad, around $220 for 8 hours of run time in a 24 hour time period.  I had Annmarie bring the pickup in to Pendleton on Friday morning and we changed rigs.   I was coming back from work and had the Prius.
We swapped rigs and I pulled the trailer out to the farm.  I had already told Annmarie that I was going to live on the tractor until dark.  I managed to get the tractor off the trailer without incident.  I have rented a couple of small backhoes in the past and I got my five minute lesson at the rental place before leaving.  I had never used the PTO drive on a tractor before (it spins around and powers the equipment you are towing behind the tractor) and kept killing the tractor when the mower bogged down in the weeds.  I kept lifting the mower but the cut was not very neat.  It took me an hour to figure out that I needed to increase the throttle and let the tractor run (not idle like I thought) at a higher RPM.  The gas pedal is not really a gas pedal, it just makes the tractor move forward.  It mowed much nicer with the RPM up around 1600 (a small detail the rental guy failed to mention).
Did I mention that it is dirty and loud?  I did have my ear muffs on to keep the noise down.  The nice thing about the ear muffs is you can put your ear bud headphones from the ipod player in and listen to music even on a loud piece of equipment.  So I messed around for about 3 hours up by the house cutting down the dead cheatgrass.  I finally moved down to the orchard pasture and got those weeds.  I had a heck of a time getting past the thistles growing on top of the culvert.  I tried to push past the thistles with the bucket on the front of the tractor and could not get through.  I had to turn the tractor around, lift the mower in the air and back up over the thistles and beat them down with the mower!!  Now the mower was doing some work, the grass and weeds were about 4 feet tall here.  The irrigation ditch water got diverted out of the ditch (in an attempt to dry out the far end of the ditch so it can be repaired) so I had to avoid the water so as not to sink the tractor, luckily it was a four wheel drive tractor and I managed to not get it stuck (it was close a couple of times).  To get to the other side of the creek I needed to get in to the field via our yard.  The only problem with that is there was no gate.  I cut the fence and pushed over one of the poles.  As I was removing the pole from the ground by hand Annmarie told me that the tractor would have gone between the posts and I could have just cut the wire.  I wanted a bigger opening, I really did.  I will eventually have to install said gate at some time in the not too distant future.
This was the money shot here.  The thistles were eight feet tall and just thick in places and I had some type of milkweed hollow thing that had formed its own forest over 10 feet tall along the back fence.  I had to push the weeds over with the bucket and just creep along with the tractor and keep raising and lowering the mower so as to not kill the tractor motor.  Good thing I had practiced up on the rest of the property first.  I literally could not see anything but weeds once I got in there with the tractor.  The grass was over five feet tall!  I kept after it till dark (Annmarie badgered me into coming in for dinner.  It was very good, grilled burgers and corn on the cob with potatoes.  So I had a 30 minute reprieve).  At Dusk, I saw the deer try to come down off the hillside into the orchard to lay down.  They didn't care for the tractor.  I couldn't get it all finished before it got dark.
So I went inside, got all cleaned up and set the alarm for 0500.  I am not a morning person, but I wanted to get everything done and the clock was ticking.  I had until 1030 Saturday morning to show up with a full gas tank and a clean tractor at the rental place.  So I got up, ate breakfast and jumped on the tractor.  I braved it and drove through the creek a couple of times and started getting right alongside the creek, I stopped after I got stuck and had to rock the tractor out (thank goodness for four wheel drive).  I was five minutes from finishing.  I had two little patches of grass to mow, when all of sudden the tractor died and smoke started coming out of the hood.  I couldn't start it.  I looked down at the temperature gauge (they had told me it had one) and it was maxed out.  I lifted the hood and the water overflow lid was off.  I filled it from my cooler and then went inside to let it cool off.  After 45 minutes, I went out and filled the radiator and the tractor started right up.  I finished and then drove the tractor straight to the trailer, hooked it all up with chains and then hosed it off.
I filled it up on the way back,  it only took around 3.5 gallons of diesel.  It ran for 7 hours (per the rental place, it seemed longer to me).  Pretty good fuel usage.  I mentioned to the rental guy that the water had gotten low.  "Ya, they heat up pretty fast" was his sage advice.  Too bad no one mentioned that when I rented the tractor.  As soon as I dropped off the tractor, I went to the local John Deere tractor supply place and got a quote on a BRAND NEW TRACTOR!!!!
So next year we are going to buy a tractor and some implements to maintain the farm.  Did I mention that one of the implements is going to be a post hole digger?
Will post some before and after pictures later.

Sheep got out, didn't think it was possible

I was sure I had it covered this time.  I think they pushed on the lower movable fence over the almost dry creek. One of the momma sheep with her two babies was up wandering the hillside.  Of course she is teaching them bad habits.  Luckily, one of them is going to be food eventually.  Sarah is outside chopping down thistles in our yard again.  She thought she was done yesterday.  Not so much.  I will go check on the sheep and see what I can do about them sneaking out.  I really did think I had it covered.

Fencing again

Well I spent the morning trying to stop the sheep from sneaking out of the pasture.  I patched the large hole, obviously a favorite spot since there was a worn down trail in the cheat grass.  I placed hog panels over both large metal gates.  The babies could just jump between the metal rails.  The adult sheep could not get through the gates, but they bawl and raise a ruckus when the babies get away from them.  Our runoff fed back creek is still running.  At the far end of the property it has dried up, but near our house and lower it is still running.  I think it is getting some water from the pasture and spring on the other side of the old chicken coop.  It is hot!  I am going to stay inside for the rest of the day now.  I needed to do some housework anyway.  We have a heat pump so central cooling happens automatically.  It is a pleasant 72 degrees F inside the house and over mid 90's outside.  I called Annmarie and told her I had stopped the sheep from leaving the pasture,  she laughed.  No really, I think I got it covered this time...

Houdini has been talking to our sheep

You'll recall that I mentioned a few days ago that the sheep seemed to be dissatisfied with their pasture. After today, I'm pretty sure the problem is actually just the perverse nature of sheep.

This morning, I let the dogs out to do their business, and noticed some rather unusual animal life out by the cars. No, it wasn't deer, nor moose, nor anything more exotic than 4 of our very own sheep. Oreo, the adult ram, and Longtail and the boys. Now, we've gotten pretty immune to seeing them out on the hillside, but not out by the vehicles. Besides the obvious potential issues, there is a very large open field not too far from where they were, that opens up onto the road a ways up. And no, there is not a gate on this end either. Just a nice opening through which the sheep could pass into this haven of freedom. Needless to say, they needed to be encouraged back to their more usual range.

Sheep are usually creatures of habit, so I thought this would not be too much of a problem. I'd go out, leaving the front gate to the yard open, encourage them to go into the yard they covet anyway, and everyone would be happy, since the side gate out of the yard opens directly onto their pasture. So, I ducked back inside the house to grab my shoes, and went out the gate. The dogs, of course, came with me. That's when everything went wrong. Sprout, the little one, headed at top speed for Mom's house (in the opposite direction from the sheep), while Bailey, the big one, headed over to try to mother the lambs. Needless to say, Momma sheep was not too happy about this, and any visions I'd had of calmly herding the sheep into the yard vanished as they darted back into the barnyard. Bailey, or course, followed. I'm sure she was trying to be helpful, but.....

So, I went back to the house, and woke the progeny to come man the gate at the upper end of the pasture. My thinking at this point ran along the lines of getting the sheep to cross the creek in the barn lot, and then go up the road and into the gate. The sheep cooperate in the beginning by walking up to the creek. Where they promptly mill about looking confused. Bear in mind that the creek is all of 2" deep here. It's a bit wide, but really, their feet will get wetter in the tall grass than they will crossing the creek. Once again, my plans are thwarted as the sheep insist on turning tail and heading upstream and out the barn lot as fast as their legs will carry them. At this point, I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have go get the pickup and find them so I can get them back to the general area of acceptability and then try to get them in.

Then, I notice them up on the hillside behind the house. Now, understand that this means that the contrary little creatures went just a little bit upstream and then crossed not one, but two creeks in order to get from where they had been to where they now were. I was only asking them to cross one creek and then go in a gate.

By this time, it's become a matter of principle, and I must get them back into their pasture. So, I move Sarah to the other gate (the one that opens onto the back hillside), and I go out and straight up the hill in order to get above the sheep so I can circle around them to move them towards the gate. I probably haven't yet mentioned that this is the hillside on which the star thistle are flourishing, nor that I didn't bother with socks, much less boots when I started on this adventure. I am at least wearing jeans, but my ankles are fairly unprotected, and star thistle are sharp little buggers. I successfully circle around the sheep and come up on them nice and calmly. By this time they've remembered that food generally comes from us two-legged beings and we're not all evil, and they calmly wait for me to approach. Then I notice that they are eating the little bitty short almost moss-type weed that grows on the barren hillside! Not the green grass growing right beside it. No, the nearly dried out browned bristly little lichen-stuff. And yes, there is plenty of this inside their fenced area. See, perverse. Anyway, this time they go calmly into the pasture, and Sarah shuts the get behind them. Then, she gets some corn and treats everyone so they can remember why they should come when we call them.

Then, I only needed to go down to Mom's and get Sprout. At least I got to sit down and fish the stickers out of my shoes once I got there, and Mom came out and we had a nice visit while we watched the hummingbirds. Did I mention that all of this took place before 7:10 this morning?