Bulls Bellow, Painters Paint, Fencing and Fixing Downspouts

09/15/2008 Monday: Should be fairly hot today, in the low 80s. When it starts off foggy, we know that it's going to be hot.

The two bulls are still bellowing at each other but it has dropped in volume and number of times.

Work on painting the house is going slowly but where it's painted it looks like (milk chocolate) velvet. Deana and I pressure washed the south side of the house today with me holding the ladder (one leg on the ground, the other on a builder's brick).

I also picked three different kinds of apples from three of my trees. The windfalls went to the pigs, or at least they will once I carry the bucket to where the pigs are sited. The rest will go in my basement for winter eating and cooking.

I think that Deana and I are going to try to castrate my Shorthorn bull tomorrow morning with the new CA bander so that I can put him in with the other Herefords. It's getting to be a PITA to have to feed him separately. He looks great but sure can pack away the alfalfa pellets and hay.

I drove into Pe Ell to the hardware store and picked up some carpenter putty to fill the holes where knots have popped out on the siding.

Fencing must be nearly everyone's least favorite thing to do especially if you have to brush the fence line first. The two remaining stretches of field fencing are overgrown with buck brush and other weeds. I've weed whacked once but I think that I should spray with Crossbow while the weather is still good to kill the brush. Otherwise it's going to be impossible to remove the field fencing. That's why I dislike field fencing; it's so hard to remove and it rusts out so easily.

Chas and I have decided to put in an electric gate instead of a steel gate between the barn and the electric fence along the driveway (the little piece that I fenced off) between the barn and the main gate into the road pasture. Chas has run special well-insulated wire through the tack room and along the roof tresses at the front of the cow barn but cannot finish till we get some of our round bales moved out of the way. I purchased 165 feet of this insulated wire from Premier Sheep and will barely have enough to reach the gate and thence the fence.

Chas is getting closer to putting up the 4 inch pipe along the side of the cow barn to drain the water coming off the roof away from the barn. I've been thinking that that water is a valuable resource and that I need some kind of cistern to store water that comes down during the fall, winter and spring to use in the summer. I may actually run water off the lean to addition on the east side of the barn into the cistern, but not this year.

We'll pound in several t-posts and put on insulators and will run polywire parallel to the barn to keep the animals off the barn wall and off the black perforated pipe that we'll be using to drain the water away from the barn.

I can't remember if I told you but I did move two water troughs yesterday, one in the Dexter's home pasture and the second in the Hereford's home pasture. The Hereford's trough sits up on gravel and on top of that 3/4 inch horse stall pads. I'm hoping that this method will work to keep the animals from sinking into the mud until I can get concrete poured.

I moved the Dexter trough to the middle of the pasture along the electric fence with the hose under the electric fence in the middle pasture. It was a PITA to pull the hose through the ties that hold it up out of the way of the Dexters but in the end it was worth the time. I'll have to keep a close eye on the Dexter trough since it's in the sun and will collect algae much faster than troughs in the shade.