This blog is being discontinued. But I’ll continue blogging under the Fox Falls Farm name.
See the latest posts at the Fox Falls Farm blog.

Originally my parents bought their farm and named it Fox Falls Farm. There are foxes around and a waterfall so the name was fitting. They’ve slowly expanded the farm over the years and in the process bought up an adjoining farm: Long Winter Farm.

When I and my wife moved here we just kept the name. Mostly because there was already signs up and we liked them. Subsequently I started blogging under the Long Winter Farm name.

Well this started to get confusing recently as we have been commercializing the farm under Fox Falls Farm. So to help eliminate this confusion I’m going to stop blogging under Long Winter Farm. All subsequent posts will be under the Fox Falls Farm name here http://foxfallsfarm.wordpress.com.

His mom is Roasie. She was featured in the Sheep Porn post last December.

His dad was also a Romney. He has some recessive coat genes my mom was hoping to get into our herd. Its too soon to tell if Rush has them or not.

We haven’t decided if we’re keeping him or not. We probably shouldn’t have named him but I just couldn’t resist. And its an ‘R’ name so it fits the herd.

He’s the only lamb we’ll get this spring. We tried to breed Seneca to Rodney but she didn’t take.

The plan is to do
1 acre wheat
3 acres barley
3 acres canola
3 acres oats

For a total of 10 acres. You can see in the above picture that the area for the oats and canola worked out slightly higher than the 3 acres planned but its not a big deal. There are a couple of spots in those areas we can’t plow so it’ll work out in the end.

I still need to get seed for the oats, barley and wheat. We have tons of canola seed left over from last year so that’s no problem. My plan is to go get them sometime this week.

Now I just need to get out there and plow!

This is the first bridge I worked on. I widened it from 8 ft to 12 ft.

This bridge crosses a small creek between the barn and the new pole barn. There was a bridge there from before but it was only 8ft wide and had rails. Subsequently it was just barely wide enough to drive the truck over. And if you were off center by only a couple of inches you tended to add yet another new dent to the truck. But the biggest problem was most of our equipment we wanted to store in the pole barn just wouldn’t fit on that bridge.

The first modification we did was to just remove the rails. That helped but going over such a narrow bridge with no rails a tense experience (to put it nicely). So the next step was to remove the 8 foot decking boards and replace them with 12 footers. That’s what you see in the picture above. Now its wide enough for even our widest piece of equipment, the drill, which clocks in at 11 feet wide.

The next bridge was a second going over the same creek along the road that connects the two farms.

For this bridge we used the 8ft decking boards we took off the first bridge. You can see the color change in the deck when we ran out of them and had to switch to new 12ft boards. The bridge is supported by 4 16ft 4″x6″ boards running longways. But the bridge was too flexible that way and bent a little too much when we drove the tractor over it. So I had to pull up a couple of the deck boards and install a few supports under the bridge. Now its as solid as a rock.

I’ve nicknamed the second bridge The Bridge Over The River Kawaii.

My dad was certain it was junk. Look how old and rusty it looked. Plus why else would it go for so cheap? Obviously the other farmers at the auction took one look at it and walked away. They must have known something we didn’t.

But I wasn’t so sure. Yeah it was old and rusty. But all the moving parts more or less moved. And the grease in the fittings wasn’t that old. It looked to me that someone was using it not all that long ago and keeping it maintained. I figured it went for so cheap because no one around here really needs a grain drill. Most people plant corn and you wouldn’t use drill like this for that. Plus it really was just too old for anyone doing any serious farming.

Well I just spent the last 2 and a half days crawling under, over, in etc this drill. I greased where the manual said to grease. I unstuck bits that had gotten stuck. I adjusted things back into proper alignment. I spent a whole heck of a lot of time unclogging tubes and checking that seed was falling in the right places at the right rate.

This evening I stepped back from it and declared it done. As a final check I had another farmer look it over. He gave it an OK and talked me through using it (to help me avoid the biggest dumbest mistakes the first time I use it).

Its getting close to planting time around here. Some of the local farmers are starting to plow already. Now that our drill is operational we should be all set to plant this spring.

You can see in the above picture the 3 flat plate hot water solar panels that were installed on the roof. These panels heat the water and deliver it to the following tanks.

These tanks then supply the domestic hot water for my parent’s house. Domestic hot water means the hot water for showers or washing dishes. These panels don’t supply heat for the heat tank that runs the baseboard heating.

These panels will be most useful during the summer. Last summer we ran the boiler on oil to provide the domestic hot water. That was pretty wasteful since the system is optimized to burn wood at high temps to heat the house. We were using the oil burner to keep the heat tank hot to provide only a small amount of hot water for domestic use.

This summer we can now keep the furnace off. Both wood and oil. And just use the solar panels to provide hot water for the house. This is a much more efficient setup.

In the winter the panels will slightly lower the draw on the heat tank/wood boiler but it won’t be all that significant.

Just to note these panels are solar hot water panels. Not to be confused with Photo Voltaic panels (PV). Those panels supply electricity and are a totally different system.

I came in for lunch and glanced out the window. Every last cow was piled up in the corner of the pasture near the house. They must have been curious about the mulch.

It was pretty unusual to see the cows interested in something other than their feed.

As you can see from the picture we made off with a hay tedder and hay wagon.

Bidding on the tedder was interesting. We were expecting the prices on the tedders to go down as the action progressed. The thinking being that the people with money or who really needed a tedder would bid on the early ones. But we found that as the auction went on the tedders went up and up in price. I’m guessing a lot of people had the same idea as we had and held off the early tedders. But as they started to run out people began bidding them up. We ended up paying more than we wanted to but still ended up with a decent deal.

Another lesson learned from the auction. As soon as you win a item. Take any removable items from said item as soon as possible. We left the pto shaft laying loose on top of our tedder. When I went to pick it up the shaft was long gone. According to the auction yard there has been a rash of such thefts recently. Must be a symptom of the hard economic times.

To bring our stuff home I figured the easiest way was just to load the tedder in the hay wagon and tow the wagon home. In practice it was much harder than that. The hay wagon had a bad tendency to oscillate at any speeds over 20mph. As you can imagine I didn’t want the hay wagon to shake itself to bits so I had to drive at 20mph the whole way home. All 50 miles. On highways with a 55mph speed limit.

It took 2 and a half hours. Plus many many stops to let traffic pass. But we got our equipment home all in one piece.

We now have all the equipment needed to do hay. A baler, haybine, rake and now a tedder and wagon.