Dead Sheep

Hey, hey, the calf's about to break through. The fence is off. It can if it tries it. The calf breaking through gets all our milk. Hey, so far so good. Yep, you can let her go. Milk sled's too hard to get into this area. I gotta get the rope paw trough. Whoa, yeah, hang on, hang on, hang on. Let me do it, okay? Okay, you're gonna hold the camera. Had to do the rope halter because she ran out of feed and got restless. She runs out of feed, she ain't gonna stand there and film. Okay, we're gonna get them in right there. A little bit of a tricky move today. Cheaper across the street, can't really see it over here. And we're gonna somehow get them into this old cow paddock. And the cows get out, Stud Muffin goes straight to the junipers for a scratch. It just ruins the privacy barrier between that house and this house. And that took 5 years to do. Well, they just recovered because that's like the second time he's done it. Where do you need me? How about you go turn it off? Okay. Sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep. Belle's walking good, huh? Better. We just treated her for what I guess is foot rot, at least some sores on the bottom of our feet that were maggot infested. Now she's almost walking normal. This is crazy. Sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep. There's no lane, no nothing. They're just going by my voice. They made it. That's crazy. Nacho's still limping a little. Usually takes him a day or two to get back at it. This one's doing good. Cows are a little more goofy sometimes. Johnny, you got to help me with these cows. Lone sheep got explosive diarrhea. Let's hope that one makes it. You know they're gonna miss it, right? Things can't go this smooth. Wow. Hey, now you got free and clear to the minerals. Pit stop for Henry. Let's go practice some potty. You want to stand or sit? Where's his tractor? He's stressed out about it. All right, it's in the truck. Let's go. Apples as big as your head. Stop, stop, it's come undone. Need help? That's funny, I was talking to Josiah. Both of you need help right now. Do you need help? Sure. Okay, hang on one second.

Trailer system is perfect. This trailer is junk.

It's—

well, Or the thought is we need to weld this.

Just make that permanent. Do we ever need to lift it? Then let's weld it. Look who and what is back. Beautiful one is on the farm doing some chores in her overalls. Well, I knew something was up when those overalls showed up this morning. Are you gonna let Josiah dig some? Actually, maybe, maybe we'll do it this way where If you're burying this one, then he gets to do that one. Jonah burying the stumps. We burned all that brush pile we could. It burned all the stumps that it would. Now a bit of a bigger pile. These old brush piles from clearing this forest are just getting in our way. We can't graze that, and we need every little grazing we can get. Trying to get deeper into here, like maybe shove all this trashy hay into that. You got to be kidding me. Wait, it's working here. I'm about to leave. It starts down by Selma. Why didn't it light when we were up here? Hey, there we go. Oh well, didn't need the hay. It's hard to know if that's big enough or not. I guess you could bury it and then if you need to, you could dig more over here. Quite a bit of stumps. We need to move the milk sled into tomorrow's paddock. Fences are in my way. You guys sit right here and you'll see how that resolves itself. We're up on one side. Hey, let's get our pig panels from the sheep round up the other day. 1, 2, 3. What's the compost at?

139.

All right, let's say turn it tomorrow. Is that pick with the yellow handle still up there in the yard?

I don't know, I think so, but I can't see.

It's not in the grass anymore. Oh my goodness, the kids put it up! Look at that, those chicken guts have converted. We got chickens vying for those juicy pieces of protein. Homestead house remodel!

Should I have a second fridge in here?

In your pantry?

We have my— we have the fridge and freezer out here.

Yeah, and then only one fridge and freezer? Yeah, you should have a second one because we have two fridges in the cabin and it's clutch. Got like 20 minutes till we need to make lunch. Well, 20 minutes is better than nothing. We're gonna start burying this water line. Shoot, are we gonna have to dig it up again? Some of it's already falling down in there. Hopefully the water line's in there. Bury the water line. We need to also bury The fence energizer electricity source, this insulated wire from Premier One. I think with 20 minutes I can dig. This is too little of a job for the machine, so let's do it with the mattock. The ladies are running electricity to the cow fence. You will have a water hookup and an electricity hookup every 100 feet with these T-posts. Oh, this is a pain. This is compact hot when you're doing it by hand a long way. Get the young guy to take over. That is tiring. Get the young girl to take over. I'm wondering if he can get in here with his machine. I feel like if I put this water line over here, he could maybe come in right here and dig this thing. Favorite smoker. We just started some chicken. That's what I'm talking about. Why am I over here breaking my back when I got a track loader with a ditch digger. There you go.

That's all scorched, and then there's no pinhole.

There's none. Problem is we can't slide— that only slides to the side on one side. It's not the side we need. Johnna had the idea to remove this T-post. I don't see why we can't, and then he can just go over the center here. Go ahead, John. What? Go at it. Here, I'm gonna give you a pull. Ready? Go. Pull it. Came over here and pulled it up just as I turned off the camera. Particularly tough ground because it's across a road which is super compact. I don't think it'll be a problem for the, uh, dig sticker though. It's roots. Lift it up. Roots. If the machine's having that hard of a time, I would have had a terrible time. Oh, we still got a bit to dig by hand. Oh, is that— what's that? An old, old water line? I think that's the old spring water line to this farmhouse. I just walked down in the noonday sun, get that shovel to do this, and Jonah says he's dug it. He did it with his mattock. Whoops. Okay, I don't think you can get in there with a shovel anyway. Let's clear this out a little bit more with the mattock. I got my electric line through, it's under the stump. And up through the wire. Let's snake this in through first. Somehow we have to get this in through it. I've just got a few minutes for, for quitting time. I just want to make sure I get this wire down and under and over into a T-post. Feels like I haven't gotten done much today, and maybe I haven't, but I'll feel like I've finished something if I can get that far. Somehow both these wires are too short and they aren't coming up to our circle. Cut off here. Let's go get some more electric wire. I have my cutting pliers in here. Y'all ready to go? Yeah. Reason to live: making mint chocolate chip. Big kids are going swimming with Sam and John. One reason I've got to get this done is this is our source of electricity to the cows, and we've calf separated. They're gonna want to get at each other tonight. Is it behind there? I don't know. I have black tape in my pocket. It is gone, I think, because it was towards the top. It fell out. I got this wire secure. All I got to do is put up the single strand and it should work. We've got our water line and our electric line buried under this access road. Cross our fingers. It's a big deal if it's gonna work because that means we can drive this road all we want and not mess up this electric line. It's hitting 5.0. It's gonna be a quiet evening, babe. Listen.

It's weird.

I'm kind of excited for this quiet dinner tonight. Camping gear. Our greatest camping hack is to write down everything we should have done or should have had after the camping trip and get it now. And then maybe if we put it all on tote bags, it could just be quicker and easier to pack to camp. Just up and go. Want to go again in October? Look at that golden chicken. Dinner off the land. This is the easiest way to make chicken and it'd be tasty. Just smoke it. I got a buddy.

I'm waiting for some morsel to fall.

Sitting next to you. He's our third kid tonight. I've been filming for 3 hours. Quite the interesting morning. The mic's not been on, so let me recap some of the highlights. I was explaining that Josiah had come and told me that Belle died. Belle, our sheep, our prized sheep. It's believable possible because she had just had that severe foot issue we had treated. She had maggots in her foot, and so it's quite possible. But we had also had a sheep with explosive diarrhea. That's also possible, and I hope that's the case because it's just a wither, not a disaster like if it was one of our ewes, especially our prized ewe. I arrive, I'm scared to look, I'm scared to ask Lily. I ask Lily, she doesn't know who it is. I do get up there and I realize I see Belle. On our knees eating. And I figure that's Belle because we had just treated her hooves. Upon examination, surely enough, it was the wither. I spoke about how we dispose of them, which is when it's a big animal like that, we put them at the edge of our property to quickly feed them back to nature. They live on, they live on in other beasts. We go about our chores. Jonah stirs up a new brush pile. By the way, our brush pile we started the other day, it didn't keep and keep going, so we're hoping Storing these brush piles will kind of eliminate some of these— this green life that has grown over these. It's hard starting a fire. We go back at it with a mission that lamb probably had a heavy load of parasites. That's just a reminder, hey, we need to be doing these monthly maintenances. Now, if we had done that, would it still go? It's hard to tell. Probably. We're cleaning out the troughs, we're putting the soap— that's, that's kind of where we're, we're coming in now. Oh, at one point I talked to Randolph about my hopes to build a 12 by 20 pig port. It could be used for pigs on deep bedding. It could use— it could be used as pigs— as a pig tractor. That's going to be the next big fun project on the farm. Come on, Gideon, let's go finish this. We spilled this earlier. Why don't you get a bunch, like practically fill it up? Okay, there you go. Oh, somewhere in there we got a new delivery of a window. What you doing today? I'm going up on the lean-to. I wish they'd stop drinking it. It doesn't have ratio of soap. How did we forget our soap? We want a half a cup of Shackley Basic H. Yeah, I'm gonna show it to you since we're going back to 50 gallons of water. This is Shackley Basic H, not the new H2 or whatever it is. It's got to be super simple. You don't want any chemicals. I see they repped our mail out of Quick Connect. We've been Tefloning these. And it's actually been helping with sometimes with little leaks. They bumped this, that's why we put it against this fence. You don't even have to screw it in there, it's so stripped.

You're gonna drink it?

Yeah, they'll drink it. They'll be foaming at the mouth. Oh boy, all our sheep and steers are out. Is that not connected right there? I hope that's what's happened. I mean, this fence is off right now. They don't have much food. They love that tree of heaven. Might as well call it the tree of hell. It's invasive, very hard to get rid of. You got to get every last little bit of root. It can regrow from just the tiniest bit of root. I want you rip up trees along the edge there, which we want to do anyway, and feed them to these cows and sheep. That's enough, Gideon. Go turn the water off. We don't have enough grass. We want to clear this anyway. Plus sheep go to the forest the— for their medicine and the grass for their feed. They could use a little health boost right now. So get one or two more of that equivalent. Just wash the sheep trough. Clean up behind this house while we're at it. Looks better. Plus they got some food. I can't say it doesn't bring up some PTSD from our first lamb experience. Feels like it's about this time of year. The first 5 lambs we ever got, 4 of them died. We have 80 trees on this farm. They all got wrapped. Tried to do it all at once, one big project, just continuous. It's overwhelming. 80 times 4 is like 320 T-posts, 80 woven wire. Count the boards it's cutting. I mean, is that— got 8 around each one? 8 times 80, whatever that is. It's intimidating. It's uninteresting. Oh my goodness, there are leaves falling. It's August. There's gonna be a day it's 91 this week.

What are we doing?

We're putting in our electric line and our water line. First up, patching this joint now that we found some black tape. Got that patched. Next, let's connect our electric wire that we already have buried. And bring it up to our cutoff here, Premier One cutoff. This lacks, I don't know, a foot and a half to get up to here. The way these work is that this, this side comes to here and the other side is there, and no electricity can get through when you lift up this metal post. So in effect, you get to turn off your fence. Now it's back on, but it's pretty neat because that means every 100 feet we have a shutoff. We got it in, Josie. What I'd really like to do is to make this span all the way up to that next valve, and then you could take the Mini-X and cover this dirt up. It's just 11 o'clock and it's so hot here. Since we're gonna bury this line, we can't do these Quick Clips that we used. I'm scared to reach my hand down in there. Now be careful, another branch could fall. Now just try to scratch it and then you can push it over, I think. There you go, there it is. We got our water line attached. That's the first T-post with water line we've attached to this new water line. We're going to attach these shut-offs. Now the thing I was saying about the trees— why did I mention that? Well, I feel the same, the exact same way about this water line, electric line. Zip-tied down there, zip-tied there, zip-tied there. Everything must be zip-tied. Gannon, stop opening and shutting that door, please. Good news, we've got our T-post in, we've got our cutoff in, our water line attached. Dang, 9.9. Love Grid Energizers. There's no way a solar energizer would charge so much. We have enough sheep net for the cows. The sheep, we're not real great about keeping it up off the ground or out of the limbs. Have a very powerful energizer powering this. Now we have the electric line going under the ground. We can drive over this with a machine. We want to know where a hookup is, just look for a T-post. Made it 100 feet today. We're moving them probably 150, maybe 100 to 200 feet a day. So there's a chance we're gonna pick up the speed and be able to keep up with them. We got another water line running along the woods there, but by then we'll have it down, won't we? Not gonna get overwhelmed. Just a little bit every day. 100 feet. Just do 100 feet every day. We're gonna leave it be, but you can look at it. Whoa, it's fast! It's hitting real hard up at the top. It's not hitting at all at the bottom. I can't see any disconnects. It's the strangest thing. They are calling us for lunch.

What is it? What is that color?

It's hitting really hard at the top of it and zero at the bottom of it. Oh, thank you. So it's not the same net that are hitting? I think it's the same net.

Is there a joint?

I don't think there is. Was there a joint, Jonah?

Yes.

Oh yeah, and I tested the joint though. It's dead. So yeah, the same net. It's dead on one end and hot on the other. You guys want to solve that mystery after lunch? It's tea party. Yeah, you love your tea and you love your Lily. And behind us, our wooden 10x10. It will actually withstand rain, and we can sit and scroll, read a book while we take our baths at night. Yeah, even if it rains. This evening we're troubleshooting this fence. Look at this! Holy smoke, they ate this whole brush pile. I couldn't solve this puzzle this morning, Josie. Heck yeah. How'd you fix it?

It had been cut.

Oh, like one of this wire's broken? Yeah. We either pull them more trees or we just go get them some hay real quick. Let's do hay since they've had the brown ball ready. We're getting some residual hay that we had left over from the winter. We got to get this ready anyway for hay that's coming. We might as well just feed this to our sheep. We forgot our forks. Look, they're waiting on it. And that lets a lot more sun in here anyway to let the grass grow better. So useful. Yeah. Papa would be so proud of you and that machine. Lambs are fed, steers are fed, fence is on. Mark, get set, go! What is this?

These are onion nets. So I bought them. They come like this. I bought them from Dixondale, I think. You tie a knot at the bottom and then you put an onion in and then you tie another knot. Okay, then tie a knot.

That way if this one rots, this one's not gonna rot.

When you want an onion, cut right here.

Nice.

And you get this onion and then this is the next onion you need. Then you hang it. I'm gonna hang it in the root cellar.

What How many does that hold?

Um, well, it's supposed to be 10 pounds. I don't, I don't quite know if it's 10 pounds. It's pretty heavy.