Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal

[Ridgetop]

Since I am assuming that your 10 ewe lambs are out of Maxwell, you are getting Cooper just in time to use him on the youngsters. You will have several breeding seasons out of him before having to replace him to use on his daughters. Father/daughter breedings are ok for one generation and if you are planning on all meat sales, you can actually use him on daughters for 2 generations. After that watch out!

Are you getting a Brucellosis test on the ram before trading? If you know the owner well it is probably not necessary.

 

[Ridgetop]

I certainly envy you your garden! We only had a few crookneck squash meals out of ours before the Plague of Ground Squirrels hit. We are planning for next year with electric fencing round the garden, earlier planting, and different garden beds. I think using the old water troughs to plant in did not work out due to the possibility of the roots overheating. Not sure but the gardens beds that sat on the ground with wire under them did great. Lots of growth just no veggies -probably due to the GSs but also not as much fruit setting. Very disappointing since we always have tons of tomatoes and squash. The zuchinis did not even produce!

We'll be thinking of you and your bounty this winter while drinking our alfalfa soup.

 

[Mike CHS]

The ram has been tested previously as has ours and both herds are closed. Matt is one of the UT folks that teaches the Master Small Ruminant Certification program.

We actually have decent springs here so the heat doesn't start beating our gardens until right about now.

 

[Mike CHS]

We got the shop building organized again and ran across a few things that haven't gotten any use so we will list for sale. Among them is a Taylor pea sheller that I bought prior to moving here since I envisioned bushels and bushels of Shelling peas needing processed. Come to find out Teresa had developed a sensitivity to them so it only got used one time.

I got to looking on the vendors site since I couldn't what we paid for it and found another casualty to Covid. They are shut down since they can't get any parts and what they had on hand is sold out.

 

[Mike CHS]

The temp is a pleasant 85 degrees today. I'm still having pain issues walking but I cut the grass with the rider this morning. I broke out my knee pads so I could kneel at one of the garden beds and we planted some beets, cabbage, lettuce, radishes, beets and kohlrabi that should be mostly ready not long after our first frost and the lettuce will be ready before then.

 

[B&B Happy goats]

I hope you get back to feeling like your normal self soon Mike, your terrain is hard enough to walk for a totally fit person, let alone someone having body aches and pain.... ...

 

[Mike CHS]

I had my 4th session of PT this morning and my hip is finally feeling a bit better. We did a new exercise movement Tuesday that we won't be trying again anytime soon. About half way through the movement the pain shot and my leg buckled so that was the end of that.

The rest of the day was installing new sensors for our security system. We have had our equipment for going on 9 years and although some of them are fairly new, we were getting error alerts when the system did a check with the monitoring system. We would also get a fail about half the time when we did a system test. We called them last week to see what we needed to upgrade and wound up with all new equipment for a little over half price since we had been with them for so long. I guess that also shows the percentage of markup on these gadgets. We have a few sensors in the shop so we will move the old sensors from the house down there.

 

[Ridgetop]

Is the security system for the house or the barn when lambing? I would like one for the barn to keep an eye on my ewes. Right now we don't need any since I can see into the night fold from my BR window, and the barn window with a view down into the lambing jugs is only 25 feet across the driveway from the door. Oh yes and our wrought iron fencing with dead bolts and 3 Anatolians works well to. Bubba is very menacing and they can all get to the driveway gate fro anywhere in the 6 acres in 30 seconds. When we move I will put in something to let me know if someone shows up to the house or gate while we are in the barn or fields since on a larger property we will need more notice.

 

[Mike CHS]

We had/have sensors on both the house, the shop, the lambing shelter and our garden shed. It may have changed but we didn't get the cameras from SimpliSafe since at the time, they didn't have a wireless system. We have a stand-alone camera system (Arlo) that we bought at Best Buy. We have more sensors than we would normally have or need because our home was empty except for 3-4 days a month and we have several thousand dollars worth of tools and material for our renovation plus we had a full system at our home in Charleston. When we first started staying here we didn't know anyone nor how secure the area was so we also had a stand-alone motion sensor for our driveway that we got from Harbor Freight. It worked well and the only issue we had with it was that whenever my parrot heard the ding dong sound it made, he would echo it for the next half hour or more.

We use cameras that are night vision outside at the stall and one aimed out in the paddock that we use for lambing plus motion sensor activated cameras in the house and shop are even the chicken pen when we are seeing predators around. We have some that aren't easily seen but we put cameras out where they can easily be seen rather than hidden. We have hired several of the young fellas around and we make sure they see at least some of them since even though they are pretty good kids, they are still subject to temptation.

 

[Ridgetop]

That sounds like a great system. I have considered using wildlife motion triggered cameras to try to catch pix of predators but now with our 3 dogs it will be rare for one to get in. Do yours have a recording tape arrangement?