Desert Weyr Blog
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New Ditch Section
Our irrigation water enters the property on the northeast corner of the orchard. From there, we have a concrete ditch box that sends the water either west to irrigate the orchard and front pasture, or east to irrigate the back cedars pasture. On the property above ours, there is a gate right by where our… Continue reading
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Elk Fence Wire Up
The first section of the new elk fence is up and installed. They stretched it from the middle, where the two rolls that make up this side are spliced together. The high tensile wire can be hard to stretch properly, but once it’s up, it’s a wonderful fence. With all the wire up and stretched,… Continue reading
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More Elk Fence Work
Ken started work on the inflow of the ditch. The neighbors’ cattle make a huge mess and destroy the ditch every summer, so we’re going to install metal culvert pipes up past the gate where the cattle walk. I hope that this’ll prevent the water loss that happens when they smash the ditch sides. Our… Continue reading
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New Loom
Erika came up from Albuquerque to teach a naalbinding class to members of the North Fork Fiber Guild (NF2G) and brought my new loom up from Santa Fe. As she said, “All those years playing Tetris have finally paid off.” She managed to get a Glimakra 4 shaft, 60″ wide countermarche loom into her van… Continue reading
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More Elk Fence
We’re continuing to replace the old DOW elk fence around the orchard. L & S Mountain Fence is doing an excellent job for us. They did the elk fence we put around our front pasture and the lower fence around the back cedars pasture. Those pastures allowed us to safely put the horses out back… Continue reading
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Shop Construction
Construction on the shop continues. Bill McKee and his crew were out putting all the rebar in the concrete floors and installing drains. Once all the rebar was installed, we had to wait until Tom McCormick could come and pour the floors. They came back on Thursday to do the work. Continue reading
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Off to Slaughter
This year, I vowed not to go into winter with as many sheep as I had last year. Our fall slaughtering has started. We’ve already done 16 adult ewes, and today we sent off 10 young rams. We have to schedule slaughter dates over a year in advance. I have 66 slots reserved for this… Continue reading
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Shop Building
Our new shop building really got going this past week. After the footers were poured, the actual foundation walls were formed and poured in. The back of the covered carport area will have a wall, but it’ll be open at the top for light and airflow. The back wall ended up being a bit taller… Continue reading
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Back on Pasture and Why Labels Are Misleading
The early snow has pretty much all melted, and we got one batch of ram lambs back out on our triticale pasture regrowth. We made sure they were all pretty full of hay before putting them out, and we made an aisle of electric fencing to prevent too much plugging of the permanent pastures. We’ll… Continue reading
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Emergency Preparations for a Farm
Watching the news about the big fires in San Diego yesterday and today prompted me to review our farm emergency plan. We used to live in Ramona, San Diego, one of the towns in the path of the fires. The latest data indicates that our old house was either on the very edges or was… Continue reading