The Collie Farm Blog

I have finally started on fencing the second pasture. Really, I started a few months ago, with the planning, but that takes a lot of time, so only just this last week was I able to start putting in posts. I have a master plan of the fencing layout of the whole property, which I have drawn up in Visio. It shows the high-level workflow of gates, tractor drive areas, ditches, culverts and bridges. It looks like this:

But when I’m ready to fence a particular rectangle, I need  second drawing to help me figure out the materials list. (more…)

A local feed store and some alpaca farmers organized a shearing event for today, held in the parking lot of the feed store. It was a great deal- $16 per llama or alpaca, much less expensive than hiring a shearer to come out to the farm to do one animal. I had been wanting to shear Dolly Llama soon, and was dreading trying to do it myself, she was one shaggy monster. So I was thrilled to see a flyer for this event last week. (more…)

We are starting to get some nice garden produce already. Our lettuce is bountiful, and tonight we enjoyed both English peas and sugar snap peas. Fresh off the vine, they were delicious (more…)

Weed-covered gate half: where is its fallen mate hiding??

We’ve lost, and bent, quite a few things that reside under our New Holland TC30 tractor. You see, this tractor has a lot of exposed stuff on its underbelly. And that’s not good, because when you have a farm, and an old farm no less, you run over things. To start with, there is 10 foot tall reed canary grass, and then there are even taller blackberry vines, and big things can hide in there.  Things that have been found hiding in our weeds, from past farm denizens and flood deposits: logs and lumber, boulders, whole trees, a truck bed, broken or bent-over fence posts (with barbed wire still attached) a clawfoot bathtub, hundreds of feet of 6″ aluminum pipe and fittings, steel barrels, huge bent gates, culvert pipes, refrigerators, a couch, an RV door, and old broken tractor implements.  Those are just the few that immediately come to mind- there were many more! Our neighbors have an entire collapsed garage, plus all its contents, under there somewhere, just waiting for the next owner of the property to say, “honey, I was thinking I’d mow that patch of blackberries over there in the back pasture today.” (more…)

Quite some time ago, we bent the hydraulic power steering shaft on the tractor- a New Holland TC30. I’m not sure how or when. But, it compromised the seal, so the thing has been leaking power steering fluid like crazy. We’ve been procrastinating on fixing it (we never want to stop using the tractor!), and were just topping off the fluid all the time. (more…)