Farm life:

I don't talk much about the day-to day stuff, but if you're curious; here's what I on Monday, Jan 27.

I got up at 7:30, ate something, and then started pruning the fruit trees that are in the back yard.  It's a ladder job, as they were well-pruned until about 4 years ago, and have since gone straight up.  I'm pruning both for structure and to thin the trees; I have about 30 fruit trees, mostly apple, that I'm working on.

Sean, one of my farmhands, made the morning run to pick up the load of fruit and veges from the scheduled market, and he was using a forklift to move the food and feed the pigs.  Wave to him, and keep working on the trees.

As I pruned them I noticed that there is (was) a fairly large number of lesions in the bark that looked a lot like the black-knot disease; I have been pruning off all of the branches that are affected, and I've been burning the pruned limbs in case they're contagious.

I spent about 2 hours on the pruning, and the guys from Excel Dairy service showed up, so I stopped pruning and worked with them to describe what I wanted to do.  Basically I've got two big bins (farmers call silos bins, for reasons I have never figured out) and one of them is in pretty good shape, but auger motor is erratic, so I asked them to take a look at that, and the other bin needs a new bottom boot and lid.

I explained to them I'd like the feed to be moved via auger from the bin to the barns at the back of the building complex, and could they work up a quote so that we could get that set up?  

After that I ate lunch about 12:30 and then drove into seattle to meet with an attorney who's handling some business issues, and then back to the farm at 4pm, where I did a welfare check of the animals; had two lambs born overnight, both in good shape, twins to one ewe.  bedding was dry, everyone had food and water, things are good.

Checked my email and orders for two half-hogs, with questions from three other people, worked through the email, returned a couple of calls, and then went back to pruning trees, got down to the last 3 trees and it was too dark to work anymore, so I went in and started working on replacing the glass on my phone.  ended up ruining the phone, or the display was more broken, cursed a little, and figured i'd go buy another phone tommorow.  Reviewed some stuff the attorney had sent me, and then ate dinner; roughly 8pm now.

Spent the next two hours working on the farm books; getting them in shape for meeting with the bookeeper on thursday, starting the tax season work for the year.

Around 10pm decided i was done for the day, so spent an hour or so reading the blogs and newspapers that I read around the net; some pretty good stuff; kept me interested enough that I finally had to tear myself away and then thought that I'd never really run down a day of mine on the blog and started writing this.

Bedtime at 1:45am, set an alarm for 8:00am