Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 28 Feb 2023...
Hey Y'all!
Happy Tuesday morning from Free Missouri! It was a beautiful 45 degree sunny morning for rounds. The high today is going to be in the mid-70s and the sun is going to be shining. All of the animals are doing well. Two ducks were on a walk-about outside their yard but we were able to quickly catch them and put them back. Yesterday we refreshed the straw for the dairy cows, edited our Google ad, and finished the bar! The top pic is the first two drinks on the bar to celebrate completion. The next pic is of the completed bar. The bottom pic is just a cool pic. We are going to take advantage of the great weather today and plan to move the hogs to a new paddock. We will also attempt to finish mowing, in fact Shelley, is mowing as I am writing. It is a fairly extensive undertaking to move the hogs. I've written about all of the goings on required to get them moved in a previous blog but we may try to video the process this time and put it on YouTube. Videoing farm tasks seems to go in one of two directions, it either looks like things are a well choreographed production or it looks like a group of elementary-schoolers at recess. Hog moves historically tend more towards the later.
We are excited about completing our bar-build project. One summer evening when we were still living in the RV, before we even started the house build, we were chatting and said "I bet we could build a bar out of these pallets." My awesome uncle has a virtually unlimited supply of pallets. One day he asked me if I thought we could use them on the farm, since they typically just burned them to keep them from piling up. I answered "Of course!" These aren't the normal thin-wood flimsy things, they are high-quality pine 2x6 tops and oak 3x4 and 4x4 bottoms. Side note, we use these things everywhere on the farm, from sheep & dog shelters to hog feeders to the milking barn. Anyway, we made up our mind to build the bar using the pallets. A year and a half later, we finally began the project. We separated the tops and bottoms of the pallets, a quite difficult task since they use ring-shank nails so they don't fall apart. We pry the boards up slightly and then use a saws-all to cut the nails. We then have piles of pine and oak boards. We used the pine 2x6s as the frame for the bar and the oak as the top making it sturdy enough for even the most energetic high-kick dancing. We glued the oak into 2-3 foot sections as anything bigger is just too heavy to lift into place. Dad spent lots of time planing and sanding the oak to get it to a beautiful smooth surface. We used plywood to cover the face and sides. Then we glued tongue and groove hardwood flooring onto the plywood, to match the walls. The flooring is Patagonian Rosewood flooring left over from the remodel we did on our house in Maryland. (These are probably the last pics before the walls are filled with awards, pics, and lithos.) We then trimmed it using barn-wood from another awesome uncle's barn. We installed a sink behind the bar and electricity under the top. All in all, we spent about $200 and really love the way it looks. The best part is that we can honestly say we built it out of old pallets and barn-wood!
Check out Shelley discussing the grass growing in a hay-bombed pasture in today's YouTube Short: Hay Bombing and Grass in February.
Folks also seem to like our milking video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2qJkJiZFQU&t=4s
Local Farm Report for 27 Feb 2023:
Harvest:
24 Chicken eggs
3 Duck eggs
0 Goose eggs
6 Gallons of milk
Sales:
N/A
Cheers!
Rich & Shelley
Man that looks awesome! Well done sir! Nothing you guys can’t do!
Your home is beautiful. There is nothing more I can say.