Well I'm down here at the hotel building, in the yard beside it, and this
winter, about a month or so ago was it, we had this couple feet of snow and had this tree break.
Well it's just on the inside of the fence between my neighbor and myself,
and the top broke out of it, so I'm just going to take this whole tree out and try to lay it this
way into the yard. I think you can see here where the top's completely broken out of it, and laying
over to the neighbor, so I'm going to tie a strap around this up there a ways, put some tension on it
with my pickup, and a strap and pull it into the yard. One branch that came my direction already.
So, see if I can't get this laid over here.
Now maybe I can get my strap in here. I'll go up as high as I can.
I don't want to be too close to this.
It has some good tension this direction.
Now I'll be able to kind of put it in the right direction.
Now I'll see if I can just pull it over.
That'll work. Somewhere is my strap.
I really like this cordless (saw)
I've got a 14 inch bar on it and this tree was probably 12 inches at the base.
It walked right through it pretty easily.
There we are.
There we go. Get my strap from under here.
Well through the winter, remember, I had a couple pretty nice days, so I came down and I took out
couple box elders and ash. This here was an ash.
Grass is starting to green up so I'm going to have to come down and trim out all my branches
and get those hauled off, and then get these trunks sawed up before it gets to be time to start mowing grass.
Can't do that today. I've got to haul water out to the cows, and then grass is coming out there
and there's some sagebrush that I want to take my brush hog and mow some of that stuff back.
So I'm headed out to our little piece of ground where the cows are at and mow some sagebrush.
Well this is kind of the totals that I ended up with in hauling water to this
3000 gallon tank, over the course of the last six months, which got us through the winter.
I ended up being full at November 7th, is when I started out at a full 3000 gallons.
I have hauled water eight different times, which includes today, which I hauled this thousand gallons,
so I've hauled a total of 4,750 gallons over the course of the winter.
There was the first month of November, we just had the two calves, and then we had a
third one show up, and in the last week we've had this little one show up, but it's been,
you know, non-impactive on the amount of water that we drink, so anyway, at 4,750 gallons over
the last six months, they have consumed between 26 and 27 gallons a day, on average.
So we're going into summer time and that will most likely double, but I have a 300 gallon tank that I
also supplement them with through the summer as I move them from different portions of the pasture.
So anyway, that's kind of the summary of the first winter hauling water out here. It's very doable.
Here in Montana, even though we have some cold weather, we do have the chinook winds that
warms things up intermittently, which allows me to haul water out, and kind of stay on top of it.
And as much as I can keep that tank full, it works well for keeping the whole system open.
So just as a review of the last six months, I think it worked fairly well. That's the update for this winter.
When we first picked up this place, this is going on our fourth year, we've had our first
three summers, this place was covered with this sagebrush. Down below it was just a mass covering
of sagebrush. It had run cows for a while, but this place was abandoned for a number of years.
So as you remember back quite a while ago, I showed a video of burning some huge piles of sagebrush.
Well it's because I took a drag, and my old Farmall M tractor, and I ripped out a lot of the sagebrush,
piled it, and burned it. Well I didn't get all of it, but it really made a significant impact on it.
Well, I've got some more Sagebrush here that is coming back from those that took out some sagebrush, even
before we had it. So there's some short sage that's coming back that's, so maybe a foot tall, or so,
and there's a fair bit of it. Well the winter snow has packed down all the old grass, and the
new grass is just about ready to start coming up, so what I'd like to do, before the new grass
comes back, I'm going to put this brush-hog mower on the back of my Farmall tractor and
try to lower some of this sagebrush, see if I can't keep it knocked back and allow the
grass to come a little more freely. So you can see it's trying to come back in here.
This was knocked down, I think with a mower, maybe five six years ago, and it's starting to come back,
but I'd like to stay ahead of it. I'm going to knock it back again to allow the grass
to come back. So even through here you can see it's trying to come back again. Sagebrush sucks
up a lot of moisture, and it steals it from the grass, so I'm going to try to stay on top of it,
and knock it back, and allow the grass to come in. I have a little bit of heavier sage a little
higher on this hill. I may even try to push that boundary back just a little bit. Here we've got
some that's old, mature, sage, a little bit up from our hay ground. You know it's pretty thick in here,
so I'm gonna kind of push this back a little bit. I don't mind some sagebrush. Sagebrush will
hold snow, and it's actually a good place for deer to hide their fawns in, and when our calf
was born, that mother would actually hide that calf in some of the sagebrush. So I don't want
to take it all out, but there needs to be kind of a limit to it. It has a purpose, but
it can over extend that purpose too. So I'm going to go hook that mower up.
So this is the type of thing that that brush -hog is doing, is taking this sagebrush and just
knocking it back. It won't kill it, but it'll open up the ground to where some of this other grass is
a little more free to come in. So this is some of that pasture that we walked through to begin with.
Now that sagebrush is knocked down.
So this is going to open it up a lot. It takes these bunches out. This old stand of grass from
last year, that didn't get mowed. As I mowed, you can see even the cows are appreciating opening up this
new grass. They they were down further north, but now they just migrated up to what I just mowed.
So hopefully this will kind of open it up. I'm trying to get this grass to come back in a
little stronger. It's been choked out for so many years. I talked to the neighbors, a couple different
neighbors, and they have never seen this piece of ground without sagebrush on it. So we're kind
of trying to reverse that trend. So kind of fun playing out here.
Appreciate you following along.