It is amazing!  The progress is fantastic.  After seeing more of the floor, I am really glad I did not try to drive any piece of equipment into the barn.  It would have fallen through in places.  Hector is out there digging away right now (1000).  Probably another two days.  It will have taken him seven days to dig it out.  I will need to work on the foundation before I can move the wall in.  After surveying the rafters, I am going to have to halve the barn on that side.  The wind tore up the roof support beams that were left for almost another 20 feet.  I hate to make the barn smaller, but in reality it is so much more barn than we will ever use even after it is shrunk.  If we do nothing the barn will disappear by falling apart.  Not a very dignified ending.

Look at the dark patch along the walls.  That was the height of the sheep dung in the barn!  Hector is still digging (1530). I went out and had a conversation with him.  It was an effort in frustration.  He wants to work, as he can see all the stuff that needs to be done on the farm, but I had a hard time communicating that I could not afford him to work all the time.  I got him set up to take a day off tomorrow and come back on Thursday.  He will finish the barn and then dig out the attached lean to on the back side of the barn.  That will let me tear the tin off of that roof and take down that addition to the barn.  I will use the tin over the part above where the sheep will be hanging out.  I truly do understand the importance of mucking out the barn in the Spring now.  I will need to get some straw to use in the winter.

You can see the different levels and layers in the barn here.  I will get a hose and pressure washer out here before I do anything else and get it all cleaned up.  Seems like overkill, but it will make it far easier for me to tell what is good wood and reusable.  Besides once every 100 years the barn can have an inside shower.  See the black mark on the wall?  It is much higher in the back of the barn.  Everything is starting to dry out here.  I have not been watering the lawn (no mower, and sheep have been banished from the yard for eating my roses).  So I tried the age old tactic of not watering.  It helped but I almost killed my grape plant in the back yard.  So I am now watering the yard and starting to drag our hoses to the surrounding sheep pasture to get about 50 yards watered around the house.

Annmarie forgot to lock my chickens up the other night and I think I lost another one.  I have 27 hens now and 1 rooster.  This doesn’t include the 13 babies I just got a couple of weeks ago.  Predators are not my friends this year.  If only I could keep a weed eater going…

Here is a picture of the fields I just took yesterday.  We have cheat grass everywhere!!

So, apparently our sheep are dissatisfied with their pasture. Before Steve went to work, he chased a ewe and one of her lambs back inside the fence. This morning, I looked out the kitchen window and noticed two of the adult sheep laying out on the hillside next to the fence. It was already pretty warm, and the rest of the sheep were huddled against the woodshed or under the bridge. It was kind of odd to see these two out in the sun. Then it dawned on me that I hadn’t heard the coffee girls in a while. They are quite vocal usually. So, I went out and checked, and sure enough, Long Tail and coffee girls were outside the fence. Speckle-butt was still inside the fence, but was apparently keeping Long Tail company while they all cooked their brains. I opened the gate and walked the wayward children back in. They rushed right over to the shade of the tree by the chicken coop and rested for a while. They appear to have recovered quite well, and the coffee girls are once again talking.

But find it we did. Actually, our contractor friend, Lee, found it. He found a first-generation immigrant working at McDonald’s who was looking for extra work and was not afraid of hard work. Lee’s been using them for laborers, and we hired one of them to dig out the barn, since Steve keeps getting distracted by other more pressing projects. There just don’t seem to be enough days off for him to get it all done (that’s an observation, not a complaint). Anyway, Lee brought his laborer out this morning, and introduced me to a very small young man from Honduras. Now, I have known other small men who can outwork a larger man, so I wasn’t too concerned by his size. I was, however, a bit dismayed to see that he had no water and no food with him. It was HOT here today. That’s OK – I can supply a water jug, and a sandwich for lunch is not going to put me in the poorhouse. So, I took him out a couple of hot dogs (don,t look at me like that. It’s what I had, and they were all meat quality dogs) and a handful of grapes at noon, and refilled his water jug. I was impressed with his progress at that point. He’d dug almost as much in 3 hours as Steve had in 6. At the end of the day, I went out to pay him (yes, we pay the laborer by the day), and was very very impressed. In 6 hours, Steve had cleared just a little over one shovel length. We now have a full 3 1/2 shovel lengths completely cleared of buildup. In 8 hours, this little fellow had dug twice as much as Steve was able to remove in 6. I was concerned that he wouldn’t want to come back tomorrow, because it was hot, dirty, stinky, back-breaking work, but instead of complaining, he thanked me repeatedly for the work and promised to return in the morning, with his own food tomorrow. We are very spoiled in this country.

I just got back from a predator sweep of the yard and my chicken yard.  No predators and all chickens were accounted for.  I have 28 hens, one rooster and 11 new babies.  of course, 11 of those hens are not laying eggs yet.  The sheep were trying to get me to let me into our yard.  Now this does slow down my need to mow the lawn (a very good thing) but they are killing my bushes and roses and make an awful mess on my back porch.  So no sheep in the yard.  I locked the chickens back up.

Well, we survived the weekend just barely.  Trying to dig out the house now.  Looks like a tornado hit the inside of our house.  It was pointed out to me that my predator post may have implied that our new baby that died was killed by a predator.  It wasn’t it just did the chicken thing and died.  I had to go out the next morning and hold another one up to the water dispenser and make it drink.  Took me about 15 minutes to perk up that chick.  It is doing just fine now and we have only lost the one.  The new babies are doing fine and running around and eating without any difficulties.  Annmarie and I were talking about switching to a nipple waterer. That way the inside water will not make any messes and during the winter I can stick an immersion heater inside.  No mess.  Now if I only had power to the coop…

Need to build fence before I wire the chicken coop.  It will be the next thing though. Our chocolate lab, Bailey thinks that any baby, no matter what kind is hers and needs to be protected.  This is her watching out for our new babies.