The Apprentice came out for a couple of partial days early in the week and got the frost free faucet holes filled in. She stated that she is constantly hurting all of the time due to the laborious nature of the work she is doing on the farm. I stated that it was merely training for her apprenticeship at the end of September. Plus, she keeps returning and working every time I ask. This is a win/win situation for both of us.
I have some extra time off of work so I am playing catch up before winter starts. I have several projects that are on hold, the old house freezer room, the back bridge, bee hive storage room and moving the old lamb shed over near the machine shed. Instead I am working on the barn. It needed to be set back up so we can use it. So on Thursday I cleaned up the house some, then picked two more gallons of thornless blackberries and then the Apprentice came out to do some more work.
We gathered some tools and drug them out to the barn. We needed to install more hooks for the buckets. It’s so much nicer to be able to find a bucket when you need it, so we installed another ten hooks. We installed bungee cords on all of the doors so they auto close now so the sheep cannot get into any area that we forget to use the latch on. We installed the sorting chute and even put some hinge joints into the chute so when we start using the chute panels to block off portions of the barn it will be easier to move the panels. I think we need another six metal pins as there are only two left unused. The door into the momma/baby is always out of commission early as it get stuck open due to the level of the bedding rising quickly. So we raised it another three inches. It cannot go any higher or the lambs will fall under it when they lay next to it. They all lay next to something that will potentially allow them to fall under it. The extra bungees were all placed in the bungee hanging spot and all of the bucket straps were placed on the wall in their appropriate storage spot. We added three more rails in the momma/baby area to hang feeders from. We added two more eyelets for the creep gate so the area under the stairs can be converted to a baby feed fattening area.
The big thing was to put metal support hangers under all of the cross braces holding up the bedding. One of the boards had split and another was cracking. We had to force the broken one back together and install the hanger. Now that they all have a hanger we don’t have to worry about the space above the feeders crashing down onto the unsuspecting sheep dining below. We just need to toss out some straw bales but literally you just toss them down and the sheep will tear them up and spread them around themselves.
Stewart Creek Somethings 