Folks who know us know that we aren’t afraid to try new things. Sometimes, we get in over our heads, sometimes it all works out in the end and we heave a sigh of relief. Case in point: over the past year, we have raised/cared for pigs, calves, dairy goats, dairy cows, worms, laying hens, meat chickens, guinea fowl, ducks, geese, rabbits, and a donkey. Somewhere in that year, we had another baby. We’re a bit overwhelmed at present, and we’ve been focusing on ways to simplify.
One thing we have thought of is a better way to house our chickens, both the laying hens and meat birds. We need access to pasture on a rotating basis, but moving them is a royal pain. Watering gets to be a problem too, especially in the summer, so having a way to set up an automatic watering system would be great, but moving it daily would not be so much fun.
So we thought it over. We made diagrams. Every discussion centered around this problem until we finally developed our plan for a chicken mansion. Pictures and more information will follow.
Last weekend, about 20 friends (and a few nice people we’d never met) descended upon our farm to help and more than half of the chicken mansion was completed, along with a new and improved roosting system.
As we’ve gradually inched the chickens’ fencing toward the new mansion, we’ve pulled out their old shelters, thinking that they would be curious about the new place and go check it out.
Some did. Others, not so much.
So today we were thinking that it was about time to pull out the last shelter so the hens would just go into the mansion roost area and roost.
Only, while we were thinking, the chickens weren’t. They aren’t real bright actually. Tonight Brian and my daughter spent an hour picking them up from all over the yard and taking them into their new chicken mansion shelter.
Of course, that was after we caught the cow.
Again, it started with thinking.
Right now, I milk 2 cows every day. Mocha came without a calf, and she only gives a gallon a day right now. We will be drying her up in May in anticipation of a July calf (if all goes well). Her production is low for several reasons, one is because she didn’t get milked for the first 3 weeks of her very first lactation period and the other is because she got sick in November and her supply never got back up to the 2 gallons she’d been giving. I put her on once daily milking and now we get along just great with a mid-morning milking.
Big Lily gets milked in the afternoon. She calved a couple weeks ago and Blackberry gets all the milk she wants and then I take off 1-2 gallons in the afternoon.
Mocha is in the back with the dairy goats (currently dry, awaiting March kids), and Big Lily is up front. Today I was thinking that it would be nice to have Mocha up front with Big Lily. Brian has plans to put a stanchion up front for me so I can do the milking up there and we can plug in the milk machine and try to get that working, but he has been working on the perimeter fence and the chicken mansion.
Today as I finished with Lily I was wondering how we would get Mocha up front. She isn’t real excited about coming along on a lead rope, so I want the perimeter fence finished so that if she gets away from me, she is still contained.
Mocha had other ideas.
Tonight as we came home from church, she was running in the driveway, parallel to Big Lily’s pasture. Both of them were having a bawling fit. Mocha ran all over the place, into the neighbor’s orchard, and out toward the road before she finally calmed down and decided to follow Brian and a bucket into a small pen next to Big Lily.
I still can’t decide if she is anxious to get in with her or trying to get away from her. I am hoping they will be able to get along.
It took a while for our hearts to stop hammering. Mocha was pretty skittish. My daughter checked the gates in back and everything is closed up tight. The goats and donkey are in their little shelter, seemingly unaware of the events of the evening.
That leaves us wondering if someone came by and let her out or if she jumped the fence. If she jumped the fence, was she scared of something? Sometimes we hear coyotes and sometimes we have dogs come around which is why we have Bonny our donkey.
So far, Mocha isn’t telling us. Perhaps in the morning we can look over the tracks and figure out where she got out. Right now I’m just glad she was in the driveway when we got home–if she had been just running around in back we might have just come in and not even noticed.