Barn Remodel

        We've been busy in 2012! It's only February and there has already been SO MANY things added to our to-do list, gotten underway, already completed, or soon to become project numero uno. One top priority was the barn. It was in desperate need of a good organizing and ultimately a remodel to best suit our and the animal's needs. Unfortunately, I did not have the forethought to take some "before" pictures prior to picking up the hammer and having at it, so enjoy only the "after" shots.

        Moving in the direction of having goats and sheep as our primary herd animals, it was necessary to build pens for them. We also don't want to only accommodate the animals we have currently, but allow for expansion and have a place to put little ones, interim goats b/w the time they are born and the time they find a new home, and any other animals we may need a place for. Accommodating the animal's needs is one thing, but we also need the barn to suit our needs for storage, influx of livestock, ease of feeding and watering, and ultimately easier upkeep and ability to keep the barn clean. We decided to go with a lane design for the barn. Essentially this just means that an aisle is set right down the middle of the barn with animal pens on each side. This way when it's time to clean, we can muck everything into the center lane and then scrape it all out at once as opposed to having to hand shovel and wheel barrow every last bit of manure and used bedding. Our barn was already set up perfectly for this design since it has two big bay doors that open on the west facing side.

Here you can see the lane that goes straight back to the sliding bay doors.
Each pen has two doors into the lane. Each door can be opened into the lane
and secured to create one large pen from the front to the back of the barn
allowing for even more flexibility in the use of the barn!

Eglantine and Rosie happy in their own pens!

Here is the milking pen, which also doubles as our birthing pen
since it has better lighting mounted directly over head.

Two additional pens on the backside of the barn.

Here are the two bays used for tractor implement storage.

Here are two bays being used for hay storage.

A look down the lane from the opposite side of the barn.

We've added gravel to the backside of the barn. Soon this whole area will have a roof
over it for the dual purpose of covering our processing area, and allowing for storing
our tractor out of the elements. For the time being we store the tractor in the
barn by the hay storage.

The Miracle of Powerwashing

Here are some great examples of how much a good power-washing makes dirty things come back to life!

The machine.

The difference.

The before.

And the after.

Out With the Old!

With Summer in full swing, that means there is a LOT of grass in need of mowing! Our old riding mower did a great job on flat smooth areas, however, there aren't many on a mountain. So we sold the rider (pictured, left) and bought a bigger, badder, more powerful machine. Now we can mow the edges of the fields with ease, and even clear overgrown brush. The new mower is perfect for maintaining our new nature trail, and it's zero-turn radius allows us to mow our orchards without running over plants we want to keep!

After a good break-in mowing of the fields!

Box Scraper: A Must Have!

We've been making a lot of new roads recently with all of the new construction going on up here. Essentially, each new structure needs to have as designated a road as possible to prevent everybody from getting in each others way, ESPECIALLY when it comes to the weekend BN'B guests.

There are a few steps to building a road:

1st: Plan out the route of the road keeping in mind the incline, what the bulldozer will be demolishing, and how direct you'd like the road to be. Ideally you shouldn't need a 4x4 to make it up or down the road if it's rained recently, you don't want to plow through existing power lines or septic lines, and you also want to have as little impact to the actual forest around the road.

2nd: Find a friend with a bulldozer to clear the area and make a rough path.

3rd: Spread the road surface of your choosing. In our case we use gravel. Start with larger rocks to form a foundation, and then add gradually smaller gravel to really stabilize the road. Finally, spread a top layer of mostly pulverized rock to form almost a tarmac surface that won't get washed away.

Thanks to the ever trusty Dave VanDerveer!

The rough road completed.

Now, the bulldozer tearing down the forest may seem like the hard part, but as long as the dozer driver knows what he or she is doing, it's relatively straight forward: get stuff out of the way. The hard part has been spreading the gravel evenly over the road surface! We've been using a rake attachment on our tractor to spread the gravel, but it never did the best job. Essentially we would just push the gravel around and hope it was even.

WELL! Have we made it SO MUCH EASIER?! Oh yes!

Whitt and I ran to Tractor Supply yesterday to pick up some more feed and waterers for our birds. Dave VanDerveer had been telling us about a box scraper we could get for our tractor to help make spreading and maintaining road surfaces a lot easier. We priced out a box scraper for our tractor while we were there and the price was better than we expected! So we loaded it up and brought it home.

This is the same style rake we were previously using. Ours is a lot more beat up.

The new tool gathers all the extra material in the "box" and spreads it evenly with a smooth edge.

Previously it took me 4 hours to use the tractor rake to push all the gravel around to some semblance of a path (let alone a road). With the new box scraper? 20 minutes! 2 passes! DONE! Now, forgive me for being so excited about this new tool, but ANYTHING that can cut my time down by 90% AND do a better job than what I was able to do previously is something I get REALLY excited about! Not only am I able to do more in a day, but we're using WAY less diesel fuel and putting less wear on our tractor! Yay efficiency!

Here's a video of a similar box scraper set up taking a pile of crusher run and spreading it smoothly and evenly down a driveway. This isn't our tractor or road, but ours works exactly the same way!

The best part about the box scraper is that not only does it make spreading new roads 100% more efficient, but we're able to use it to re-surface existing roads that are a bit worse for wear. It has "ripper shanks" which can be adjusted to dig into the existing road, churn up all of the gravel that's been packed in and re-lay it evenly. Gravel is not cheap when you're buying it by the truck load, so the more we can get out of the existing gravel the better!

One pass down the worst driveway restored it to almost new. (All that gravel was under the dirt!)

Many thanks to Dave VanDerveer for clueing us in to the box scraper, and also for owning bulldozers, dump trucks, backhoes, and everything else needed to move the earth for a living. If you need any heavy duty excavation or landscaping done, he's the man to call!