Second Week of Hobby Farming
7-25-2012: I got back to work on the chicken house. I measured again, dug holes at each of the corners, and set the posts I’d brought from the sandbox in Keene. They were still in their concrete footings. The concrete was all kinds of overkill for a sandbox with a little fort and slide, but it sure came in handy today!
Digging post holes was much less of a chore than I’d imagined it would be. We have about six inches of topsoil here, and beneath that is a nice layer of sand. In one spot I actually made it down to a clay layer below the sand, but it didn’t give me any trouble. There were some bigger stones in the sand (evidence that farmers before me had removed the stones from the upper layer, I guess), but they were handy for bracing the posts when it came time to level them. I got the braces up, leveled the posts, and poured rocks and concrete into the holes. Once again, this was found material. The rocks were the ones that had come up in the digging process, and the Quikrete was the remains of two bags I found in the garage when we arrived here.
So I have four corners of a henhouse. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll dig out the floor a little more, set the base plates and lay out the hardware cloth that’s hopefully going to stop predators from getting our birds. This is going to be a deep-bedding-over-dirt style henhouse, so I need to prevent critters from burrowing under the walls. Mark the insurance guy, who has been raising chickens around here for over twenty years, poured a concrete floor and wrapped the edge with a course of blocks. I’m still hoping that won’t be necessary, because I was convinced by Harvey Ussery’s description of deep bedding, and want to give it a try.
Steph spent part of the afternoon shoveling away at the manure floor of the shelter behind the barn where the horses were kept. It’s deep, and will make good worm food, then good compost! She filled each of the three sections of the composter with a good foot or so for a base layer, and I watered it down. Tomorrow, we should have worms to throw on the pile.
One last thing that happened today: Steph read a craigslist ad this morning from someone giving away kittens. We had already determined we’d need a couple of barn cats. In the end, we went looking for two and came home with three. Their names, from left to right, are Quintus Maximus (or just Max), Iorek Byrnison (from The Golden Compass), and Tommy (or Tom-tom, or Thomas). Hours and hours of fun.
7-26-2012: I got back to work on the henhouse. I cut and leveled the base plates, then started cutting the one inch hardware cloth for the floor. This process was interrupted by rain a couple of times, but in the end I got all the pieces cut, and the two end pieces fastened to the 10 foot base plates. Then came the hard work.
Bending 16 gauge wire to lace these panels together was difficult. I did some of that, but mostly I cut short pieces of wire and made “twisties” every three of four inches. Hopefully these and the one inch overlap between sheets will stop any critters getting through to eat our birds. There’s a foot of extra mesh on each long side, which I’m going to fold upward and nail to the joists. I’ll add a couple more of these extensions on the front and back, to discourage animals trying to get in at the base of the walls.
Tomorrow, I’ll finish setting out the floor and fastening the baseplates. Then I’ll be able to start framing the sidewalls, and the thing will start to look like a structure!
7-27-2012: We now have two indoor cats and three barn kittens. Next week we’re getting two puppies, and in the late fall a third. We had good luck feeding our dog in New Hampshire a raw diet, so we thought we might try that here. In Keene, we were able to buy frozen blocks of ground raw chicken from the small meat market up the road. Here, no one is really doing that. So we decided to do it ourselves.
A little back-of-an-envelope math suggests that three big working dogs are going to eat 18-20 thirty-three pound bags of chow a year. Five cats are likewise going to eat about 20 twenty pound bags of cat food. If we used a decent supermarket brand like Iams, we’d be looking at about $1,500 in annual petfood costs. If we used a premium brand, it would be more. A lot more.
On the other hand, we could grind fresh meat for all the animals. This meat could come from a variety of sources, at a variety of costs. Some of it could come from the farm or from fishing, and would be very very cheap. But let’s look at the worst case scenario, and assume we went to the supermarket and bought people food, and ground it up for the animals. How would that compare?
We started out today with four whole chickens at 95 cents per pound. I dismembered them a little bit (note to self: sharp knives are more efficient and safer!), and then Steph fed them through the grinder for a coarse grind. The machine gobbled up skin, organs, meat, and bones, as fast as we could stuff chicken into the top. Then we changed to the fine extruder, and I fed the rough mix through again. This not only ground the chicken finer, but also mixed the meat, organs, bones and marrow into a nice uniform paste that looked just like the chicken-burger you get at the store. Most of that went into forms Steph placed in the freezer so we’ll have bags of serving-sized chicken for several weeks, from about an hour’s work this morning.
If the animals eat between three and four pounds of raw meat daily, we’ll save from $100 to $500 in the first year. That will pay for the grinder. And chances are, our animals will be healthier and fitter as a result. We’d save even more, of course, if we added fillers like rice to the mix. But let’s be real, fillers are one of the reasons commercial pet foods lead to obese pets.
The kittens inhaled it.
Of course, it’s having a large number of animals to feed that makes this economical. We wouldn’t be able to do it this efficiently with just one dog or two cats. But it would still be healthier for single pets to eat a raw diet. Something to think about.
Later in the day, I worked on the henhouse some more. I set the base plates, cut the posts so they were all level at the top, and framed the sidewalls. Then I threw some of the dirt I had previously removed onto the floor, to protect the hardware cloth. I placed the studs so that I’ll be able to hang nesting boxes between them. I’m going to build the nesting boxes in stacks two across. So some of the gaps are two feet, and others are closer to three (for the Jersey Giant hens). It will all make sense later in the process. But it was fun cutting and hammering, and it’s nice that this structure is finally starting to look like something!
7-30-2012: My task today was trying to figure out how to get the roof built on the henhouse. Luckily there’s a rental place in town that has everything you could possibly need at reasonable rates. I shot down there and got the scaffolding I needed. Things went much smoother after that. It’s a heck of a lot easier to concentrate on doing the job when I’m not constantly thinking about falling. Like Clint says, you’ve gotta know your limitations.
I almost finished the roof joists. Will complete that and install the roof tomorrow before I have to bring back the scaffolding. That means another early trip for supplies, and I may as well get the wallboard at the same time I get the roofing material. I’m going to try translucent Suntuf panels. They come in 2 foot by 8 foot sheets, so I’m going to need the scaffolding to get them up on top. But with luck, I’ll have that all done by tomorrow evening, which is when I said I’d bring back the scaffolding. In the photo below, I’ve already taken down the second story of scaffolding, because I was running out of space inside the structure. Couldn’t add any more roof rafters with the scaffolding sticking up there!
Boy, it’s nice to have the right tools...
7-31-2012: In addition to cats, a farm needs dogs. Especially in coyote/wolf/bear country. We saw a black bear in our backyard a couple of evenings ago. A little one, but that suggests there may be a Momma bear around.
These puppies are half German Shepherd, half Great Dane. So they should be about the right size to scare off animals and protect the kids.
