Monday, October 02, 2006

A busy weekend for farm work.

We moved the laying hens first thing Saturday morning.

Chickens in thier new location

Then we went off to Lake City to buy a new breeding ram.

Our friends Lewis and Janice had several rams they were willing to sell.

We picked out a nice Katahdin ram about a year and a half old.

The new Katahdin ram (click on photo to enlarge)

Katahdin is a hair sheep breed (no wool therefore no shearing required) that does fairly well in our climate.

Sunday we did a bunch of fencing work replacing some two-strand electric twine paddock fences with three-strand 14-gage aluminum wire.

These fences needed to be upgraded because some of the twine was failing from UV exposure, and because we now know that this is where we want the fence to be for quite a while into the future.

We were not sure where the best place was when we put in the twine fencing. Twine can be moved, wire cannot.

Some of the new three strand fence

In the evening we penned up the cattle in the barn. The Vet is coming today to vaccinate the calf and to de-horn its mama. The mama is a fairly tame beast, but I don’t need to get gored even by accident.

2 comments:

Madcap said...

I love reading your "chicken" posts, Jim, and seeing how you set up your operation. Chickens are the first farm animals we're going to set up with when we get onto our little farm next spring.

Unknown said...

Hi Laura,

The hoop house is 8 ft x 8 ft. It holds about 30 birds, could probably hold up to 50.

There are no nesting boxes in the hoop house, just roost poles.

The nesting boxes are all in the small square chicken tractor in the foreground of the photo.

The chickens use this housing all year around, but this is Florida so it just does not get very cold.