{"id":2908,"date":"2011-10-12T18:09:25","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T01:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=2908"},"modified":"2011-10-15T12:11:05","modified_gmt":"2011-10-15T19:11:05","slug":"renovations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/?p=2908","title":{"rendered":"Renovations."},"content":{"rendered":"

A rainy day is usually an excellent reason to avoid farm chores.\u00a0 But since my other choice was to clean the red mold growing in the bathroom, I rushed outside to the barn to find something to do.\u00a0 Luckily, I didn’t have to look very hard to find a list of things to do in the barn.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, I usually avoid barn To Do lists because their length is enough to drive you back in the house to the bathroom.\u00a0 Instead, I squint my eyes so that the minor problems are blurry enough to ignore and only the most glaring damage is visible.\u00a0 This is called “visualization<\/em>” and famous athletes use it enhance their sports performance.\u00a0 I think.\u00a0 Either that or Oprah created the term in order to live her Best Life.\u00a0 Since her life probably doesn’t include cleaning red mold out of bathrooms, it must be working for her.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

I decided to tackle the Feed Trough Situation.\u00a0 In an alarming display of betrayal and poor hygiene, the chickens have taken to roosting on the cattle panel in the feed room.\u00a0 The cattle panel to which the goats’ feed troughs are attached.\u00a0 Which results in this:<\/p>\n

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Gag!\u00a0 Poop all over, in, on, and, under the feed trough.\u00a0 It’s like a Gordon Ramsay Kitchen Nightmare.\u00a0 You know, where he goes into the food storage room of a restaurant and finds slimy vegetables, sprouted potatoes, and mayo kept at a temp over 42 degrees, and all of America is so appalled that someone has been serving food under those conditions.\u00a0 C’mon, restaurateur!\u00a0 If we wanted to eat that, we could have it at home for free!\u00a0 Although, I do believe my mayo is at the right temperature.\u00a0 But it does have bread crumbs (and maybe a little bit of tuna) in it.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

A dirty feed trough makes for goats who have to eat their feed off of the ground.\u00a0 Which is a problem because…well,…um…actually, I don’t know why it’s a problem since they’ve been doing it for a couple weeks now and seem just fine.\u00a0 The hard packed floor of the feed room is unlikely to contain worms, the goats get most of the grain up and the chickens get the crumbs so there’s no food wastage or spoilage, and spreading a few piles around the feed room keeps the pushing and fighting to a minimum.\u00a0 Maybe it hurts their necks.\u00a0 Also, since Tractor Supply tricked me into buying those feed troughs I should try and get my money’s worth. \u00a0 And, of course, it makes me want to puke when I accidentally see that mess out of the corner of my eye while I’m milking.\u00a0 That’s called “peripherilization.<\/em>”\u00a0 It’s the complex ability to keep one’s attention focused on an immediate task while simultaneously tracking a problematic issue with one’s side vision.\u00a0 Examples include children-fighting-in-the-back-seat-of-the-car-but-no-one-crying-yet and the-shocking-size-of-my-thighs-when-I-accidentally-see-them-reflected-in-a-store-window.\u00a0 Peripherilization can be coupled with “denialization<\/em>“–which is the nonsensical hope that the problem will go away on it’s own.\u00a0 But it is usually followed by “desperatemeasurilization<\/em>“– which is when one can’t take it anymore and is forced to do something drastic like pull the car over or start the cabbage soup diet.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the Feed Trough Situation was obviously much more serious than the red mold in the bathroom.\u00a0 I began with a thorough survey of the situation.\u00a0 Upon close examination, I decided this single roosting bar was not fit for the 30 hens trying to roost on it.<\/p>\n

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Well, duh, you’re thinking.\u00a0 But it was never really meant for that many hens.\u00a0 The chickens have a full size coop with four 8′ roosting bars to accommodate everyone.\u00a0 I only put up this roosting bar for the poor, picked on, less dominant girls that always ended up huddled on the barn floor because they weren’t allowed in the coop.\u00a0 However, some clique coop d’etat (Get it? Coop<\/em> d’etat?? Sometimes I kill myself!) occurred last spring and the Queen Bees ousted the Wannabees from the barn and took over the single roost.\u00a0 That seemed like an odd victory to me, but knowing the hens, it undoubtedly had something to do with the rooster.\u00a0 And no girl is at her best when under the sway of the cock<\/span> rooster.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

So I decided I would clean the feed troughs, provide expanded roosting areas for the chickens in more appropriate areas, and make it impossible for them to roost on the cattle panels anymore.\u00a0 Since I am not a man, this did not involve a trip to Lowe’s to spend $100, sawhorses, and 1,500 tools to be hauled out of the shed.\u00a0 I just went out and visualized what the Best Life for chickens would look like.\u00a0 Ha ha, just kidding.\u00a0 I actually looked around the barn and tried to figure out what I could use to fix the situation that was free, laying around the barn, and could be attached with the only tools I generally use for barn problems—scissors and baling twine.\u00a0 If that seems insufficient to you, then you obviously don’t have barn (and you’re probably male).\u00a0 Barns breed cast off supplies in the same manner that closets breed hangers.\u00a0 Leftover rolls of fencing and random lengths of 2X4’s gather in corners.\u00a0 Rusty hinges and broken gate latches pile on top of the nest boxes.\u00a0 And this case, a handy, dandy section of cattle panel leaned against the back wall.<\/p>\n

I remembered this section of cattle panel very well.\u00a0 I always use cattle panels to encircle my round bales of hay.\u00a0 It keeps the animals from pulling off long strips of hay and wasting it.\u00a0 It also keeps the goats from climbing on top and defecating on the hay and then refusing to eat it because it’s nasty.\u00a0 But when our pony first encountered this odd means of feeding hay, she reached through the smaller holes in the panel and rubbed her face on the wire.\u00a0 After doing this for a while, she developed a few bare patches on her muzzle.\u00a0 On the day I noticed this phenomenon, I must have had 4 loads of laundry to fold because I didn’t just ignore it and figure that when she got uncomfortable enough she’d switch to pulling hay through the larger holes.\u00a0 Instead, in a tizzy of animal welfare concern,\u00a0 I cut apart the panels surrounding the hay roll, got out the bolt cutters, used them to enlarge some of the holes, carefully wrapped the sharp ends of the wire with electrical tape, and then reattached the panels around the hay roll.<\/p>\n

Which resulted in her face healing up nicely.\u00a0 It also resulted in the pony pulling huge swathes of hay out of the hole, and trampling them into inedible piles on the barn floor.\u00a0 The goats climbed through the hole and resumed defecating on the top of the roll.\u00a0 Even the dastardly chickens, assuming the larger openings were meant as a doorway for them (the chickens think everything is meant for them) began climbing in and laying eggs in the hay roll.\u00a0 So I promptly removed the panels with enlarged holes and the pony learned, in a couple weeks, not to try and reach through the small holes.\u00a0 I have heard physicists say that energy is never lost.\u00a0 But if that’s true, where did all the energy I uselessly expended on that little project go to?\u00a0 Can I have it back?<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

For today’s energy experiment, I stood the cattle panel straight up so that it reached the ceiling of the barn.\u00a0 I placed it parallel to a section of chicken wire that separates the feeding room from the rest of the barn.\u00a0 I then began to gather all the items I could use as roost bars to be supported by the squares of cattle panel on one side and the squares of chicken wire on the other.\u00a0 The back of the kidding barn held a lovely supply of old tool handles from worn out brooms and broken garden tools.\u00a0 When I ran out of those, I raided the kids’ teepee in the woods.\u00a0 At first I felt a little bad about that.\u00a0 After all, they spent several days constructing that thing over the spring and summer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then I figured it made a good lesson in perseverance.\u00a0 How many times do you think the Cherokee Indians went to hunt and gather,\u00a0 leaving their teepees safe and sound, and returned to find the Creek Indians had stolen some of their best poles?\u00a0 You know, a kind of Indian practical joke.\u00a0 Or test of character.\u00a0 Or…something.\u00a0 Probably happened all the time.\u00a0 Besides, the kids will never notice if they’re a few poles short. But just in case they did, I sprinkled in a few small branches and leaves over the livestock guardian dog’s coat.\u00a0 That guy’ll steal anything, chew it, and then bury it in the fill dirt behind the dam.\u00a0 And that, my friends, is a good lesson in cover your a..ctions.<\/p>\n

Of course, he’s not the only animal known for hijinks around here.\u00a0 By the time, I returned with the poles to my work-in-progress, my scissors were missing.\u00a0 I knew I had left them sitting squarely on the stump in the corner of the barn.\u00a0 And they weren’t on the ground next to the stump where they might have fallen on accident.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Eventually after much searching and a lot of fruitless questioning of the menagerie, I spotted the blue handle of the scissors out of the corner of my eye.\u00a0 Thank goodness for my peripherilization skills.\u00a0 See it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yep.\u00a0 There’s the scissors.\u00a0 Inside the cattle panels.\u00a0 Inside the cattle panels and deeply imbedded in the hay.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Julia and Josie had no comment on this matter.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I thought I heard Carmen mutter something about a test of character.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But I didn’t have too much time to ponder over it, because I had to chase the chickens off the roosts I already made.\u00a0 Pooping in the feed trough is one thing.\u00a0 Pooping on my head while I’m working is another thing entirely.<\/p>\n

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In no time at all, the new roosts were installed.<\/p>\n

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The food trough was clean.<\/p>\n

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Plus, the goats got an old sheet hanging over the cattle panel where the troughs were attached.<\/p>\n

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Which is a not a statement in shabby chic decorating.\u00a0 Sheets are wonderful in keeping chickens from roosting on the edges of things.\u00a0 Most of them won’t fly into the sheet in order to get up on the fencing.\u00a0 The ones brave enough to do that aren’t comfortable with the sheet touching their face or their bottom, so they eventually hop down.\u00a0 I don’t plan on keeping it there forever.\u00a0 But it should work to redirect them to the new roosts.<\/p>\n

While I was on a roll, I hung a few roosts in the corner of the back kidding pen.\u00a0 The guineas already sit on the edges of the pallets at night but the roosts are really better for their feet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To top things off, I tracked down this chick peeping hysterically in the pasture pen.\u00a0 He must have gotten separated from his mother (who had no business hatching chicks in September anyway) and couldn’t find his way back to the barn.<\/p>\n

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After all that was done, it was time to head in to meet the school bus.\u00a0 By which I mean have a cup of coffee and read a bit of my latest Mother Earth magazine before the kids arrive at the door.\u00a0 I don’t actually meet<\/em> the school bus.\u00a0 Last time I checked my kids had legs and knew how to get from the bottom of the driveway to the door without getting lost.\u00a0 Besides, I got the roosts hung, the troughs cleaned, and the sheet up.\u00a0 That’s what I consider a good way to avoid cleaning the bathroom<\/span> day’s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A rainy day is usually an excellent reason to avoid farm chores.\u00a0 But since my other choice was to clean the red mold growing in the bathroom, I rushed outside to the barn to find something to do.\u00a0 Luckily, I didn’t have to look very hard to find a list of things to do in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,111],"class_list":["post-2908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-chickens","tag-roosts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2908"}],"version-history":[{"count":42,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3011,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908\/revisions\/3011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ruffledfeathersandspilledmilk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}