Busy Weekend Down on the Farm

We did way too much farm stuff this weekend.

We’ve known that the chicken coop needed work before it could house the new lay­ing flock. We got car­ried away. Or rather the chicken coop got car­ried away. We moved it from behind the barn out to the house-side edge of the pas­ture. We’ll be able to build a big­ger yard there with­out hav­ing to make it wonky shaped to leave room for the trac­tor to get in and out of the barn.

It’s amaz­ing what you can do with 2x8s some chain and a rea­son­ably capa­ble tractor!

Here’s what it looked like:

And here’s how we made it work.

The 2x8s and cross pieces are screwed together to make a pair of skids and then chains are hung on the bucket of the trac­tor and it’s all lifted just a bit to get the front edges clear.

Then it’s a slow pull and a bit of tricky maneu­ver­ing at the end (we turned the coop 180 degrees) and the coop is now in it’s new place.

It also go a bit of new wall, a quar­ter sec­tion of new floor and a new pop-hole door. Oh, and some gut­ters! Now it needs paint — badly. The only draw back to the new spot is that it is vis­i­ble from the house. So chicken coop aes­thet­ics now matter!

That all hap­pened Sat­ur­day. Sun­day we sheared. It’s amaz­ingly fast for such hard work.

That’s Jim hold­ing Satchmo by the head and Jason Black try­ing not to get kicked. Satch hates hav­ing his feet touched!