Almost Ready…

Yesterday was a busy day, with a little bit longer hours at work than usual for Daddy, and 4H in the evening. This made the already short afternoon farming window even shorter, but we still managed to get things done.

A friend who is an electrician came by to evaluate the electrical panel for the possibility of running 220 out to the shop so we can run a stove out there. Turns out it is going to be prohibitively expensive so for now that is going to have to go on the…

back burner!

After that Mommy arrived with a few bags of layer feed for the hens. We have been planning to check out a wholesale distributer and see if we can save some money by buying non-pelleted grains in bulk, but we just weren’t able to get out there this week so we had to get some 50lb sacks of pellets from Tractor Supply, just to tide us over for a few weeks.

Ellie was supposed to take a picture of Mommy carrying the feed sacks, but she took a pair of videos, > 1 minute each with audio commentary instead. So you will just ahve to imagine it.

After Mommy went home to start supper with the rest of the kids, Ellie and Daddy stayed behind to feed the chickens, and as we always like to take any opportunity to make any possible forward progress on any of our projects… and also so the piglets have something to eat out of when they get here tomorrow… we set up the feed trough for them.

We are making ham soup for Lord’s Day tomorrow (actually, Mommy started cooking it today) so Ellie harvested some of the carrots from her garden for it.

This old bale feeder was left behind by the previous owners, clearly too tall for pigs, but that’s nothing a few minutes and a hacksaw can’t fix.

In addition to the 500 other pictures she took of this event (not an exaggeration) she was kind enough to take a selfie.

Two legs down, two to go.

Took about two minutes per pipe. Then…

Digging out a small divet for each new, shorter leg, and voila!

Ellie is checking to make sure it is sturdy enough.

It isn’t sturdy enough for a full grown pig, it needs to be wired to the fence, but it will do for the weanlings for now. We may actually have to put some blocks in front of it so the young pigs can get to it. Of course they will almost certainly climb into it to eat, but since pigs don’t poop where they eat that isn’t really a problem.

We’ll see how it works tomorrow!