Last Saturday, after the bull calves casually walked through our (somewhat) electrified netting for no apparent reason, Mommy and Daddy went on a date.
I record that here because we made a resolution at the beginning of the year that we were going to do one date per month, and so far so good! Of course, we were right down to the wire in April, but we got there. We went out to breakfast and had a good long talk. One of the things we talked about was how to get the calves eating grass as quickly as possible.
A solution we came up with was to install a gate across the far end of the laneway that we could use to close it off, so they would have a physical barrier to keep them in. They could roam around and eat grass and poop in there, and no one really cares if it gets over-grazed or torn up by the pigs because it is just a laneway, for driving on.
“So how wide is the laneway? How big of a gate do we need.”
“It is fourteen feet,” Ryan answers with all the confidence of the man who measured it, designed it, laid it all out, and built it with his bare hands.
As it turned out, it was not fourteen feet, but sixteen. We found this out when we brought the gate home and tried to install it.
“But hey,” says Kathleen. “How wide is that gap at the end of the pig pen? The one with the two 8-foot gates covering it?”
It was 14 foot. So another project was born. It was relatively quick to take out the old gates, replace the smaller lag pins with a 3/4 bolt pin, and then hang the new gate, but, as usual, it did not go quite smoothly.
For one thing, the drill ran out of battery half way into the first hole. And while I was running to the shop to get the spare off the charger…
The pigs decided to see how it tasted. Yes. That is a mixture of dirt, pig saliva and chewed up straw. Delicious.
After that it only took a few minutes to get the gate hung, but as I was pounding the staple to attach the latch chain…
Baby Girl woke up from her nap. She was not feeling good (she was second in line for this round of snotty noses and goopy eyes) and felt like she needed to be up on Daddy.
So the rest of this project will have to wait.
Little Farm in the Big City 