Notes From Zone 4

We worked outside almost all day yesterday, finally finishing putting up the Clearspan Storage thingie that will we use to store hay. We bought this one except that we got the 3 foot rafter span to handle the snow load. It took much longer to put up than we expected, but Frank said the next one will be easy! Ha. It is so rare to do something twice on a farm, we’ve come to learn.

At least it is up. I took one last lonely ride in the truck to get one last load of hay, because Keith isn’t going to deliver a full load until Sunday, and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow and Saturday both. We were down to two bales, and that just wasn’t going to last. We are feeding about two and a half bales a day. Three, if I do both feeds by myself!

Speaking of feeding hay, I saw a message on the Shetland Breeders message board from someone who’d made hay feeders out of recycled plastic barrels. That’s such a good idea. Last year, we bought Grate Bale Box Feeders. Well, that’s not exactly true. We bought a kit, so no box and no roof, just plans and the heavy grate for the top. It never got installed or put together, because we didn’t know what to do for a roof.

Those plastic barrels cut in half? Brilliant. I want to do something so the roof can lift up, which will make putting the hay in easier. We have five pens of sheep right now with all the different breeding groups, and spreading out all that hay is wasting so much. Plus, I’d love to free-feed. I like happy, happy critters.

I tried a few places for free barrels, like craigslist and freecycle, without any luck. I called around and found that Agway sold recycled ones, that had formerly held juice concentrate. They were sort of expensive, $35 each, but still much cheaper than the kit we bought last year and never used.

It was 45 degrees outside today. Unbelievable. Where’s the snow, man? We worked outside in just shirtsleeves, which is unheard of for January.

We bought one of those temporary ‘tent” garage things from Farmtek to store hay in. This was pretty much an act of desperation because we weren’t here to do anything else. We finally got it assembled today and a hay drop is scheduled for Sunday.

In our particular circumstances I have to give it a mixed review. It’s a 14 by 28 tent basically. Including truck freight from Iowa it cost us right on $1000. It took two people (Lisa and I or Jeremy and I) about 20 hours to assemble. Experience could have saved a few hours of that, but not too many. The basic scheme is to assemble the pipe skeleton, secure all the joints with self drilling screws, and then wrap the tent cloth over it. It’s pretty straightforward but there are a couple of gotchas: first, you’re supposed to put together several of the subassemblies on a flat surface. Clearly they tested these directions in Iowa, not New England. If I had a flat surface that big it would the be concrete floor of a barn and I wouldn’t need the tent. Second, a noticeable fraction of those screws just won’t bite for some reason: you could sit there all afternoon with your drill (power screwdriver) spinning and nothing would happen. Fortunately they send extras and you can just discard the losers. Alternatively, a pilot hole works.

When you’ve finished, you have a really good kite: I’d estimate a 40 to 50 mile an hour gust will send the thing off to Oz. Farmtek recommends attaching it to big chunks of concrete set below the frost line, or failing that, they’ll sell you 6 auger type anchors which are also to be set below frost. Neither sounds very likely in Marlow. We build a wooden platform, strapped the tent to it and then piled on two tons of hay. So far all has been well.

All that done, it works fine: the hay is dry, and we can keep the trash can of sheep pellets out there too. So why the mixed review? For most people I’d say this is a good way to go: You get everything except a roll of ductape in the box, you couldn’t buy alternative materials for less, and as long as you don’t set those concrete blobs in the ground you can explain to the tax assessor that it’s just a tent and thus personal rather than real property.

We’re a special case however. We own a sawmill, a tractor, and we have hundreds of pine trees of all sizes cluttering our future pastures. We’d still need a few hundred dollars in materials. mostly metal roof panels and some hinges, but with 30+ person hours of labor committed to the tent, and $600 or so in avoidable expense, I’d say that next time we’ll just invest an extra Saturday and build it out of wood, on either skids or blocks. Wooden buildings only go to Oz in a real tornado, which are pretty darn rare around here, and the tax assessors from Nashua assess everything based on how well it would drop into an upscale development.