Day 102

I can only imagine what our farmer friends think or say to themselves when my text message goes through. I can imagine it is something like “What do they need now?” Sure, someday down the line we might have the knowledge, time,  and equipment to do some of these jobs ourselves. But for now, we don’t. Sometimes, it’s not what you have but who you know.

Our first winter, we didn’t really have much reason to go to the barn all too often. Because of this, we really didn't notice that water was making it’s way into the tall and freezing until the season was well underway. We knew we had to adjust this so our stored items didn't freeze this upcoming winter. However, we had more important things in the barn now and we were pretty sure we didn’t have the time or ability to teach our chickens how to swim. Getting grading done to the barn and surrounding area was crucial and moved up to the top of the prioritized projects list. This list seemed to grow by the day of not hour.

Luckily, when we met with the farmer friends to get their suggestions, they were happy to help and get us on their schedule. Though our initial conversation focused just on grading around the barn, it ended up following the pattern of other projects and turning into so much more.

We knew we would probably add gravel to the east side of the barn as this was the side of the barn taking in. Luckily, our birds were on the west side, but we didn't want to take the chance so we opted to make a gravel perimeter around the entire barn. 

Knowing there would be some large equipment here to add and lay out gravel, we thought this might be a great time to level and spread the new dirt piles we had formed from digging out the coops. There were also some extra dirt piles we couldn't access because of some initially hidden  metal and glass farm treasures. Now that they were out of the picture, we could take down those piles as well.

But we weren’t done yet.