I got it in my mind that I wanted an area for the main flock to be when I didn’t want them out in a pasture. Something connected to their barn, and something that I could see from the kitchen window. A safe place during the winter. Or when we had groups of people over, that sort of thing.
We had the one little paddock that Gideon hangs out in, but it’s much too small for the size of our flock now, including the pony.
So I got to thinking… why not build a little triangle shaped space that would connect the fence lines between the poultry barn coop run and Gideon’s paddock. It’s not like we’re using that area for anything and it’s a nice sized space for everyone to get a little elbow room and still have the barn for shelter. Great for the winter… when I don’t want them out in the middle yard gnawing down the sparse grass.
And I also wanted a nice hay feeder so that we could easily feed a nice sized flock.
Oh, and it had to be cheap. Because we’re in our starving time… (End of summer, waiting for holiday sale season… always a bit thin for us.)
So I began to scrounge around the homestead. I found 4 or 5 good posts! Yah… so I started to dig holes. I pretty much was on my own for this build, the girls were all busy with other things. They helped at a few crucial points because well, it’s much more fun to build with a buddy!
Oh, those posts were hard work. That area of the paddock near Gideon’s pad was all strewn with hard concrete and bits of old foundation! I had to dig several different holes because I would get down a foot and hit solid concrete!!! Agh! Those holes took me three hard days but I finally got them dug One area I had to dig five different holes to finally get one in the right place that I could get down about 18 inches to 24 inches. Remind me NEVER to put any more posts in that area! My goodness…
Cody Pony had helped us to drag over the last of the slab wood that our wonderful neighbors had given us. They had a bunch in their lovely old barn and we used it for two big projects… the front “salad bar” pasture fence at the front of the property and now, this, our big sheep paddock. That stuff is neat looking, very rustic and HEAVY!!! I like how it weathers and ages. Fun stuff.
I had to buy two heavy 4 x 4 posts because I could not find anything decent enough to be my gate posts. Those are most important in a fence build, if you ask me. But luckily, I got one 4 x 4 x 12 feet and had my lumber guy cut it for me in half! So it only cost me $8 for the big long post, which then made two! And I cemented in all the posts that I dug in. Used a half a bag each of redi-mix concrete. I want my posts to stay put!!! Thankfully, the concrete mix is really reasonably priced and I only needed 3 bags at $4 a bag. I was up to a whopping $20 investment so far!!
I am an avid Craigslist browser and have scored deal after deal on that thing. And this was NO exception! I found a local couple selling lovely rough sawn boards for a dollar a board! Ten feet long and four inches wide! And nice stuff. It’s not a hard wood but it’s good and solid. And then on top of it, they gave me a bunch of these 4 x 4’s in odd sizes… some 2 foot tall, some 3 or 4 foot… they get them in between their stacks of boards! I spent $40 bucks and got 40 boards! I ended up using half of them for my paddock build. The other half went to building two new raised beds for the garden!!! What a deal!
Jessy came out to take some pictures for me, so there you go, an action shot of me actually working! (haha) I am the best hammerer of our little gal bunch. The girls are getting better through experience for certain, but I’m still the pro. Nearly 50 years of hammering I guess gives you an edge on these whippersnappers.
Here’s the feeder that I designed! I scored these beautiful turned spindles at the Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in Defiance, Ohio! Only 50 cents a spindle!!! I got 18 of them. They are hardwood and super cool. I thought they would make a great area for in the paddock side that the sheep can nibble through and eat hay without making a big mess. And not getting stuck in there!
One evening we worked into the darkness because we were so excited to get it in place and try it out! The flash made it seem a little darker than it really was, but it was getting late in the evening for sure. I wanted it to tip forward a bit, in the paddock side, so that eventually even the little lambs can get in there and eat with everyone.
Of course, as you can see in this picture, it’s tipping the wrong way!
That’s because after we got it all built, it didn’t want to fit just right! Aaahhhhh! It was just a wee bit longer than it should have been. It’s okay, we just had to move Gideon and get into his paddock to push and shove and ease and curse and maneuver the thing into it’s final spot. And we just were not ready to do it that evening. We did get it right in the morning! I think that somewhere along the line, I accidently added the thickness of the boards into the mix and didn’t take that into my planning! Still, an inch is not too much and we managed to get it right, eventually!
And here is Fergus, showing us that the very last rung and post is just a little toooo far apart as he gets his head in there. Silly sheep! He’s a little runt boy, so that showed me that I need to put a blocking board there at the end, because we don’t want a little horned boy to get stuck and hurt himself. I have SO learned that once you build something on the farm, you really need to watch how the livestock interact with the thing for a day or two and make a few adjustments. Unless you’ve been raised around animals your whole life and seen all the various ways that they can get stuck, wedged or wreck something in a heartbeat, you always have to make a few adjustments to fit your beasts!!!
Kitty Duke approves of the cat perch we built for him. Just for him. To watch the livestock.
Here’s another design flaw that I fixed in the morning. I wanted the feeder to be accessible from both sides. So, that when the flock was loose in the middle yard, they could always go over and nosh on some lovely hay when they wanted. And as Noel is demonstrating here, the gap was too big and they were yanking out big messy mouthfuls. Hay all over is hay wasted as soon as they start walking all over it. Cody is pretty good about eating hay off the ground, but then, it’s not good for equines to eat off the ground as they can pick up a lot of sand and grit which can lead to colic. So…. I added an extra board between the two lower boards and solved that problem! They can still pull some from over that middle board, but it’s not nearly as messy as the first test run!
Dukie is very happy…. he spends a good deal of his day sitting on the feeder, surveying his kingdom!
The next day I got to work on my lovely sturdy gate. After building a few others, I knew I wanted it to be super tough and sturdy. So, I used not just three cross pieces, but three on the back side as well! You can’t tell from here, but this is one sturdy and heavy gate. I cut a couple boards into 4 food sections to serve as uprights. And everything was nailed together and then each section got a screw as well as final testimony to a very long lasting gate. And the best part? It only cost $10 using 10 boards from my dollar board stash!! And I had two nice hinges that I had scrouged from our farm stash of stuff we found here and there. I love that! The feeder ate up another 10 boards… and I utilized a lot of the free 4 x 4s as the uprights!!
Of course, the raw wood sort of stands out, but as soon as I can, I’m going to paint the feeder and the gate. However, with the weather as it is, it might have to wait until spring! I hope not, there might be a tolerable day in the next while that the temperatures will be conducive to paint drying… I want to paint it a dark purple or kind of a dark lavender color. Since we used this cool sort of hip green around the concrete walls of the sheep and poultry barn, I thought a nice dark lavender would be really a neat contrast and a change from the standard farm red kind of thing. We’ll see how that turns out! I want to paint their barn door the same color!
What a lovely fall we had. We managed to keep up on the raking, which we did all by hand this year!!! I can’t wait to get one of those leaf sweeper thingys off Craigslist or maybe at a garage sale or something because with three acres and LOTS OF TREES…. my aching arms and back would love something like that, something that maybe Cody Pony could pull around the estate! Wouldn’t that be fun for next year!
Over all, we just kept at it. As you can see, the new sheep paddock fits nicely into the fence line. It actually helps to sort of define the area and make it look nice and well, thought out.
Here’s another shot with Cody hanging out and napping. I put them all in for a day to watch and see how they liked it. And to be honest, I think they did. The ewes like to naturally lay under those trees and chew their cud in the afternoons and with the barn, they can dash in if it’s raining or nasty out. They can hang out with Gideon since there is a 16 foot section that they share. Molly and Fergus found a little section of the back pallet fence that they could squeeze out of and get into the weed patch pasture, but we fixed that right away. They are still the smallest of the sheepies…
I got a couple of these little wire fences for flower beds at the dollar store on clearance… 75% off! So for six sections I only paid $2. Pretty cool! So we stapled them to the inside of the slab wood fence, just to keep anyone from doing the ovine limbo under a few of the boards that were a bit higher off the ground because of the basket weave design of the fence. Mostly just Molly and Fergus… the twins are apparently related to Houdini in a past life.
Cody still likes to hang out and eat with Gideon, nibbling through the fence at his very simple feeder. I just took a piece of field fence and wired it to the paddock fence with a little give in it. I can shove a flake of hay in there and everyone has to work to get it out from the fence squares! It’s perfect because it slows them down a bit from just gobbling up the hay and minics natural grazing. And… best of all the horned boys can’t get stuck in it. There is nothing fun about coming and finding your ram bloody and missing a horn, or worse, dead… from getting caught in something over the night. Thank goodness, we have had nothing like that happen. And I don’t ever want to, either! I really watch what I build around them because they are very good at getting their horns hooked on things. I came out one day to see Fergus walking around with a bucket on his head!!! He had gotten it off a lawn chair, where I had forgotten it, and in search of treats, had managed to get himself hooked! I wish I had my camera at the time because it was rather silly to see him bleating and walking around with his bucket helmet, bumping into things. But I’m pretty sure, he’s happy there was no evidence of his silly situation. Of course, it always reminded me that livestock can and WILL get into the dumbest situations if you are not diligent to watch out. We try hard to remember not to leave buckets around where the animals have access!
All in all, I’m super happy at how the paddock and hay feeder came about! I spent less than $70 on the whole thing and I hope it lasts for year and years! It should! Once I get a coat of paint on the raw wood build and maybe a little sealer on the slab wood, it should last us a good long time. And I love how it provides a nice safe and convenient place to keep everyone corralled. We have used it several times now, when the weather was bad and we wanted them close together. With hurricane Sandy’s high winds and sleet, it was sure nice to be able to look out the window through the afternoon and evening and make sure everyone was safe and just milling about, eating hay and safe.
And just in time! Our wonderful friends Terry and Bob had some hay left after selling a couple goats and we bought it… they brought it over in their trailer. Just 11 bales, but around here, that’s like gold! It will keep us for probably a good month. I know I still need to get about 40 or 50 more bales, but it’s just expensive still after the drought and awful hay season. So with our lovely feeder, we can manage their hay and keep it from getting all wasted and stamped about. These bales are good and heavy, so a flake will take care of most everyone for a day since they are still grazing our various pastures as well. We’ve had a couple good frosts so I know the grass is loosing it’s nutritional value, but still, they like to nibble and graze all over the place. Since we’re trying to get all the gals bred, I want to make sure they stay in tip top form. Cody and the boys are doing fine as well, actually a bit on the rotund side! They can stand to loose a little bit of that fat summer weight without too much problems. I would rather my beasts go into the cold of winter with a little extra chub because it helps to keep them warm and healthy. They will burn most of it off before the spring when the grazing is really non-existent. I’m also planing on supplementing with alfalfa cubes… A few of those hard crunchy cubes of dense hay will keep a ewe busy for a good long time! It’s like chewing salt water taffy… it takes a good amount of jawin’ to get it all chewed up good! Anything to help spread out the winter hay cost because I’m afraid that come January there is going to be a super high price rise in baled hay. Everyone I know is having trouble filling their barns with winter feed! I’m a little worried about it, and will be doing all I can to get as much stashed. I can get bales from our local feed store at a reasonable $6 a bale, but still, he told me yesterday that he doesn’t have a whole lot left. About 400 bales. I’ve got a lead on a couple others with bales about that much, and will be working hard in the next month to get at least 40 more bales put up. That should get us through to the spring.
Well, hope you enjoyed this big old project! Took us about a week to build and finish. I think we’re getting fairly good at our hillbilly engineering! It’s fun too, to try and reuse and repurpose things around the farm into useful projects! I’ve got another fun build to share with you all… coming up soon!!!
Pin It