With the temperature rising into the teens and twenties over the past few weeks we've been reminded of the next series of tough jobs: cleaning out the animal pens. I was surprised when the chook palace roosting area started smelling like ammonia. I didn't want to start water it down so it would compost, at the risk of increasing the humidity to dangerous levels for the chooks. Seasonal change is the perfect time for chooks to get sick. We will water everything in there once the threat of chill is over.
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| Aqua Duck and Sassy enjoying flooding middle field. |
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| Aqua in her element : ) |
The duck house is also starting to off-gas, and the giant manure pile beside the horse paddock needs to compost and be put on the fields before it starts to attract emerging flies. Not everything has thawed yet, so we can only pick away at things.
We made a good push at it this weekend!! The chook palace coop is shovelled out, and I put a fan in there for a few hours. I was happy the entire flock spent most of that time thoughtfully spreading all of that bedding over the spot where Glenn is planning on seeding oats and a bunch of early seasons plants. I'm still keen on planting buckwheat again, but he says that comes later in the season. Last year in late summer/early fall the buckwheat provided some shade for Mr. Flan and the flock, and they spent hours harvesting the buckwheat themselves.
Our big task for the day was taking four huge loads of manure up to L paddock and manually spreading it. That was a lot of work! It would have been so nice to have Oakley up there with us, dragging a nice little harrow. We'll have to see what the future holds!
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