Ready for Kidding – DIY Pens and Warming Huts

We pasture bred our two older Boer does in October, so we don’t have a tight date on when they’re due but it’s going to be soon.  The girls are double-wide, their udders are filling out, and Jessie in particular has started to spend a lot of her time lying down, moaning softly.  Good thing I got some time today (after the 4-H activities this morning) to finish up the kidding stalls and warming huts.

The girls were a bit nervous about the new digs, and squished into one stall together for a bit. They calmed down later.

As I wrote earlier, we made the stalls primarily out of recycled hard plastic pallets.  However, I got preoccupied with other chores and projects once I got the walls up, so it wasn’t until this week I was able to get the doors completed.  I made those doors out of new lumber, mostly because I wanted them to be relatively clean and nail free.

A better view of the door.

You might notice that the center “bar” is connected differently.  My plan is, once the kids are older, to remove that center piece and add another one offset to the side to make a barrier for our creep feeder.  The idea is to have an opening small enough for the kids to get through to free-feed on grain, but tight enough to keep the greedy adults out.  The next trick is to design a feeder to put in the stall that the kids can get to, but the ducks and chickens can’t.  That will be a trick.

One of the two warming huts

The warming huts are salvaged 55-gallon poly drums, cut at the 2/3 point.  I cut a circular hole in the top for the warming lamps, then used sheet metal screws to mount the brooder lamp fixture.  The huts are screwed into the stall divider (which is made of dimensional lumber) to keep the adults from knocking them over.

So now we wait…

Farmcycling Airplane Parts

Our church got a great idea to have a metal scrap drive to raise funds for the new kids’ classroom addition.  So, after we got home this afternoon, we sent the kids on a scavenger hunt to find what they could in the woods.  The church gets to build without going into debt, our woods get cleaned out, and our kids stay occupied while we get things done around the ranch… everybody wins!

A while later, they come back with the Radio Flyer filled, and empty it to start their scrap pile.

Some of this is pretty much normal stuff you might expect to find on an old farm… bolts… a can full of nails… a roll of scrap fence… an old car or tractor generator… some miscellaneous farm implement parts… even a cast iron manifold off a tractor.

But what’s that square piece of aluminum towards the upper right of the photo?

A cargo door off some kind of light aircraft.

Actually, it looks like it has a paint scheme similar to my buddy Jughead’s Cessna 170, and he does have a bit of a reputation for landing in a different location than his aircraft (the story is here – and it’s worth a read).  But I checked, and his airplane is safely in its hangar.

So now it’s a mystery.  I’m not quite sure how it got into our woods.  At first I thought it might’ve fallen from the sky (this happens from time to time – someone forgets to close the latch properly, it pops open inflight, and it gets ripped from the hinges and falls to earth, followed by the pilot’s lunch).  But then I noticed a few other pieces of aircraft aluminum in the pile.

Now I’m tempted to go look and see if the rest of the thing is out there.

[edit:  I was thinking last night… I may need to buy this from the kids and turn it into something on the farm – we are the “Flying T” after all]