It Must Be Winter: The Waters Frozen

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Just had our first foray into the -20c's.  Of course the new water Hydrant we installed in the refurbished barn froze up this morning.  Apparently everyone on the planet but me knew that leaving a hose on a hydrant will cause it to freeze up. Ah well, off to town in a snowstorm to get some heating cable then I will disassemble the thing and give it the hot water treatment.  I am pretty sure it's not a drainage problem because we took great pains to make a 10 foot long drainage path.  Well we'll see.  That kind of problem disappears in Spring - and that's only six months away!


The Pups and Hurley seem to really like the snow.  We just gave Xena heck for climbing on the wood pile and when we turned around here's Hurley and the Pups:

Haven't been doing any blogging lately.  A dry spell.  We've been busier than a couple of cats trying to burry scat on a marble table top. Getting the New Barn operational and the winter wood project consumed quite a bit of time.  But mostly it's that I've just felt like I didn't have too much to say or post.

We store six 1100 pound bags of feed in a stall in the barn and to get them in we had to install a bigger door.

 We off load them onto pallets, use a skidsteer to get the pallets to the barn and then shuffle them around with a pallet lifter.

We made four stalls with four foot gates on them.  They are made out of salvaged "D" logs from a log home. Sturdy and hard to beat the price.

We've got three pigs ready to go to market. I want to process these ones myself.  Including the hams.  Well, ones for us and the others are for a couple of friends. We're wintering Five sows and a Boar, with a little weiner purebred Berkshire who we may keep as a boar.  Time will tell.

I have heard some great things about the Berkies.  He's seperate from the others for a while.  He needs to be a bit bigger to hold his own.

Don't know if you can make out the guillotine door at the right.  a rope and pulley means we don't have to go in the pen to let the boys and girls out..Of course the biggest oinker we have around here got to make the inaugural entrance! 

We also have a Belgian Blue beef hanging in the cooler.  I was practicing with a vacuum pack machine.

 We were going to cut the beef up tomorrow, but first things first being getting the water flowing.  Carrying five gallon buckets of water a hundred yards loses it's fascination really quickly.  The pigs are going through 30 gallons of water  a day.
"Ha, Ha, he's so new he doesn't know he's not supposed to pee in the water"

Ah sometimes at the end of the day it's just nice to snuggle up with a friend and a cup of tea!

Hope you got yours!

Comments

Donna OShaughnessy said…
HEY!! You're back! Good to see all is well (if not busy) up north. All those white dogs in all that white snow is like Christmas 24/7. Keep up the great blogging. Your fans need you guys.
6:59 PM
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