Annex progress & pastured chicks

Well gosh, time sure does fly by! Marty and I have been working on the annex to the shade house and the shade house itself is now covered in shade cloth and is keeping seedlings out of the frost and cold winds. We have native seedlings for planting around the farm, wattles mostly. There are tagasaste sprouting and cuttings from forage plants taking root. I intend on planting plenty of sunflowers for the poultry this season, too!

Last piece of tin for the roof!

Inspecting after a rain.

The potting bench was made last weekend from scrap and reclaimed ply-board. I painted it in a "subtle nightsky" colour, leftover from renovating the Old Miner's Cottage in Stawell. I honestly can't remember where we used that colour though!

We welded up a stand for an old laundry tub we got from a clearing sale years ago now, and it's ready for plumbing in. There's a trench cut beside the path ready for the water line, which hopefully I'll get done this week. Eventually the outside tin and roof will be painted, we tinted the paint "fairy wings" quarter, so it'll be a light pink colour!

There's still three doors to be made, a bit more shadecloth for the east side of the hoop house, and shelves to put up inside the annex, but it's all coming along. The chicken food is now stored all in one location in lockers to the south of the annex, so feeding and moving chickens is so much easier now.

The old aviary has been excellent for raising chicks. They have a little nest box where they sleep with the broody at night, and a new area to scratch up every day. I put dolomite lime down on the previous day's ground to help keep the flies away from the manure, which is also remineralising the ground as well as helping break down the old grasses.

We kept the chicks like this for just over 18 weeks, now that they're "point of lay" we popped the pullets in with the adult hens and the cockerel will soon become the best quality roast money just can't buy. :)

I really enjoyed raising the chicks like this, and will definitely do it again when one of the adult hens wants to become a mother again. The last broody happily stayed with the chicks for over 10 weeks, which is a testament to the system. Usually our hens will get sick of the chicks and smaller pen size in around 4 or 5 weeks.

So there's plenty to do, and we're working on the logistics of getting sheep so we can rotate them around the pasture as well. That won't be for a little while yet, but it's higher on the priority list now. We've measured the height of the dam wall, sized a couple of pump options and got a rough idea on what we need to get before we take the great leap forward into purchasing our first 4 legged livestock.