Last weekend, the auto-waterers for the chicken coops went in. K spent most of Sunday digging and cutting sections of hose, attaching taps and connectors and the float-valve controlled water dishes to each of our coops. We have two up-cycled 200 L plastic olive barrels as the water reservoirs, which should only need refilling every couple’ve weeks even in summer. It’s a pretty big item to tick off the to-do list, because making sure the poultry have access to fresh water all day every day through summer is a real pain when using the standard pet-shop waterers (max size: 10 L; max lifetime: 2 yrs of UV before they crack and leak). And the chickens are our only actual productive farm element so far, so it feels good to get them sorted out. Especially since they’ve started laying again.
This weekend the coops got sand to cover the incredibly awful muddy muck that the ‘deep litter’ had turned into with the rain, and corrugated iron roofing over half the run area so there’s some outside space which will be mostly dry in the rain and shaded in the summer. Neither of those things were on the list, but they should have been. The next actual list item is doors for the quail cages, and fully enclosing the chicken runs to make them fox proof (as opposed to merely fox resistant, which they are now).
On the water-related front, the next big thing (other than getting the last water tank in, and placing a 10,000 L fire tank near the gate) is setting up some auto-watering for the fruit trees. Another few olive barrels and some drip lines, ideally with auto-timers, would save us hours and hours of work every evening through the middle of summer. Last summer we watered the fruit trees by hand, with watering cans, every day.
The list is a little daunting, but it’s good to have the entire list of things to do up as well. It’s stuck on the pantry door, and every time we finish something, it gets crossed off the list. We brainstormed all the things we could think of that we need to do, and agreed that until next year no new items can be added to the list. So it will get smaller, and we won’t have the despair of trying to catch up with an ever-growing list. We started with 95 items on the list, and we’ve completed 9 so far (with another 3 or 4 which are almost completed, but not quite). There are quite a few items which are in progress, too. It seems slow, but – like watching trees grow – these things do take time. We’re getting there.