Mid-September

Sunny, 74 degrees
We've been blessed with more nice weather. Very little rain, which is just fine. The leaves are just beginning to turn, some have begun to fall from the trees. When I sit next to the west living room window, I can hear the occassional thud of giant black walnuts hitting the ground. It sounds like far off gunshots.
The other night, we were in the house after dark watching tv (!), but I heard something outside. So we turned off the sound, and heard lots of gunfire. I quickly realized it was fireworks! So Karen and I walked to the top of our hill, leaned against the tractor, and had a great thrill watching the surprise show practically in our own back yard! We remembered that one of the local bars had a big shindig that night to commemorate September 11th, I guess. The fireworks themselves were fantastic. Cool!

Been working on cleaning up the barn and hanging gates. Got the gates on, just need to finish up with the rest of the enclosure for the corral area. As far as cleaning up the inside of the barn goes ('before' picture was posted last week), we've made some good progress there. Got most of the big 'stuff' moved out, several loads of straw taken out, and I managed to remove most of the stanchions. We are going to leave the mangers intact, to see if we can utilize them in feeding sows. Once sows are up to their full size/weight, they need to be monitored and fed individually according to whether they need more or less feed, to keep them in the best condition. But those mangers need some real cleaning out, they've had decades of neglect and crap thrown in them.

This morning after chores I got the pigs moved outside to the piggie palace. Getting them from point A to point B can be accomplished one of two ways: either put them in the trailer and drop them off at the new pen, or build a makeshift chute and run them out there. I opted for option A as more of a sure thing. We have had our fair share of piggies going right under/over/through what we thought was a pretty sturdy makeshift chute. It took me a couple hours to get the pen ready. Needed to go through and pull all the grass and weeds that had grown against the electric wire, put down fresh straw in the hoop house, rearrange and secure the tarp, go get the water barrel and fill it, get the trailer hitched, then set up gates from their pen to the trailer. THEN, get the piggies to get ON the trailer! This took quite a while, even after Karen came out to help with chocolate cake as an enticement. These pigs sure aren't as easy as Berks!

Got the hoop barn ordered this week, it should arrive in about 4 weeks! Woo hoo, it'll be just in time for the change in seasons! Also been getting lumber lists and quotes from neighbors, etc. on the foundation work. It's both exciting and scary. I'm nervous that of course there will be last minute changes or details that I haven't thoguht of, and it will hold up or even mess up the progress of getting the new barn up. Well, I tell myself that no matter what, having a new barn up, even if it isn't perfect in every way, will be a huge improvement over the facilities I am trying to work with now! So I'll just do what I can and hope for the best!