February 1st - Week in Review

I felt like this week’s theme was mud, mud, and more mud. The temps have been fluctuating quite a bit, with snow one day and then warm temps the next, making for quite wet pastures. Sometimes it feels like instead of four seasons we just have two - dry or wet. 😊 I can’t complain too much though because I know our wet weather is nothing compared to what a lot of our friends in the PNW sanctuary community deal with. We are east of the Cascade mountains, and considered high desert, so we have a drier climate. My hat’s off to sanctuaries that deal with tons of rain, freezing temps, or loads of snow, on a regular basis. That’s no easy task for them!

​To combat some of the puddles building, I used the tractor to move some wood chips to the pastures. Being surrounded by so many trees means we occasionally have trees that need to come down because they are dead. When this happens we keep the wood chips to use for wet spots. It’s a nice temporary fix for wet ground, but we’ve been thinking about longer term solutions for in front of the feeders to combat the mud and/or wet hay that accumulates. We scrape the ground each week with the tractor, but that just makes it muddier at times. Some longer term options we are thinking about include putting down stall mats, or gravel, or creating a cement pad. Any of those seem like good options, so it may just come down to cost. 

In other news, it’s been so fun watching the cats run around the barn and entertain themselves. They are so happy! Sometimes it looks like the musical Cats is happening in the barn, with cats running to and fro (pretty sure I’ve never used that word in writing), and leaping and climbing. I may just need to bust out a karaoke version of “Memories” one of these nights. The Broadway musical version though, not the creepy movie version. 🙂

I got some gorgeous photos of the barn set against the night skies today. We spent several hours trimming hoofs and left the barn after the sun had set. I always think it is so peaceful walking back to the house on starry nights. Same goes for when the sun is setting. Always so peaceful. Unless there are coyotes howling. I’m only partially kidding on that though, because even with them howling it’s still quite beautiful. Some people are beach people, others are mountain people.  Me? I’ll take forests and trees any day. Mix that with farm animals and free ranging kids and I’m all set! 

On a less glamorous note, I posted a photo below of a snippet of how we clean the chicken coop. We chose to use sand after a few years of trial and error. We first used pine needles, then the deep litter method, before settling on sand. We find it keeps the coop smelling better and it’s easier to clean. Each week we do a deep clean of the coop, taking a scooper and essentially scooping up any pieces of chicken poop, wet sand, and feathers. We then put it into a sifter and sift it, letting the clean sand fall through to reuse. Like mining for gold if gold was chicken poop. We also take a big ol’ shovel and scoop out all the poop from under the nesting boxes twice a week, and then lay down agricultural lime because it deodorizes the coop, is an insect repellant, and is safe for the chickens. (Btw...if you chose to use lime in your coop, be sure it’s the agricultural type and not hydrated lime which is extremely dangerous for humans and animals.)

Be sure to check out next week’s blog post for updates on the art wall. I had to move it from the barn to our Art Shed (it was a little dusty in the barn and some goats were wanting to snack on the paper). I have to say we like it so much better in the Art Shed. We hold art and education classes for kids in that spot, and I’m so excited for visitors to see the display of all the great drawings of our animals that have been submitted so far! (If your child hasn’t submitted a drawing but would still like to contribute, click on the ART in the menu above for more info.) I’ll post some photos and include them in our blog post next week.

We hope you had a good week, and leave you with these words for thought:

“How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand.
Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.
Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul." ― Frances Hodgson Burnett