Chicken experiment now in progress.

Wind damage over winter.  Door now falling off.

Yesterday Sarah and I finally repaired the chicken coop enclosure.  The wind had blown the posts over during the winter and the constant slamming of the people door had caused it to come off its hinges.  There are rocks about 12 inches down and I could not sink the posts very deep.  We attached a board to the coop building and outer wall then added a second board to stabilize both sides of the door.  It is pretty secure now.  I want to do a quarterly chicken report but the chicken tracker is acting all funky.  It wants the data from one month only to be the years values.  When you add the second month's data it changes the previous month to match.  Annmarie will have to give it some TLC (10 minutes of magic) to make it work correctly.  Once that is done I will get the abysmal 1st quarter report out. 

Fixed!  Support added to building.

I locked the chickens up last night.  Today we got a whopping 5 eggs, not that great for 17 adult hens and 7 teenagers trying to lay eggs.  I have hope and the experiment is going to go on for seven days.  My iron barrel trough I use to catch water runoff in the chicken yard has a hole in it!  It was a hand made trough from forever ago.  I will drag it out and toss it on the scrap pile.  I have the other half over by the wood shed so it will just get relocated. 

I finished the upper fence today.  Another 300 feet done (almost done, it needs stays but I don't have any yet, not till late May or June) and ready for animals.  Tonight, Monica and I went up on the hill and relocated the electrical fence straight up the hillside.  It opened up another 200% of pasture for the sheep.  On a plus note, all that fencing in the yard gave great respect of the white fence to the sheep.  I forgot to plug in the last two strands of fence and the sheep never even tried to push past it!  They just saw an evil biting white fence and stayed away.  This time I remembered to plug the electrical connections together.  This should buy me a couple more weeks.  I will start working on the next 300 feet of fence next week.  I need to dig out the weeds, remove the bottom three strands, straighten half the posts, build a rock crib then tighten the top four strands of wire.  Most of the woven fence is approximately the same height, so I am just going to set the top four strands at the newly completed neighboring height and hope the woven wire fits.  If needed I can add a single strand either above the woven or at the top of the fence to make up any difference.  I called a guy about buying a lot of the sheep, the price is only $1/lb live weight for lamb no matter the age (as long as it is under 1 year old it is still lamb).  So I renewed the craigslist ad.  I didn't change the price but next week I will lower the price on craigslist.  I plan on butchering a couple myslef this year.  I would like to do that in about 6 weeks.  The sheep need to fatten up.