The old quarantine pen is now gone

After about a half a days effort, I have finally removed the old quarantine pen. I had forgotten that I had tied a couple of 8 metre lengths of steel pipe to the bottom of the wire to stop the goats escaping from under the fence … damn but that steel pipe is unwieldy. Now it is on the top of the lean-to, along with the fencing wire.

The sheep are very happy that the quarantine pen is gone, it gives them access to another patch of grass that was unattainable previously.

I must say, I’m a bit sore from all of that wire cutting. I had to use a pair of side cutters for most of the cutting, but the 20cm bolt cutters were used for the old heavy gauge fencing wire … that stuff is tough.

The only thing left to do is to move the temporary shelters from the field and it will be job done. The temporary shelters need a little bit of attention, some of the wood has completely rotten away and the plywood that I used to cover them with is not really suitable.

I will get some corrugated iron sheets and make up the roof to a more suitable standard and reline the base so that the hay doesn’t just escape through the holes in the bottom.

Anyway, that’s my work over for the weekend. Now I can sit back and relax.

Out with the old Quarantine Pen

Our old quarantine pen certainly took a lot of battering from Jimmy (our donkey). He used to lean hard against the long star posts and rub himself down.

Apart from Jimmy, the goats worked on the pen from the inside, pushing and climbing the wire until the whole thing looked very sad indeed.

The quarantine pen has been sitting in the field unused for some time, so I started to pull it down today. It is quite a painful job: cutting wire, unbending it, removing wire clips, rolling the chicken wire, removing the star posts … you get the idea. It seems that putting the pen together is so much easier than pulling it apart again.

I want to use the temporary shelters in the quarantine pen as movable shelters for the sheep to use (not that they particularly want shelters).

We still have a need for quarantining animals when they come onto our property. It’s so much better to quarantine an animal when it arrives so that you can observe the animal(s) and catch any illnesses or diseases before they get introduced to your flock. Sometimes it makes good sense to quarantine your animals for a couple of days if you have taken them off the property for something like an agricultural show. If you are moving new animals from another farm onto your property, then the animals should be quarantined for about a month. This gives the animal an opportunity to get introduced to a new feed regime slowly without competition as well as allowing any diseases to run to an observable stage so that you can catch them and treat them. If you can do this here, you are saving your whole flock from catching the disease as well as saving you the cost of treating your whole flock.

I’ll be making a new quarantine pen in much the same way that I built the sheep pen. The only real difference between the quarantine pen and the sheep pen is that the animals in quarantine will need to be kept there for up to a month rather than just a couple of hours (at most) in the sheep pen.

The quarantine pen needs to be large enough and strong enough to keep the animals in for that length of time. It also needs to provide the animals with shelter, food and water. Of course, if you keep goats, you also need to make sure that the animals are kept entertained.

My new quarantine pen needs to have at least 2 separate “cages” and each section, needs to be at least 3m x 3m. That really isn’t a lot of space for a goat, but it is suitable for quarantine and makes sure that, if you get in the pen with the animal, it isn’t too hard to catch them (for injections, etc.). I intend to make the quarantine for 4 animals, that is, 4 three by three meter pens. It is important to make sure that the animals in quarantine are able to see each other but are not able to physically interact.

It is also good to keep each of the pens separate from each other within the quarantine. To this end, a passage of 1m between the pens and between the pen and the rest of the property.

The above plan shows the overall approach to quarantine, an outer fence that keeps the quarantine pens away from the rest of the property, and space between each of the individual “cells” to keep the animals away from each other.

There is enough room around each of the perimeters of the pens so that the animals held in quarantine are able to see each other and communicate.

Ideally, there should also be a way of making sure that the path between the outer gate and the gates to the individual pens can be closed off. This can be achieved by putting up gates in the passages to stop animals from coming into physical contact with each other.

The entire area required for the new quarantine pen is 9m x 9m and will need quite a bit of material to build.

I’m not expecting any new animals on the property for a while yet … but show season is around the corner, so I’m going to need to come up with an interim solution.

Turns out, sheep like to eat pine trees

Well, the sheep have eaten all of the pine saplings that we planted in their paddock. They seem to be a little short-sighted about things like trees.

I found the pine trees destroyed and replaced two of them with some Grevillia. These were eaten too … so I’m going to have to fence them in. I think that I can get away with making a rickety guard around the trees using some star posts and old hardwood pallets.

I’ve seen other people make their trees animal proof by using four pallets and four star posts. First, set a star post into the ground where you want the first corner of the enclosure to go. Put the pallet over the star post so that the post is inside the gap between the top and bottom of the pallet.

Next, hammer the second star post in the other end of the pallet so that you end up with one pallet standing up on it’s open end.

The next two pallets are simply tied on to the fixed pallet. Don’t tie the pallets on too tight, because when you put the last pallet in, you will still need to move the two loose ends to match it.

Next, position your last pallet and drive the star post into the gap at both ends. Tie the loose pallets to the fixed pallet and tighten. It’s best to use wire to tie the pallets together as this tightens the pallets together as you twist the wire.

We also put in a windbreak of acacia in the bottom paddock. 10 young trees ready to push up and break that driving wind from the south. The acacia are fast growing, but short lived. They will probably die in about 7 years. We will need to also put in some other longer lived and slower growing trees so that they are out of the ground and ready to take over in about 7 years too.

Mushrooms in the Chicken Coop

We’ve had lots of rain lately, and a huge crop of these little mushrooms have come up in the chicken run.

They seem to have come up around the logs in the chicken run where there is straw. At first I thought that they may be a kind of straw mushroom, but they are the wrong shape.

I think that the fungus may be growing from the decay of the logs, rather than the straw, so … who knows? Some of the caps are bright green, some are black and others … in between. The stalks are long and thin. The heads of the mushrooms are about the size of grapes.

So, the gills are a kind of chocolate brown and there seems to be a reddish sap. The small mushroom next to the older mushroom is of a much lighter colour. The stalk appears to be hollow.

The length of the stalk on the larger mushroom is about 2 inches.

D’oh The Sheep ate the Pine Saplings

Well, who’d have thought that sheep would eat trees? OK so I’ve seen that trees in sheep paddocks tend to have no lower branches, but I thought that that was because sheep broke the branches to get under the trees for shade. I never would have believed that it was because they ate them.

Five holes in the ground with some potting mix mixed in and no little saplings left. Bummer.

Well, today we went out and bought a couple of Grevillia Grandiflora and I put them in grow tubes so that the sheep don’t have such an easy time of eating them. One by the boundary fence to add to the general wind break, and another by the sheep pen to provide the sheep with some shade when they are locked in the pen awaiting the shearer (the shearer sheers Gary and drenches our three sheep).

Hopefully, the sheep won’t try too hard to eat the new saplings.

The pine trees that we planted in the bottom paddock are all doing fine. One of them has lost it’s tip, so it’s likely to struggle a bit and probably throw out co-dominant stems.

Shade Trees

About a year ago, my darling wife and my two lovely daughters went for a walk in the pine forest along Seven Mile Beach in Tasmania. I wanted to collect sap from the pine trees to make a natural varnish (mixing the sap with gum turpentine), my lovely wife wanted to collect some pine cones for decorating some plant pots with, kind of like mulch only … different.

Well after about ten months, we had some pine seedlings growing in our plant pots and they started to grow nicely.

We decided that the pine trees would make good shade trees for the paddocks. The four of us went out and planted the lot of them in the bottom paddock and the middle paddock. We made a stand of trees in the bottom paddock and planted one of the pine trees next to the animal shelter that I built there.

Eight trees went into the bottom paddock, the remaining four trees went into the middle paddock. Now there are more trees for the animals to shelter under and to break the wind blowing up the valley.

The Birthday Herb and Veggie Patch

My lovely little daughter and I made my darling wife a veggie/herb patch for her birthday. We had a patch of weeds where there was an old and quite unattractive plant struggling in an ancient raised bed. So with a little elbow grease and a small measure of spadework, we made a nice little bed, about 1.25m by 2m.

We turned the soil, removed the weeds and left it fallow for a couple of weeks.

This weekend, we went and bought some plants to go into the bed. My lovely wife was the chief selector for the plants to go in, along with some oohing and aahing from small daughter and myself, we ended up with:

• Lemon verbena;
• Leeks;
• Mint;
• Fennel;
• Coriander;
• Rosemary; and
• Lavender.

Plus there is still a bit of space for more stuff to go (although not much). At this time of year, seedlings are much better than seeds otherwise they won’t get out of the ground for the Tasmanian frosts. This garden bed is fairly close to the house so it doesn’t suffer much from frost.

The leeks were planted in three and a bit rows. This is one of the things that I really like about vegetable gardens. A leek in the shops costs you about $3.00 whereas a punnet containing about 40 leeks costs you $4.00. Go the economics of that!

They don’t look like much yet, but in a couple of weeks they should be getting to a decent size. Yum leek soup, bacon and leek, leek fried in butter with garlic and rosemary … oh so many nice warm things to eat.

Coriander has become more and more difficult to get. The punnet of coriander will make us lots of coriander for putting in jars and fresh coriander for yummy Asian soups.

The mint has a habit of escaping and taking over the garden, I’ve planted the mint in a pot with about an inch of the pot proud of the ground to make it harder for the mint to make it’s bid for freedom.

The fennel bulbs will just carry on nicely growing fat and waiting to be pulled up and cooked. At the back of the bed is the lemon verbena on the left and the rosemary on the right. You can see the lavender hiding at the back behind the garden.

All nice things to eat and cook with (with the exception of the lavender). Here’s hoping that the dogs don’t sleep on this garden bed … we may have to put a small fence around it.