Barn chores

Today I decided to clean the ram pen. Over the last few months the rams have broken a few bars out of the feeder. I didn't realize until a few days ago that they had been pulling most of the hay through the broken area, so there was a big build up of wasted hay.

Rusty moved the rams to the back and I had him keep an eye on them while I worked. (You can read Rusty's blog post about this.)

This shed that the rams have for shelter is an old concrete building that has barbed wire instead of rebar for reinforcement (there is a hole where you can see that). I have reinforced the end of this wall with wood and this is where the gate hangs. That is also where I throw the hay into the feeder and hadn't noticed how it had built up. I was filling up the wheelbarrow and then I noticed this:

This pen had flooded a month or so ago and all that old straw was wet. Look at all those mushrooms. I was glad that my friend, Jackie, was coming over in a little while because I knew that she would be excited about mushrooms.

Jackie has been doing some natural dyeing so we scooped up a lot of these mushrooms and she is going to experiment with them.

Jackie's daughter and her boyfriend are visiting from New York. While her daughter visited with the sheep, Jackie and Mark pitched in and helped me finish cleaning the ram pen. That's my kind of visitors!