Scavenger Run

We went to the place to pick up the pallets. They had a ton of them!! Most of them in good shape too. We got one that is 4 x 8 ft, will make a perfect floor for the new goat ghetto, we'll just trim one end off to make it about 6 ft. 4x8 ft is the max we can put in the mini van flat... they had a few other really nice skids that were larger, maybe 6 x 6 ft... and hardly any gap between the boards.

We're thinking it might be worth our while to go back there with a cube van and snag those ones as well. They might make a great floor for the Caprine Castle that will get built this summer! Cover them in rubber mats and we'd be set!

We ended up with 8 or 9 pallets total (that filled the van)... some are the smaller size... some are bigger, but we only got one of the 4x8 ft. There were many that were buried under the snow as well, we just picked off the top of the pile.

It was not the nicest night for doing it.. .with the rain...and slush... in this place's yard, snow was coming off their roof and they had slush puddles over the top of my blundstone boots! Twas pretty yucky.

I also had an idea today of where to move my goats when the thaw gets to be too much (likely this weekend). We're considering putting them under the tarped building where the van usually lives. We're not sure how it will work out exactly, but we might give it a try. It would give them quite a bit of shelter under there and we have enough fence panels that they would still get out in the sunshine on the driveway about 10 feet.

It would still leave me enough room to get in and out with the van and turn around... as the snow melts, I would have even more room!! Its fairly high there, has a nice stonedust base and shouldn't flood too badly.

We'd put the goat ghetto in so they'd have a cozy place to sleep, even with the tarp over top. We may have to run chicken wire or some other mesh between the top of the fence panels and the bottom of the tarp, to discourage them from leaping off their shelter and over the fence, but that's not a big deal.

I was looking around other parts of the yard and not coming up with any good place. The problem is, that I have to move them soon, so not much melting will have happened in the yard areas yet. So I was going to snow blow an area out and then set it up in that cleared area. Well the problem with that is as soon as I snow blow an area, that area is LOW.

I'm not joking when I say we still have 4 feet of snow in most of the yard areas. With the rain, its compressed and melted it a bit, but its still very high. Some areas have less but its still well over 2 feet deep. Plus now that's its wet, snow blowing will be a real *problem* to do... I would have to get our tractor guy in to do it for us, I don't think our little blower would clear it.

So we might try putting up the panels in there this weekend and see what issue we've over looked. At least the panels are easy to move around and put up, so when we make a mistake, its not a huge loss of time or effort. The whole things takes under 30 minutes to do.

I have 3 rubber mats that I bought last fall on sale that I've been just storing in the feed building... one will go in the goat ghetto building. I think another we will put under the gate panel to keep that from getting too churned up. The other I might put outside the door to the goat ghetto, as that's another place that gets a lot of action.

That's our current thoughts... we'll see how they work out in practice!
--L