We pasture bred our two older Boer does in October, so we don’t have a tight date on when they’re due but it’s going to be soon. The girls are double-wide, their udders are filling out, and Jessie in particular has started to spend a lot of her time lying down, moaning softly. Good thing I got some time today (after the 4-H activities this morning) to finish up the kidding stalls and warming huts.
The girls were a bit nervous about the new digs, and squished into one stall together for a bit. They calmed down later.
As I wrote earlier, we made the stalls primarily out of recycled hard plastic pallets. However, I got preoccupied with other chores and projects once I got the walls up, so it wasn’t until this week I was able to get the doors completed. I made those doors out of new lumber, mostly because I wanted them to be relatively clean and nail free.
A better view of the door.
You might notice that the center “bar” is connected differently. My plan is, once the kids are older, to remove that center piece and add another one offset to the side to make a barrier for our creep feeder. The idea is to have an opening small enough for the kids to get through to free-feed on grain, but tight enough to keep the greedy adults out. The next trick is to design a feeder to put in the stall that the kids can get to, but the ducks and chickens can’t. That will be a trick.
One of the two warming huts
The warming huts are salvaged 55-gallon poly drums, cut at the 2/3 point. I cut a circular hole in the top for the warming lamps, then used sheet metal screws to mount the brooder lamp fixture. The huts are screwed into the stall divider (which is made of dimensional lumber) to keep the adults from knocking them over.
So now we wait…