we got a mini

I cant recall if i mentioned that our goats had to be re homed.  it was a sad day when our female, Bella, went to live on a farm with a cousin of mine. We decided that it was best for her to be with "family" so we could still visit. i put family in parenthesis because while we are distantly related we are not close. turns out we haven't been allowed to visit her and it still breaks our hearts. short story with our male. once he didn't have a female he tried to mate with everything. i mean everything and if you know goats then you know the spraying and the smell was just too much.

 let me introduce y'all to Marron.

i will be posting more about Marron soon. plus, the pallet paddock and how we built it. 

till next time, keep it Green, clean, and classy. 

chicken coop on WHEELS

i have been meaning to post this one for a long time, over a year. we were tired of the chicken coop clean up and wanted a new design that would mean less cleaning time. around the same time my brother, works in construction and remodel, had a job with a tongue and grove demo. he asked if i wanted the wood...free lumber that's a big YES PLEASE!!!!

my brother is the greatest y'all. he delivered the lumber and stayed to help me build it.  we live in Texas where it is 100 degrees 90% of the time...i may be slightly exaggerating  but keeping the chickens cool and not warm was the main objective. so, that is why the walls are mostly just chicken wire and not solid. i wanted whatever breeze we had to be able to blow in. we do add a heat lamp for the few cold nights that we get. 

we ended up using sheet metal, for a roof, as the walls on the upper part to keep chickens safe from predators. even in a coop a  raccoon can reach in and hurt or kill one or several chickens. chickens like to perch up high so they are never on the lower beams. we put them in just as a step to the higher beams. 

the inside view. we only put in perching beams and no boxes. we have their boxes built somewhere else and its so great! if the boxes are part of the coop the eggs get so much poop on them, its way better this way

so the above picture is what the bottom looks like from the inside....dirty. this is real life, chickens poop like 24/7 haha. the coop is on wheels and every few days we roll it around and usually i spray the inside down before movoing it but i havent kept up with it due to a crzy cold front in texas. we got snow!!!! that never happens and it was before freezing for days. my husband even had to take a snow day at work haha. 

i do have pictures illustrating the build step by step so comment if yall want more pics or instructions. till next time.

Half Dozen chicken coop

So, this is the start of our newest chicken coop. We had a devastating loss of all of our chickens and ducks. Long story short, even with a fenced in yard a pack of wild dogs broke in and killed them. For a long time we didn't get more; we had our daughter and a million homestead projects plus we were sad. 

I got us more chickens so we were ready to get the coops built. My brother works in construction and remodel so he often has access to scrap wood. He was working on a tongue and groove ceiling and the clients were going to just throw this wood out!!! Obviously, he took it for me. Thanks Theo. 

Not only did he snag the wood for me but he built this coop too! He started with the side walls. 

The pictures kind of explain the process. This coop will house six chickens and the nesting boxes we have are for our backyard so my brother built in three boxes. Mr and I originally thought that each chicken needed it's own nesting box but they don't so this coop got three perfectly sized boxes and that'll be good enough. 

Till next time, y'all know the drill keep it green, clean, and classy

Shalimar and Z

Farmily Members

We got new chickens! And ducks! We had a wild neighborhood dog jump our fence and kill our chickens, so for awhile we were without any. Having a million projects and a baby kept us from getting more straight away, but we have more now!!!
I'll be posting a new chicken coop build, once we build a new chicken coop haha. Till then,
Shalimar and Z

New Farmily Member

This is our newest family member Chloe. She is a Californian rabbit and was a gift for babies from her great-grandpa

Wall Framing

Wall framing made easy. So we started with a slight sketch of what we wanted on graphing paper. the real design however came from an app on my iPad.
Useful tips / tools. get yourself a nail gun. other tools that will be needed are a square, a level, chalk line, and extremely helpful C clips.

Diy maternity shorts

Making these shorts were pretty simple. 

I marked a curved section on the shorts. Then, cut that out. Notice these shorts came with an elastic adjust strap at the waist.

I used a stretchy fabric scrap I had on hand and used the section I cut as a template  (yes, I realize they have paint on them. These are just around the homestead work shorts)

Sew the fabric in and wear. Easy 15 minute project.

Here's my man warrior man, Iolaus.

Hope you enjoyed. Green, clean, and classy.

Shalimar 

Iolaus gets buried :) in leaves

Isn't he just the cutest!?!

So, me and the Mr were cleaning up all the leaves and debris that we hadn't gotten around to yet and Iolaus was showing a lot of interest in the wheelbarrow... F.y.i wheelbarrow is not pronounced wheel barrel, it's a Texas thing I think. Anywho, he jumped right in with just one or two handfuls of leaves. Soon, there were enough leaves that he was slowly disappearing in the pile. He took it like a champ and Miss Bella got a little jealous but as you can see there wasn't room enough for two:)

This literally makes me love him even more, as if that were even possible.

He stayed there as we wheeled him around the yard, but eventually we had to kick his cute little rump out and get back to work. That's all for now but I'm really going to be trying much harder to get post up more frequently. Till next time y'all keep it green, clean, and classy.

Shalimar