I have a rule...take care of live animals before doing anything else. My husband feeds the poultry in the mornings and most of the time I check on them a few times during the day, I change water or clean or whatever I need to do. Strange things happen sometimes, like finding a chicken hanging upside down from a gate, or a turkey with the neck caught in the fence...or chickens with wounds I notice. I have two turkeys separated right now because they were getting picked on and I found them bloodied. I have two hens that have swollen areas on their feet one has Bumblefoot, but the other one doesn't have the scabby part...it is just swollen. I feed my special needs chickens and Doctor them if needed while my husband is feeding the other poultry most of the time. I have two chickens that are blind in one eye that I am keeping on my porch at the moment. So I basically hit the floor running a lot of the time. Today was no different.
We have had a lot of rain lately, I have hung tarps and plastic on coops trying to keep rain out it doesn't work when you get 5-1/2 inches of rain in two days and it gets worse when you get even more rain a few days after that and it is 1-3/4 inches and it all comes in about 15 minutes. That happened early this morning, my husband baled out tarps and reset t-posts and pounded them back in...but I will have to do something more, we are suppose to get even more rain the next couple of days. I went and raided the trees we cut down trying to clear some around the pond. I am going to try and tent the pens that I have roosters separated in...until I can get something else figured out, you never know I may end up having to go cut down a bunch of trees and make more coops out of the small trees...Lol, I wonder if I could make little log cabins for them? Hmmm, probably not before winter gets here.
Sitting on a hill has both advantages and disadvantages, our house is up high enough that it will probably never flood, but the chicken pens and coops are much lower although still fairly high on our land. I have never seen the areas flood that I put them on, but some of them are only about 50 feet from a small creek. Even when we had 8 inches of rain in a few days, the creek only left it's banks further down on our land and only as far out of them as about 20 feet. But, when we get a lot of rain very fast and hard water rushes down the hill pretty fast and will build up on the backside of whatever blocks it. Our house for one, all of the chicken coops too...but, being sandy soil the sand washes down and builds up on the uphill sides, even if I dig trenches to divert the water they end up collapsing and I may have to go out several times in extended periods of rain. I am no engineer, but whomever built this house should have built the foundation thicker and higher so that this washing effect might keep the water from the inside of the house better. They planted a lot of bushes on the uphill side also...so it will not be easy to correct the drainage issue or seal the base of the house better. Our house is a steel building sitting on a cement slab and I don't think the slab is very thick...if it is, you can't tell because it is pretty much even with the ground. I don't think that is a good thing. There is a silicone seal at the base of the metal panels, but the bushes are so close to the house I am not sure if I could reapply the silicone if it fails....we may have to remove all of the bushes over there and they are the full length of the house and about six feet tall.
I started this post several days ago, we have had more rain since I started writing...and I have been trying to figure out what I can do to get more housing built for a lot of chickens. I may just get a carport built and then enclose it. I have been trying not to make big purchases on my credit card, but it is the only way I could do it right now. I looked into building something similar and I think it may be the easier route to getting it done in time for winter. I figured up the cost for wood and metal to build something from scratch...it is almost $1000 for the size I need in wood and metal alone, not to mention what I might need for hardware, I construct things with screws...it is easier on me than banging a lot of nails into wood. Our compressor has been having issues, so we may have to get another one of those too. The one I bought several years ago was refurbished, we may need a larger capacity compressor, my husband tried using our current compressor to ratchet off nuts on our lawn tractor and truck and the pressure was not good enough to get them off...the valve would release the pressure before he could use it to get the job done. He finally got them off by timing it just right...but the last time I used it for the staple gun...the pressure gauge maxed out and the adjustment would just not work any more...every few minutes it would release the pressures do then it would come back on and fill it back up! That thing is loud too.
Anyway, I will be busy and may or may not write for awhile...unless it rains a lot. The time changed and it gets dark really early now so I have to do the night feeding around 3:30 or 4:00pm now. I had to catch all of the turkeys yesterday and get them into their house. We are due to get more rain tonight with a cold front that will give us daytime highs in the 50's for a few days. I need to do a lot of work before tonight.
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