Chicken Moat

My husband stumbled across this wonderful idea a couple of months ago now, a chicken moat.

We're going to build a fence around our vegetable garden and then put a second layer of fencing around that for the chickens to run around in. We will also attach our chicken coop to their fence so they have shelter. This will keep the deer, rabbits, and a lot of the bugs out of our garden! It will also keep the weeds downs, because the chickens eat the weeds too! We will basically be starting a new flock of hens in the springtime, so in the spring of 2015 we should have lots of eggs to go around!

We've been working on getting our corner posts in and now the corners are done!

We also pulled one of our big gates from the back of the house and repainted it to use for this project.

Time to get the T-posts and the actual fencing to keep going with this project. More updates to come!

Wood Chopping

A couple of weeks ago our wonderful neighbors down the road saw us outside chopping wood with an ax. They stopped by and offered to let us borrow their 20 ton gas powered chopper. We have a small chopper, its an 8 ton electric, and we were trying to make some really big pieces easier to handle with the ax. We borrowed theirs and spent that whole weekend powering through all the wood we needed to get chopped up.

Here is before:

Both sides of our carport looked like this. The logs were very large! We would have had one heck of a time getting these chopped up.

Here is our after shot!

It was a lot of hard work, but it felt so good to have gotten it all finished. We also had cut down a few trees on the other side of the house, and we got that all chopped up for the most part.

Now we have lots of wood for this winter! I have a feeling its going to be a very cold and snowy one. We've already started lighting fires in the house to keep it warm and toasty for these indoor piggies of ours.

Solar Panels Round 2

Well, we have been working on all kinds of things around the house. I will post updates on all of these different projects in the next couple of weeks. Alex has been rebuilding the engine of a 1986 VW Jetta. We have been working on moving the animals around and getting them ready for winter. Our biggest chores have been cutting down trees and chopping wood. Anyway, it has felt like we've been working on all kinds of little things, and I couldn't figure out what to post on, so we'll start with the second round of solar panels.

We got these up in September, thanks to help from our friends Craig and Nathan. We used the same company for our solar kit, Anapode Solar. They have been great! We highly recommend them to anyone looking to do solar. Now we are in limbo with Ameren on our second rebate. They changed the rebate paperwork for additional solar panels, so we've got that all figured out and sent in now.

Round 2

The whole roof

The day before Craig and Nathan came down to help get the panels on the roof we cut down 2 of the 3 trees that were right in front of them. We cut the big one down later that week. We were cutting down and cutting up trees for a good three weeks. We then proceeded to start trying to top off the trees in the back of the house. All so we can get as much sunlight as possible on our solar panels.

It has all worked out great though. We put these panels up on September 15. Our electric bill for October was $7.16! Of course the weather has been great. So there has been no need for air conditioning or heating. Our house is all electric though, and its awesome that our bill almost nothing!