Since we decided to stay on a farm for a year, my mom has
been generating ideas like some kind of creative rollercoaster; all of us has
been engaged in the planning of having numerous animals, and, armed with our
very formal Project Management Plans, we have been working at it steadily
(thanks again to mom) during January.
Plans and drawings....
We’re planning to have chickens (my project), piglets
(Theuns’), and maybe even a horse or two (for Maarten, our family’s horse lover);
things have made good progress so far.
I’m going to have 10 chickens in total (in their coop a
short distance away from the house) and supply eggs to the farm’s grocery shop
(for their own workers) and our household. Theuns and Maarten are going to
handle batches of piglets, two at a time, one month apart (we buy them at six
weeks old, and sell them as pork when they are about 4-5 months old).
One Saturday morning we got some of the farm workers to help
put up a fence for Theuns’ piglets. We already have some cement pigsties a
short distance from the house, but wanted to make a camp for them too. Charles
(the supervisor) and company quickly wrote off our previous attempts at
planting poles and what not (it was very funny actually; he would shake the
pole we’d planted, pull it out of the ground, and remark how they’ll start with
planting poles). They put up an elephant proof fence in 2 hours (something that
would have taken us much longer), fixing my chicken coop’s one side as well.
Speculating.
Raising the fence.
The jaw smasher - a most useful and dangerous tool for putting up fences.
Standing and (hopefully) piglet proof!
