The mist hung around all day again today. We don’t seem to have seen the sun for several days and nor the sky for the last two either. Even when it is not raining, there is a steady drip, drip, drip from the roofs and trees and bushes and the ground is just saturated. BUT, we move ever forward with all our ideas and plans to beat the winter wet and today we managed to get the double goat field sheltered boarded along the front in order to create a much drier ‘under cover’ space for the animals. We have used dung walling so that it is in keeping with the original build and left four/five foot entranceways which could, at a later date, have gates fitted if we so choose. It was dark when we finished the boarding and we now need to straw it all out and top up the woodchip path so we will take a photo when all that’s done and it is completely finished.
Other plans now include getting gate mats from the bottom three acre (that we forgot we had) and using them in our muddy barn-to-four-acre gateway in order to make it just a little easier to get the trolley through. We are also re-strawing both field shelters in the four acre field using some old dog dirt trapper mats in one and a tarpaulin/stable mats in the other in an effort to stop too much wet seeping up from the ground.
We continue to keep an open mind about whether or not we need to bring the sheep and/or alpacas into a field shelter (or two). Although winter has officially only just begun, autumn is traditionally wetter then the winter so we may not actually get as much rain in January and February… well, it’s good to be positive (!!!).