Pallets, pallets everywhere

Well, what can we say?  Opportunity knocked again.  Now that we are adopting livestock, we need housing for them.  Housing generally involves wood of some sort which usually involves money.  We're short on that due to the whole house thing, so when my work decided to unload a large number of very large pallets, we said we'd take them.  Each pallet has 3 long 2x4's and some amount of 1x lumber, so its a substantial amount of free framing lumber.  After 4 trips with the trailer and some stacking, we now have 68 twelve foot or longer pallets at the farm.  If you're wondering what that looks like, here are some pictures:

Half the pallets

This is how the travelled from work to the farm

 

The other half the pallets

 

Sometime soon we'll start building the chicken tractor for the 8 laying hens and rooster.  It is based on the plan shown here:  http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/a-classy-a-frame-tractor  although we're making some modifications.  With a little luck (and some warmer weather) we'll start disassembling pallets to get the framing lumber for it in the next week or so.  Then we'll get to start on the buck's house.  The sheep, fortunately, is small enough to live in a dog house we picked up last year for the other goats, so no construction required there.

In other news, we're starting seeds again!  We hadn't planned to have much of a garden this year, but we changed our mind (nothing like a severe winter to make you dream of a garden).  I started sorting through our seeds tonight to figure out what we already have.  Tomatoes, peppers and herbs will be getting planted soon.  Does this not just look like a winter gardener's paradise?

Seeds everywhere!

Unfortunately, the bucket of soil to start the seeds in is still frozen, so seeds won't actually get started until tomorrow.  :(   That's ok - it was enough fun to sort through all the seeds tonight!  There's one happy gardener in this house tonight.