Our Last Sweep And How Long Things Take Around Here
We were anticipating very chill weather Saturday, but we were blessed with a sunny mild day instead. We clean out our rabbit hutch and our chicken coop every week, and our run about every three weeks; but we are headed into about a week of bitter cold weather as a giant cold front blows in from the north west and so we figured we’d take advantage of our last mild day and give everyone clean quarters before we hunker down. They are calling it a hard freeze…
Dad also noticed that we forgot to flush out the irrigation lines and disconnect the system from the bury hydrant over in the garden so that was on the list Saturday.
People always ask me how long it takes us to do things, or how many hours a day we spend on maintaining this “lifestyle” and I have a really hard time answering. You could spend 12 hours a day every day because there is never an end to what needs to be done.
Today’s labors took us about two hours for two of us, but it’s so hard to measure because we also threw in a bunch of other stuff that we didn’t really include. David took down the slack lines that the kids play on, I moved some chickens around into different quarters again, Mom and I pulled up all the weed barrier fabric from our squash garden and David threw that on the burn pile.
This property and the animals will take as much time as you give. There are always projects that can be deferred and there are always projects that pop up that are urgent.
I would probably say that my father and I spend about an hour a day on average on animal maintenance and animal needs. My mom spends more like three hours a day. So for one person, five or six hours a day would keep up with the daily tasks that are needed to keep things running. The amount of hours that we put into infrastructure and improvements varies. It all depends on how much money you have, how much money you want to spend, and how many hours you have available.
“It definitely takes a certain kind of soul to work with animals at this level - when you don’t have enough that each one is just a number, but you have too many to quite consider them as pets. ”
One thing’s for certain, I’m writing this blog post as I am driving to pick up my three growing chicks from a girlfriend - I think it’s important to share and it’s something that surprised me as we got deeper and deeper into this. It definitely takes a certain kind of soul to work with animals at this level - when you don’t have enough that each one is just a number, but you have too many to quite consider than pets. Every day you worry about the health and safety of your animals, you will sacrifice for them, you have to be willing to get down and dirty for them, and despite your best efforts, some will die and that’s heartbreaking, but the reward of having them is indeed great. You just have to be the right kind of person - it’s not for the faint of heart.
