Our Plans for The Winter Goat Pen

Pretty soon we are going to stop moving the goats for the winter. Right now, we are still moving them a little bit in a field we had planted earlier in the fall, but soon they will have to stay in their winter home, so they will need some things to play and climb on.

Shadow and Ava resting on repurposed stairs.

We are having to put the hay in places other than in their feeder in the barn because the more dominant goats will not let the other goats in the barn to eat the hay (or even come in the barn).

Hazel and Chocolate Chip resting on their hay out in their pen.

We have been gathering pallets from a few places and will be building little shelters for the goats with them. The more dominant goats keep the less dominant goats out of the barn (which is large enough for a herd of up to 30) This creates a challenge when it is really cold, raining, super windy, or snowing to provide shelter for all the goats. We have one alternative shelter built for them right now, but it isn't enough! As of now we have 13 goats. The goal is to build 2 more of the pallet shelters and see if that will be enough to let each goat have a spot to rest without any disturbance from the other goats.

Philly eating hay in a pallet home.

We have quite a bit of scrap wood left over from various projects. Before we had our first farm tour, we were cleaning up the yard quite a bit and gathered a lot of our scrap wood and stacked it near our shed. We used some of the scraps to fill in the holes in the pallets that we used for the ramps and were also thinking of using some of it to fill in the gaps in the pallets to block the wind. (If you would like to come and see the farm and how we do things, here is the link to our farm tour page https://www.longcreekfarm.net/farm-tours)

We brought some old stairs into their pen for them to climb on but then we decided to build a little platform off of it to use up our really old pallets, but also just to let them climb on something (we are also using it to feed them hay on).

Another project for the fall is to dig out in front of the barn and fill it with rocks from our property and then cover the rocks with a layer of mulch. A tree company in our area comes for free and delivers mulch for us. Putting the mulch down should eliminate the mud and muck we had last year after the rains came.

The place in front of the barn covered in hay gets pretty squishy when it rains in the winter.

We also put both our old pig A frame shelters in the goat pens for more places for them to get out of the elements. We also screwed backs on the A frames to stop the wind. If you would like to learn more about these shelters, see our blog https://www.longcreekfarm.net/post/a-frame-shelters-for-pigs.

Hopefully we can get a lot of these jobs done before it gets really, really cold! It is already getting into the thirties in the nights!