Monday, November 14, 2011

Moving Poo

| | 4 comments

It's moving week here, just a little over one week until we move from the Little Farm to an organic farm in Hawaii for three months.

I've been waking up in a panic most mornings long before it's time to get out of bed, my mind spinning.  So many details, so many boxes to pack, so much poo to move...

{wait, did she just say "poo to move?"}

Somehow this has a nagging feeling of "deja vu'."  And not in a good way.

When we moved here last August, we discovered with dismay that a large amount of horse manure would need to be cleared out of the paddock near the barn and mucked out of the barn before we could move our boys in.

This required hiring a neighbor farmer with a Bobcat (at our own expense) to clear the paddock area, and also mucking the barn by hand with a manure fork (the barn doors were too narrow to fit the Bobcat inside). 

Because the manure in the barn had been compacted by horses for what I can only assume was months or years, it was packed in like cement from wall to wall and the resulting removal was back-breaking work. When ground level had finally been reached, the dirty line on the barn walls where the manure had recently resided was nearly 3' high.

All of the horse manure was moved to a back corner of the pasture, a weedy, brushy area the horses had been fenced out of, and the resulting manure pile was about 8' high and at least that wide in diameter.

Ever since we cleaned out the paddock and the barn, I've been doing a darn-good job of keeping it all clean.  I pick up the boys' piles every week (alpacas poop in a group, making the task pretty simple), diligently hauling it out to the manure pile, which I couldn't add to the top of (too tall) so we sort of started a smaller pile beside the Big Mother Pile. A baby poo pile, so to speak. My shovel is planted into the top of it in the picture above.

Towards the end of last week, our landlord sent an e-mail saying something to the effect of "Oh and by the way you need to remove the big manure pile from the back pasture before you move out..." a statement which has led us to the following conclusions:

  • Apparently she has has forgotten whose manure that is and where it came from.
  • Apparently she has forgotten we had to spend a considerable amount of time and money to move it out of the paddock and barn in the first place.
  • Apparently she has no appreciation for the fact that during our residency, her barn and paddock actually stayed poo-free {we will move the alpaca beans, although they should be put to use in the square foot gardens}, a feat she was unable to accomplish during her own. 
  • Apparently she is slightly insane.  
I wonder if she has even considered exactly what her barn & paddock would look like if we moved it back in for her?

If only I had a Bobcat....................

4 comments:

Jess said...

Insane, yes. I think you need to cross "moving the poo" off your list before even think about doing it. That's her mess. You did enough.

And are you using a SLED to transport poo? Brilliant. You have some of the simplest but absolutely best ideas!

Victoria Strauser said...

Yes, an ice-fishing sled and it's so easy to move things around, summer or winter!

:)

Jess said...

I'm cleaning our coop out today and I'm so stealing that idea!

Victoria Strauser said...

Haha - I hope the sled worked well for you! At first I had a kids sled but it did not hold enough poo - now I have the ice fishing sled and it's AWESOME!

 
Follow Gypsy Farmgirl on Instagram Follow Gypsy Farmgirl on Twitter Follow Gypsy Farmgirl on Flikr Follow Gypsy Farmgirl on Pinterest
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...