Help from all around...

It takes a village to raise my chicks ~ 

                                           old Chinese quote hacked and paraphrased

Well getting the barn ready has been a load more of work than I expected. But it looks like I will be ready for the chicks next week!  Chirp chirp.....

The equipment we have is not new so there has been a little extra effort needed to be put in to get it all operational. The 2 gas brooders are old and one has been dropped. So I consulted a gas fitter to get them set up and operational. This took him 3 visits and a lot of tweeking. One is running fine. The other is debatable. I am quite nervous with the whole natural gas thing so I hired a professional to hook everything up and make sure all is working okay. Although I am sure I could detect the smell of rotten eggs (what a natural gas leak smells like) all by myself with my super huge nose and all.... but I wanted peace of mind.

After incurring his services I learned that I could buy one new brooder for the same price I have paid the gas fitter. Or I could buy 2, good, 2nd hand ones for the same price! It irritates me that so much in today's world its cheaper to replace appliances than it is to repair old ones... but I digress......

My problem solver extraordinaire!

Early in the week I was working in the barn and my youngest son (Brackton - age 7) came around to lend a hand / watch. I was telling him how I needed to get that pile of nailed together boards down to the burn pile at the back of the property since they were garbage and that I had to build some sort of gate near the door - so I could enter the barn without the chicks running out the door. Brax looked at the scrap wood and looked where I needed a gate and promptly said "well mom, if you take that wood and turn it around and slide it in,  you'll notice that it is the gate!" And would you know it - he was right.

Installing what I thought was scrap wood ~
 was actually perfectly fitted for the gate.

The gate - all installed!

I still had no good idea on how I am going to get the water line sterilized - enter to the problem solving scene - Dad!  We popped over to ma and pa's for an evening visit and dad impressed me twice:
1) he was reading my blog! Nice! ~and~
2) of course he had several ideas on how to get the cleaning solution through the lines.

My Jonkman haul

The only British Columbia distributor that Ziggity recommends for their water system installations and maintenance happens to be a few kilometers up the street..... so I wander over to Jonkman Equipment... for some more learning.  The staff were so helpful! They sell a huge range of farming related equipment - and they took lots of time showing me options and getting me quotes and ideas. I left with a jug of hyrdogen peroxide and a roll of cardboard. The smallest quantity of commercial grade peroxide they sold will last me a decade. That's a lot of McNuggets that I will have raised on a sparkling clean watering system!  Jonkman also helped me solve a problem I saw looming on the horizon but hadn't put in the effort to even contemplate options yet..... and that is that my barn is too big for 100 chicks to start off in. Word on the street has it that these little chicks are quite un-intelligent (read: dumb) and can easily get lost. So this long beautiful roll of 12 inch high cardboard will serve as mini walls to keep the lil balls of fluff close to the warming brooders.

This farm help was a perfect find!

Enter my sexy farm hand, (who is also a fabulous personal clothing shopper, chef, my fellow Kawasawki rider, and should be John Deere's next poster boy) my hubby Cam. Together we run a mixture of peroxide and water through the water lines. This required a lot of tedious siphoning and some agitation (we got Ziggity with it - full pun intended), and then repeatedly depressing all the little nipples to make sure the solution ran through the entire system.

We turned the brooders on to make sure that we could get them to 95degrees and we closed the barn up for the day.

Phewf! This farming gig is hard work and time consuming....