Just a few hours on the berry cage construction this weekend: installing the welded wire on the new fence portion, that divides the berry cage from the rest of the veggie garden.
The rightmost portion has an angle to accommodate the slope:
Right side done; working on the left side:
All done:
A view through the doorways:
The left side also has interesting angles for the slope:
Next up: replacing the wire on the old portion of the fence, with this smaller gauge wire.
The weather last weekend wasn’t great, and it’s going to pack in again next week, so I decided to spend some days this week on building the berry cage in the veggie garden. An advantage of being self-employed is that I can shift my time around as needed, in this case to take advantage of decent weather during the week.
I ended up doing four days (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday), which is equivalent to two weekends, so all works out. I’m working on the weekends to offset that time.
Anyway, I started by making a simple wooden stand out of scrap wood, to help support the 10′ lumber when cutting it with my table saw:
Then I continued installing the poles and roof beams, starting work in rather frosty mornings (and the highs were only around 45° F / 7° C):
Here’s a pole in a hole. The 10′ poles are about 2′ underground, 8′ above ground:
As before, I used boards and clamps to hold the poles straight:
I also added a post level, that is tied onto the pole, which is much more convenient than using a straight level, plus a string to line up the posts:
Here’s a view down a pole, showing a temporary block clamped to the pole, making it easier to position each horizontal rail board by myself:
Here’s a board resting on the block, ready to be nailed:
Another new acquisition was another stop ladder; a new 8′ one, in addition to the older 6′ one, very kindly picked up from Home Depot by Jenn. Having two ladders really saved a lot of time when measuring, positioning, and nailing two ends of a rail, and no doubt had safety benefits, not having to move a ladder as often:
The last pole:
I didn’t want to bother with covering my tools with a tarp, or carrying them individually back to the hoop house shelter at the end of each day, so I put them in one of our carts. Including keeping the air nailer compressor in the cart, which makes it easier to move around as needed, too. Here it’s all loaded up, ready to go back to the hoop house for the night (you can see the hoop house in the background):
A view of the roof beams:
Completed poles and roof beams:
Adding bottom and middle rails on the front fence:
I brought the welded wire over to check the position of the middle rail:
An extra rail on the sloped part of the fence:
Fence rails done:
A view of the front and back doorways:
Another view of the finished poles and roof beams:
Next up: adding the welded wire fencing!
A little more progress on the berry cage project.
I started by moving some of the holes a little, as was mentioned last week, to position them better. Here’s my earth auger, which makes digging holes much easier:
I then temporarily placed poles in the holes:
Next I removed the top course of wire from the existing fence, since I need to add boards to attach the top of the new wire, and the roofing wire:
I also extended some of the poles that were a bit short:
Here’s the new top beam; that will be the height of the roof (about 8′):
Finally, I carefully positioned the first new pole, bracing it with boards and clamps, and attaching the two roofing beams — one with the board in a vertical orientation, attached to the side of the new post and an original fence post, another with the board in a horizontal orientation, 5′ from the old fence (for the width of the fencing wire):
Here’s a closer view of those roof boards:
Next time I will continue placing posts and their roofing beams.
Last week I posted about the start of a new building project: a berry cage in the veggie garden.
This past weekend I continued work on it, starting with a bit of prep stuff: taking the table saw, circular saw, air compressor, nailer, and various other tools to the hoop house and veggie garden, and re-stacking the delivered lumber to access the bits I need first.
8′ and 10′ 2×4 pressure-treated boards:
10′ treated posts, and welded wire fencing:
Next, I took the new untreated lumber to the veggie garden, and built a new garden bed in what will be inside the berry cage. I decided it’d be easier to do this before the enclosure is built, rather than after. In progress:
This bed is the same size as the others, 10×4′, though is on a slope, so has extra lumber shaped to the contour of the ground, to make it level:
Thusly:
The veggie garden is fenced, and had only one entrance, which was fine, but a little inconvenient at times. Especially now that there’s a greenhouse behind the garden. As part of the decision to place it there, I planned to add a back door to the veggie garden, to make it easier to get to the greenhouse.
So I started adding the new doorway; removing the fencing wire, and adding a new pole:
I then cut the fence boards to make the doorway (3.5′ wide):
The opposite view, showing how convenient it’ll be for the greenhouse:
One issue was that there was a tap in the doorway, so I also moved that (I do enjoy the garden plumbing!):
The new tap position:
Hole filled (a little mounded at present, but it’ll settle flat):
I also placed some boards on the ground to help visualize where the roof beams will go. You can see two short vertical posts marking where the poles will go, boards standing on their edges that will be attached to the posts, and boards lying flat between those, that’ll be spaced for the roofing wire. Basically the same design as in the chicken run.
I do need to move some of the holes a little for optimal placement. I had measured the holes based on centering them between the beds, but this arrangement will work better, having the poles in the center of the cage next to a bed instead of in the middle of the walkway:
Finally, I temporarily closed the back doorway with a spare gate panel; I will build a proper gate later (in the same style as the chicken run gates):
Next up, I will tweak the holes, and start installing the poles and beams.
Yesterday I started work on a new construction project that I planned a month or two ago: a berry cage in the vegetable garden.
We have a large fenced veggie garden, with multiple raised beds. Some of the beds include blueberries, strawberries, etc, which are targets for birds. Plus we let our chickens into the veggie garden after we’re done with it in fall/winter, so they can clear out the foliage and weeds. But we don’t want them grazing the berries to the ground.
So, I’m building an enclosure: a fence to split the back four beds of the veggie garden from the rest, a wire roof to keep out birds, and gates. This kind of enclosure is commonly called a berry cage.
I started work on this project by measuring the positions for the poles, cutting the fabric on the ground, and hand-digging out the top gravel layer:
I then used my earth auger to dig the holes, about 2′ deep:
Thusly:
I also dug to expose the pipe for this tap at the back of the garden, as it will be moved. I’m going to put a new gate there, to make it easier to get from the veggie garden to the new greenhouse:
Here’s a view of the back part of the garden. The holes in the foreground will be where the front gate of the berry cage will be:
This morning, I received the delivery from Home Depot of the materials:
Several rolls of welded wire fencing, a heap of 8′ and 10′ posts and boards, and gate hardwire:
A closer look at the lumber. The big untreated boards are for a new garden bed in the berry cage:
Stay tuned for construction progress. Next weekend I’ll re-stack this lumber (I need the posts at the bottom first!), cut the back gate, and start installing the posts and beams.
Should be fun.
Believe it or not, we have more than just feral cats at the homestead, despite them being a popular topic of my blog posts.
We also have chickens, and I recently did a minor repair of their grazing box. This is a wood and hardware cloth (wire) cover over some grass, to enable the grass to grow without being pecked to the ground by the chickens. They can nibble on the tips that grow above the wire.
Some of the wires had come loose at one end:
So I snipped off that panel and replaced it with fresh hardware cloth, nailed down with U-shaped nails:
Here’s the whole thing:
Just a simple little repair.
Over the weekend (and a bit elsewhen) I assembled a small greenhouse purchased from Amazon.
Here are a sequence of images taken from about the same position, showing the assembly (with more detailed pics following):
Let’s go back to the beginning. Here’s the 90 lb package:
I built a foundation out of treated posts I had on hand (concrete would have been better, but this should be fine):
I secured the posts to the ground with some heavy-duty metal spikes:
The base of the greenhouse:
The base is secured to the foundation with several lag bolts:
I added an optional accessory, a louvered vent:
Back corner:
Openable roof vent:
Gutter:
Base of the door, with a magnetic catch:
Inside:
Another optional accessory, an automatic opener for the roof vent, that opens or closes it based on the temperature inside:
The vent open:
The greenhouse feels pretty solid, and hopefully is anchored quite well, but I also added a third accessory, tie-down anchor cables to make it even more secure:
The cables go over the top:
Hopefully we’ll make good use of this over time. It could be very useful to get a head start on spring veggie planting, and more.
Recently the pop door opener for the old chicken coop stopped working. The pop door is the small door that enables the chickens to go from the coop to their run. It has a door that slides closed at night (on a light sensor), and open in the morning.
So, I purchased a replacement.
One likely factor in the failure of the old opener was that the cord went through the wall then horizontal then vertical, via three pulleys. This complicated system would have put more strain on the motor. Plus, I had a fairly heavy pop door. Here’s the old system, when it was first installed (in January 2016; wow, seems much longer ago):
So in addition to replacing the opener, I simplified the cord system. It still goes through the wall, since the light sensor needs to be outside, but there are now only two pulleys, on a more direct path. Here’s the inside of the new opener, and the pulley above the hole in the wall:
The opener control panel, awaiting installation:
Installed control panel:
On the inside, the hole and second pulley:
The cord now goes straight down from the hole:
The wooden door is also more lightweight now; thick plywood instead of solid wood. Not quite as secure, but should still suffice.
I expect this new setup should last much longer.
I wrote an article that appeared in the October/November 2018 issue of Backyard Poultry magazine, describing the chicken coop I designed and built last year.
The article covers six pages, most of it my photos. There’s an excerpt available online, but the article is only available to subscribers of the magazine.
You can see more of the coop on the Yellow Cottage Homestead blog; if you prefer, you can filter to see only chicken-related posts, or alternatively look at only posts about the chicken coop.
Yep, it’s another week, so another cat update.
But more importantly, it’s been a year since we first found the feral cats, or rather the kittens, and their mother, Poppy.
Here’s a picture from my first blog post about the kittens, published one year ago today; click the link to see more:
My how they’ve grown!
You may recall from last week that I turned on the heating pads and held open the door to the shelter part of the cat house, hoping that they’d start sleeping in there. This has worked out well. Most nights, at least one cat has spent most of the night, and often several.
Here’s the first guest, Porcini:
The following night, three cats:
Two of whom stayed all night:
However, Spud got a bit curious about the camera, disloging it from its magnetic mount (hanging on by the power cable):
Two mornings running:
Cute angled shot:
Here’s what the camera looks like:
To prevent further issues, I built a wooden enclosure, that both holds the camera in place, and protects it a bit, much like I did for the feeder cam:
Here it is installed:
We also had an encounter between the alien black cat and one of the mushroom girls:
Some words were exchanged:
And a bit of posturing, before the black cat made a hasty retreat; they didn’t actually come to blows:
Makes you want to bury your head:
Another exciting development was when we saw all five cats at once; we hadn’t seen more than four at a time for months, so had wondered if something had happened to one of them.
Here’s a screenshot of my iPad, showing one cat outside, two in the shelter, and two in the feeder:
Let’s finish off with some random interesting pics.
Mirrored sleeping cats:
Poppy:
Stretch:
A snuggly pair:
Hunting:
That’s it for now.