Well, my son and I got the roof finished on the Wyandotte Coop- for definitions of "finished" and "roof" which do not bear close scrutiny. That's two of the ten hours I told CL it'll take to finish it. We also got the thick concrete pavers to make a better foundation for the watering trough- hallerlake has heard at length and most tediously of the saga of the watering trough, which was a source of great annoyance last winter. *THIS* time, people are going to listen to me when I tell them it needs to be level, right? RIGHT? I used to do all the maintenance by myself, long ago, and now I am not up to it at the same time we got a Rubbermaid one: they are lovely in some ways, but hinky as heck in others, most particularly in the really bad float valve mount and the need for the whole thing to be dead level to function. Add sloping, highly erodable soil, and, well cattle and you have a recipe for annoyance; subject the whole thing to repeated hard freezes and annoyance becomes disaster. We've had one trough, up by my cousin's barn, since January, when one of the cows learned how to pull the float out of the tank entirely and the last bit of foundation was undercut by the flow.
Of course, it would help to have a bunch more watering troughs. We used to have six, but the place for two of them got turned into horse pasture and the brain trust decided that the perfect place for another one was in the lowest point in the water main (right before the sixty-foot climb up to my cousin's place) without any step-down valves on the hydrant, and now it has two settings: empty, and leaking at about five gallons a minute. And there would still only be one place where we could put a heated hose in winter: right outside my bedroom window, forty feet upslope from the nearest "bottom" and in the dead cold shade from Hallowe'en until Valentines Day. The sixth was in a pasture which now has no fence, and no reason for its own trough, given that it takes twohundred feet of hose or vinyl line from the nearest hydrant.
Watering troughs are right up there with fences on the list of ways cattle farming is much less fun than most people think.
