The barn has been a long process. The first year was basically clearing around it to even be able to start working on it. The area around the barn and down in the woods was piled with trash. We will share a few photos further in this post but even they can’t show the amount of trash there was. We think there were 20 truckloads of basic house trash that just had to be burnt, 4 truckloads of stuff that had to end up at the dump, and 3 truckloads of random metal items that were able to cashed in at the scrap yard. We plan on going over the woods themselves in detail in a future post.
The right side of the barn was piled with different kinds of trash plus briars. One example was a 55 gallon plastic drum which contained seashells, 10 lbs of various nails, 2 car batteries, scraps of hose pipe, and torn tarps. This drum had no lid and had been outside for who knows how long so it was also full of water. Making a sort of trash bouillabaisse.
The left side of the barn had a few things like the right side, but the bigger issue was the down tree on the phone lines. Several attempts were made to get the phone company to come out, but eventually we had to take care of it ourselves. With that gone, we could get the left side cleaned out.
The back side of the barn was more like the right, lots of trash and even more briars and small trees. Moving further away from the barn it became less and less trash but thicker and thicker in underbrush. This was all cleaned out and burned as well which left a nice square. The start of our barn lot!
Since we do not have livestock yet the past 2 years we have planted behind the barn with limited success. As in, 4 total pumpkins in 2 years.
The ground seems good, but due to the woods and the property line of trees, it gets little sun. This will be good shade in the summer for the animals though so not cutting anything down.
The barn after it was cleaned up around it turned out to be very sturdy still. And colorful…
The plan is to have 3 lots behind the barn. Setting them up with fencing (undecided on exactly what style yet) with the 3 lots be able to rotate some small livestock through those. The lots not being used at the time we can sow with fodder for when they come back to that specific lot.
The red squares in the photo above are the future barn lots mentioned.
Now that we could actually walk around the barn it was time to get to work on it! That was a slower process and is actually still going on. We will share more of that later.
The first problem was removing the 250 used car tires that were being stored in the barn…….
Green Journal Homestead 