Kinda of proud of myself

I have written here and here about stock panel arch buildings we use. It is a simple adaptable design for out building that is easy and inexpensive to put up. Made from arched sections of 52" X 16 foot that create a variable length building 8 feet wide and six feet tall. With a 6mil plastic or poly tarp skin and some internal stays, it creates a dry shed that can withstand our VT snow loads. As solar heated green houses, they extend our growing season a month in the spring and a month plus in the fall. As animal shelters, they provide shelter from wind and rain, retain body heat and gather solar energy to make comfortable winter housing.




















The Goat house is a little more elaborate than the Green houses. The Goat house has a human end and a goat end with seperate entrances. The Goat end is half open, half covered by a canvas tarp. There is also a wall of old hay bales on the closed side. The hay feeder is hung on the wall between the goat and human ends. The Human end gives us a place to store feed hay and hay waste. We can load and cycle the feeder from the human side. Their are also two slots for the goats to reach through for water and minerals. And brackets to hang mini feeders of grain on.



















For the Goat shed, we had some new design constraints to meet. We wanted clear spans inside (no supporting posts) given the limited space. With such a thin wall, condensation can be an issue. Since goats are suseptable to pneumonia, keeping their housing dry was important. We also wanted to maintain a solar warming design. So the sunny side has a layer of translucent plastic and the shadowed side has a layer of heavy canvas. The Canvas helps buffer the condesation while the clear side allows the heat of the sun in. For cold or foul weather, there is a poly tarp that covers the whole goat end. The canvas stretches around the open end and can be positioned to suit the weather. Now that the sun has changed it's swing enough, the tarp stays open most of the time to catch the afternoon sun.















Today was a good day to drag out the old bedding and replace it with new. It just means going into the goat end with a wheel barrow and pitch fork and loading up the soiled bedding. We compost the bedding to add to the vegetable gardens. Even in the depth of winter, the compost generated enough heat to melt it's way through the snow. We change the bedding on a schedule to interupt parasites. We replaced the old bedding with a new layer that is the waste hay we collect from the hay feeder. Goats a picky eaters and only eat about half of the hay that we put out.