Too often, homesteading articles, blogs, websites, and videos (including this one – guilty!) show only the successful side of homesteading. The abundant harvest, the completed projects, the fresh eggs and baby chicks and overflowing milk, the healthy livestock ... by golly, this lifestyle must be easy-peasy, right?
Yes and no. Of course things go right. And of course things go wrong. But what is seldom shown is the nitty-gritty day-to-day dirty side of homesteading, including the daily chores that must be done for the comfort and welfare of animals. For that reason, I thought I'd show you something I do every day, rain or shine; namely, cleaning the barn.
This, dear readers, is what the barn looks like on a typical November morning. Lovely, n'est-ce pas?
The mess includes puddles of urine, which tend to concentrate at one end of the barn (the building may have a slight slope to it).
The regular weapons in this fight against a messy barn include a dedicated rake and flat-edged shovel...
...and a dedicated wheelbarrow.
I work from one side of the barn to the other, starting with the milking stall (left) and calf pen (inner right).
Stormy, who is the calf of our milk cow Maggie, spends the night in the calf pen, so I make sure it's as clean and cozy as I can make it every day. This means raking out soiled hay and manure, scrubbing and refilling her water bucket, giving her a bit of grain (as an enticement), and making sure she has a pile of fresh hay for feed.
Here's the soiled hay and manure I removed from her pen.
After the calf pen and milking stall are cleaned out, I mentally divide the barn flood into six "quadrants." I clean one or two quadrants at a time, working my way toward the other side.
(Yes, the barn mats are a mess. We know that.)
By this point, the wheelbarrow is ready to empty for the first time. I usually have between two and three full wheelbarrows each day.
Here, I have the remainder of the barn waste accumulated in one corner.
Halfway through the process, I'm warm enough to discard my coat and scarf.
Time to fill up another wheelbarrow.
Once that's full...
...I cart it out to the waste pile.
Never undervalue a barn waste pile! Barn waste becomes compost, and compost is just about the perfect food for the garden. Believe me, we view the pile in the photo above as black gold.
Still, you can understand why this chore requires boots.
Cleaning up the barn waste is the hardest and heaviest work. Once that's done, the chore gets easier.
The next task is to clean and refill the calf's water bucket, which tends to get messy overnight.
I give the bucket a quick scrub...
...then refill it with fresh water.
Since I'm at the water tap anyway, I confirm the big tank is full. Here in mid-November, we're still able to use the float valve. When freezing weather comes, we'll remove the float valve (which would otherwise freeze) and insert a stock tank heater, at which point we'll have to manually fill the tank morning and evening.
I had been banging around the barn, inside and out, for about half an hour, without disturbing the two does that were lying down a few yards away. Deer are extremely common here, and these animals know we're not hunters and therefore not a danger to them. These two ladies stood up when I got within about twenty feet of them, but they were barely alarmed.
After filling Stormy's water bucket, it was time to sop up the puddles of urine in the barn. We do this with sawdust. Older Daughter's shop is on the other end of the barn, so she routinely shovels sawdust into a garbage can for me.
On a shelf inside the calf pen, I keep a number of necessities: A wind-up lamp, my milking crate, Maggie's leg hobble, scrub brushes ... and sawdust (in the white bucket on the left). This bucket is kept brim-full at all times. If I'm milking and Maggie suddenly urinates in the milking stall, believe me when I say I need sawdust fast. I toss it liberally over the wet mess and it sops it right up. I never want to get caught milking without that bucket full of sawdust handy. (It's amazing the sheer volume of urine a cow can unleash.)
During afternoon cleaning, I apply sawdust to the barn floor as well, putting an extra amount anywhere it's especially wet. It gets shoveled up during the next day's cleaning and added to the waste pile.
Then I top off the bucket with more sawdust, and return it to the shelf in the calf pen.
Next it's time to put out grain for Maggie and Stormy.
We used to give grain to all the animals, which trained them to come into the corral at night. However, gradually, all the animals sort of ... lost their taste for it, I guess. Now we don't bother graining Romeo (our young steer) or Mignon (our yearling heifer), since most of the time they just ignore it anyway. We still make a scoop of grain available for Maggie in the evening, but for the last month or so she hasn't wanted it. She will, however, eat a scoop in the morning when I milk her, and Stormy enjoys about half a can (shown in the photo above), which entices her into the calf pen each evening.
Next I give Stormy's pen a pile of fresh hay for eating (piled on the left),and her pen is ready. Of those two white buckets, grain is in the left bucket and water in the right.
Normally this is where I finish the daily barn cleanup. However about once a month, I clean up the duff that tends to accumulate on the floor between the hay bale and the feed boxes.
This material is too small and choke-y to feed the animals.
So, using a push broom, I sweep it into a pile...
...and then pull that pile through the gate into the livestock side of the barn, and spread it out.
Now the barn is clean and ready for livestock. The whole chore takes about 45 minutes to complete.
The very last thing I do is close the milking stall and calf pen gates. Otherwise, when the animals come in for water mid-day, they would eat the grain and hay, and foul the fresh bedding in the calf pen.
This, dear readers, is one of my daily chores. Some people react to manure and think "Ewww, cOw PoOp" and refuse to have anything to do with such tasks. But for me, it's just something that has to be done, and it's no more onerous than any other household task that needs doing.
In fact, by some measures it's the ability and willingness to do these dirty chores – day after day, cheerfully and without complaint – that will help determine whether someone is cut out to have a homestead.
