Building Unity Farm Sanctuary - Fifth Week of December 2016

The holidays are a time of joy and family gathering, bringing together multiple generations at Unity Farm.  This year we introduced all our visitors to the sanctuary.   My mother was eager to help out with the horses, pigs, and goats.   Here are a few photos of her greeting, feeding, and generally being a part of the daily rituals at the farm and sanctuary.

Much of work over the holidays involved preparing for our upcoming new arrivals.   Amber, the 20 year old Arabian horse, arrives on Monday January 2.   We had to rebuild the main horse paddock and electric fence at Unity Farm Sanctuary, replacing rotted posts and a failed solar powered fence power supply.   We wired a heated watering trough and created a weatherproof enclosure for the new AC powered fence charger.   We built two gates in the paddock to accommodate the tree work we’ll be doing to expand the paddock space between the farm and sanctuary, adding 3 new fenced areas and run ins.   At this point we’re ready for Amber’s arrival.   She’ll live in the stall adjacent to Pippin, our Welsh pony, and they will run out in the large paddock together.

It’s truly an adventure doing all this work during the chilly temperatures of winter with frozen ground and weekly ice storms.    Although we’re deferring some work to the Spring thaw, everything we’ve done thus far makes the sanctuary good enough to support 3 horses, 3 goats, and a donkey (we’re still working on that) over the winter.

Inside the sanctuary building, we’ve been preparing the plumbing and electrical for the public uses to come.   We’ve gone through each room and repaired/replaced those items the public will frequently use trying to use commercial rather than residential hardware when we can.     We’ll be refinishing all the floors in January with a commercial matte polyurethane finish that can stand up to high traffic.

I continue to plan trails and a forest layout that will be safe and maintainable.   Also in January we’ll be cutting down dead trees that are a risk to animals and buildings.   Their wood will provide the chips for all our new trails.

The weekend ahead will be spent hosting New Year's visitors,  restocking all the supplies and foods we'll need for the coldest few weeks of winter to come, and creating the daily rituals we'll use to keep the sanctuary and all its creatures warm, safe, and happy.