The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: OhLaLa on October 01, 2010, 12:24:21 pm
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I'm about to build another sheep shelter. Would love to see yours so please put a pic up (and it might help me get this one right).
What floor do you use? Ours is directly on the ground, I have nettles growing in there on one side which I have to pull, can't sort until they are in another field (hence next shelter)...
:sheep: :dunce:
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Hi, just tried to write and explain how OH built one last year but might take a pic it would be easier!! Anyhow we got the idea from smalller versions at our local wildlife park and used up old half round rails, will see if I can get a pic on soon.
Dawn
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depends on your sheep I use off the peg veal calf igloos. I can get 6/7 sheepies in there quite happily ( minus door to entomb the veal calf :-[)
(http://i223.photobucket.com/albums/dd278/SperedBreizh/DSC07896.jpg)
portable durable high resale value :sheep: :sheep:
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pics
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inside, cant quite get the hang of getting more than one photo at a time on!! We have also used same technique to build a duck house.
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Wow, thanks guys. Bit tricky to get idea of size but certainly food for thought (keep em comin').
Kanisha, thanks for sharing that, loved seeing it, unfortunately don't think it would survive our winds.
Frieslandfilly, love that one, looks sturdy and our sheepies would love it too. Clever OH!!!!
Good idea for the roof, bit worried ours (Onduline) might not make it through the first gales but have done my best - will change it for your style if our roof goes the same way as the wicked witch of the west.
And.... hay bed for them tomorrow it is then.
:-*
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Hi Oh Lala you bolt them to pallettes if you want them to stay put and don't mind the extra weight. Mine live on the top of an exposed hill 10 km from the north brittany coast.
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Our whole stable block has onduline roof and it has survived 100mph winds straight off Cairngorms and 2 ft of snow for 3 months sitting on it. And thats built (cos of slope) on a raised foundation so very exposed.
Key thing is no overhang, they look pretty but are deadly for catching the wind.
TBH at least if it does blow off, you might survive being hit by it (or might not, but most other materials would kill someone outright).
The shelter must at minimum on exposed site be staked into the ground with angle irons hammered into ground and shelter lashed to it. Irons at 45 degrees to the ark wall and entering the ground just by the ark wall.
TBH the best and cheapest is the pallets even with no roof in terms of amount of shelter and from every wind direction if you make them into a noughts and crosses, you need 12 pallets from memory, I will get a piccy of ours tomorrow. You can also hang troughs on them and attach hurdles to give sheep pens more rigidity and strength (useful with Shetlands like mine!)
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having to do this to get you back at the top, the worlds gone crazy
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Hi! Our shelter has an onduline roof too, absolutely brilliant stuff for field shelters. It costs around £12 per sheet inc. vat. It started off as one of those section wooden field shelters you can buy online, but it wasn't big enough so OH replicated the way it was constructed and extended it...twice now.. started outs as 14' wide its now 28'!! I tried to post you a pic of the outside and the inside to show you how we built it (which is just out of the usual type of timber used to build decent garden sheds, only with a good basic structure and cross bracing), but for some reason the site will not allow me to do it - even when I tried to post only one pic I was informed it was too large a file to go through!!! Anyone any advice on this?
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This is one of our shelters built a few years ago and still standing in spite of the gales. This is what OH has written about how he built it:
<The corner posts are standard 4"sq fence posts. This is good enough for ewes and lambs but will not withstand being butted by tups. The structural timbers are 4" x 2" tanalised. The vertical slats are 6" ranch boards (as used in horse fencing). The roof is corrugated galvanised steel - anything lighter shreds and blows off in gales.>
I would add that the floor is earth with straw. Siting of the entrance is important and difficult - which way is the prevailing wind? Ours comes from all around but I suppose mainly S.W but snow comes from N, NE, E and SE - this shelter faces SE and doesn't catch much weather. It is very small but this means that the entrance is not so trampled and muddy as bigger ones.
For a tup-proof shelter, try wrapping sheep fence mesh all around the outside once it's built - this seems to hold it all together ok and spoils it for them - they can't get a really good thwack in !!
We also have a very large shelter made of semicircles of corrugated tin to give a rounded roof, attached to concreted in straining posts. This year a HelpX worker built us a new shelter which turned out to be HUGE - I will try to get a pic when it stops raining.
We also have a little lamb shelter which is a zigzag of low boards with a couple of planks across the top, to make two triangular hideouts, which will always have one side protected - the Soays like to lamb in there too
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I forgot to add that the gaps between the vertical planks are very important for airflow to keep everything dry.
Also the front should be wide so one ewe doesn't bags the shelter for herself and not let anyone else in.
Yet another shelter we have, used mainly by Soays and lambs, is a 400gallon black water tank cut in half lengthways, with the top widened into a front door, and the sides strengthened by a 2x2 timber base. It's amazing how many sheep can squeeze into that.
We also have an old horsebox which the tups live in - it is beyond use on the road so they spend many happy hours smacking their heads against it.
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slated floor is best
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I mean slatted
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I must be extra mean to my sheep - no shelter at all (other than hedge and some trees). But as I rent two of my three fields and the one we own also now will have cattle in over summer - no chance of building shelters... However my sheep do fine and none of them died during last winter (my 12 year old shetland ewe had a stroke or something like that in March and had to be put down, she wasn't in lamb anymore anyway - but she came through all the snow and -15 deg C alright...)... so I think as long as the sheep are fed and watered well they don't actually need a shelter, I am more worried about the heat (and lack of shade) in summer than the cold in winter....
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Fab info guys, thanks so much for taking the time, really learning loads from you. I can see where I went wrong with the first one. Does the job but think it might be due an extension in the spring. Loving seeing your pics.
Something new has been mentioned in your posts which I've not come across though: tup proof shelters and thwacking??
:sheep: :wave:
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Look forward to seeing a picture of your finished sheep shelter on here!! Good luck!
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my sheep have no shelter either. Here in orkney most of the rain is horizontal so I have nailed some roofing sheet on the fence facing north and west. North is the coldest and west is the wetest so they can sleep behing it
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Tup proof shelters - tups like to smack their heads against anything solid, especially those with horns. This quickly destroys shelters, vehicles, fences etc. So a tup proof shelter is one designed to reduce or slow down the amount of damage they can do (as with wrapping the whole thing in fence mesh). Thwacking is just the noise it makes when they hit their heads against something they find satisfying ;D It can help to have a post specially for them to thwack against.
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Fleecewife - what would I do without you? I didn't know about either of those antics. Guess I just haven't reached that page in any of my books yet. :-\
Again, thanks so much.
:-*
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Maybe you will be lucky and your tups will be well behaved. I keep big bad boys :o ;D
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All girls at the moment but when ram arrives he will be a Suffolk Black, so thankfully no horns.
I had better give making a thwacking post a bit of thought, I can't think of anything that will stay up once the ground softens up like it is.
:sheep: ::)
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Not trying to put a damper on things but i was always told that sheep should not have shelters. Aparently it encourages them to sleep in one place thus encouraging pests. i presume you take the shelter away in the summer as flystrike would be a problem.
sheep have warm coats so they don't need protection. I'm not that experienced so am only going by my local sheep farmers advice.
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OH build this for our sheep this winter - can't find the pic with the sheep playing around it - design with Anerdeenshire wind in mind - on my old downhill ski's so I can tow it about - but the proof is in the pudding and I've seen them about it more on sunny days than horrid ones!! Guess they must be true Aberdeenshire sheep - only joking we do get nice weather too
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It looks like the alians have landed, very modern, did he make it himself (clever bloke) or does it come flat pack?
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All his own handywork!! with of course encouragement from me - it all started with dome homes - timber kits built in the us as homes - we thought of doing one but ended up doing our stone cottage. So this has been his first excuse to give it a go - and the maths works - unbelievably stable for timber triangles and ply (85 felt triangles still to be fixed)
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impressed
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Not trying to put a damper on things but i was always told that sheep should not have shelters. Aparently it encourages them to sleep in one place thus encouraging pests. i presume you take the shelter away in the summer as flystrike would be a problem.
sheep have warm coats so they don't need protection. I'm not that experienced so am only going by my local sheep farmers advice.
I can't agree with that. This spring we saw many lambs die (other people's) because they were without shelter in their fields, when the weather was lashing sleet and snow. Round here most fields have simple stob and wire/mesh fences, so they provide no shelter either, and there are few trees. On a large scale it would be difficult to provide artificial shelters, but on a small scale it works well. We have seen no increase in pests or flystrike - if flies concentrated in the shelters then the sheep would not use them. . The shelters are used against rain, blizzards, wind and hot sun (on the odd occasion we get any) but when it is deeply cold but dry they are outside enjoying some of their favourite conditions. The only drawback is that the entrances can become muddy, which is not good for feet. But sheep will all sleep in the same place anyway, whether they have shelters or not. With built shelters, they can be strawed and mucked out like any other housing and the muck composted to use in the veg garden.
The wildest sheep of all - Soays - on their native island, take shelter in the old stone seabird-drying huts, which are dotted all around the island.
Although many breeds of sheep do have thick woolly coats, they are shorn off each spring, often before the weather has realised it's spring, so they can be very cold. On the other hand, it can be very hot before shearing so then sheep in full fleece need shelter from the heat.
Sheep are perfectly intelligent enough to decide for themsleves if they need to use their shelters or not, so no, we don't remove them in the summer.
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fair enough, I've only got advice from the big farmers and i suppose they have a different outlook. Basically laughed at my question as to whether i should provide shelter, said what did i think the fleece was for.
I do have hedges surrounding all my fields and large trees and i do live in wiltshire so it's not a problem for me but one of said farmers farms in north yorkshire so i took him at his word. Wasn't trying to be argumentative :)
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It's a good point to discuss though. As with most topics, there is never just one answer. Some farmers house their sheep through the winter and lamb indoors, others run them on the hill year round with only rocks and other natural features to use as shelter. There might be differences in losses from each system. Many commercial sheep raisers expect lamb losses which for us would be catastrophic - we usually lose between none and one lamb each year and I think our chosen breeds and the shelters we provide help to keep our losses so low.
Smallholders are in a unique position to farm their animals with a bit of extra care. As I said before, it's difficult if not impossible to provide outdoor shelters for very large flocks, but I think it could be that sheer numbers will provide protection and shelter to some extent. But this does mean that advice from large scale breeders does not always translate to small systems :sheep:
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I agree with you on the sheep loss. My local sheep farmer thinks nothing of loosing dozens of sheep in a season but i would consider that such a waste of a life when many of his losses could be saved. I went on Tim Tynes sheep course and he has many sheep, lambs indoors with constant supervision but vey little interference and has virtually no deaths.