We live on a hill. This hill really feels more like a mountain. The driveway is so steep, that we can’t even drive our cars up to the house in the winter, even with 4-wheel-drive!

Every year we get as much hay as we can before winter, because we know we’re not going to be able to get more until the snow melts, usually in March.

Previously, we have only just had a little lean-to on our shed, which holds about 60-70 bales of hay, and the loft above our goat barn, which holds another 20 bales.

That is no longer enough. Our goats are currently eating about a bale hay a day right now. We are at our peak, with all 5 does having freshened recently, and building milk supply, and none of our bucklings for this year sold yet… so hopefully we won’t stay at this high demand, but we like to figure to be safe.

We were also in a drought this year, and aren’t sure there will be enough local hay to buy more early spring.

We decided to shoot for 240 bales, but we had to find a place to store it all!

Well, my husband had the brilliant idea of cleaning out the sugar shack, at the bottom of our hill (mountain), so we made a big project of doing that this fall. We had a garage sale, and then neatly stacked up the rest of the things that were in it that we wanted to keep in the back.

The nice thing about the sugar shack is that it has a cement floor. All we did to ensure dry hay storage was to add pallets covered with a tarp, then we stacked it high to the ceiling!

Unfortunately, we only were able to get 144 bales of hay, so hopefully we quickly sell these 5 extra bucklings we’re not keeping, or we can get more in March, but at least we tried! And it does feel good to be as “full”. Another task done for the year. 🙂