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3rd June, 2008 - Dan Forgets His 10 Times Table With incessant rain for the third day in a row, it was impossible to get outside and tend to the garden.
So instead, we planned how to construct the new poultry pen which will house the turkeys, chickens and quails.
Although the birds, except the quails, will have complete freedom on the enclosure around the pond, it's important to have a smaller fully enclosed area for them for when they are young and for their nighttime protection against stoats/foxes/owls etc (we don't want a repeat of last year!)
The cage we've designed will have an area of 10 metres by 6 metres for the turkeys, 4 metres by 5 metres for the chickens and the same again for the quails.
It's also important that we can walk free around the cages so it's going to be 2 metres high.
Once we ordered the wood (all 250 metres of it!) it was time to order the netting.
Maybe it was due to the wet weather, or just age, but the netting comes in 10 metre lengths and Dan worked out that we wanted 64 metres in order to build the cage and secure the remainder of the pond enclosure.
So, simple - 64 metres at 10 metres wide. At €1 per metre it was only going to cost €64, so an absolute bargain!
Err, not quite!
The price wass per square metre, which meant that we actually needed 640 square metres - Dan had forgotten this little "fact" and all our budgeting went out the window.
Given that Dan's former job was based around forecasting numbers you'd have thought that he would have at least got this simple calculation right!
After feeling like a complete pillock, we recalculated our figures and although it's going to cost a lot more than we'd anticipated, we know we've got to do it - the cage will be around for a long time and given the huge losses of last year, we can't afford not to have it.
It just means that Tracey's shoe shopping "expedition" will have to be downsized to a "quick glance"
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