Fencing and Playsets and Pens, Oh My!

In case you haven't noticed, it's All Systems Go for Goats around here this week. There is so much to do and buy: fencing, pens, playsets, dogloos, feeders, waterers, mineral blocks, hay, bedding, a storage shed for the hay and bedding, a pickup truck....

The house is U-shaped with a lovely courtyard in the center. After much back-and-forth, it has been decided that the goat kids will live in the courtyard. There is a large fenced pen on the property that would be ideal for goats, but there are simply too many coyotes, hawks, and owls casing the joint 24/7. It's a wild, wild world out there beyond our courtyard gates, and the fenced pen is not within sight from the house.

The main entrance to the house is via the courtyard, so it would be nice to keep the area as spiffy as possible. Surely someone has designed a practical-yet-elegant goat enclosure. But I haven't seen one yet. Goat pens tend to be of the ugly chain-link fencing variety.

Goats, who climb and hide, love (human) kids' playsets. I had no idea that these little plastic numbers (apparently, they're called "climbers") can run upward of $300! And I don't think the bright orange and teal plastic will look particularly elegant in the Tuscan-styled courtyard, but the wooden climbers cost about five times as much as their plastic counterparts.

Similarly, I'm having a hard time finding an attractive hay storage system. It appears that most folks without barns simply stack bales on pallets and cover them with a tarp.

We're poised dangerously on the brink of becoming "those" neighbors. You know, the ramshackle sort with makeshift fencing, eyesore storage sheds, and toys inexplicably strewn about the yard with nary a child in sight. Oh, Junky Neighbor, how I have judged thee. I now will think twice before tsk-tsking my disapproval from my car window. Perhaps he, too, once fancied himself a Ralph Lauren-sort of rancher. But then he got goats.

We really do need a proper barn.