We’ve tried to structure our farm year so that summer is a time of dormancy, maintaining the property, but avoiding too many big jobs in the heat. With an historic heatwave across southeastern Australia, and four consecutive days over 40 degrees for South Australia, we thought we’d make an exception to construct another shelter for our long-suffering sheep.

Like previous shelters, this one was constructed from primarily salvaged materials: the skids and beams are salvaged hardwood, the uprights are ironbark woodlot thinnings from friends at Finniss, and the tin, of course, is salvaged from the gully junk piles. It’s designed to be able to be moved around the property, typically dragged behind the ute. This way, we don’t need to construct shelters for each of our seven grazing paddocks, and we can also use the shelters to focus grazing in a particular area.

The A-Frame design is intended to be more alpaca-friendly than our previous skillion roof constructions, and overall, it feels more robust than those. It also, unexpectedly, feels lighter, despite being bigger in almost every way. Hopefully this will not mean that it sails into a neighbour’s paddock with the next stiff breeze. While the sheep inspected the construction coolly, as temperatures begin to climb again, we’re sure any reservations will quickly melt away!