I like piles of wood.

It was a lovely day for chopping down trees. We removed this mulberry, which was pushing up the foundation of our garage.


Side note - isn't our garage h.o.t.??

We also chopped up this black locust as, apparently black locust leaves are poisonous to chickens and this tree happened to have the bad luck of living near our future chicken pen.



Despite the thorns growing from the branches, twigs and trunk of this tree, we are quiet enamored with black locust and plan to do whatever we can to help them grow in non-chicken areas of our property. Locust burns hot in our wood stove and this good-sized tree is only 20-25 years old.

This sort of wood pile (we have 6 scattered around), I'm not so in love with:

Sugar spent her day smelling the flowers:

Our radishes are growing!


And some random knitting...fingerless gloves from super soft alpaca my mom picked up at Rhinebeck:


Now, we are off for pizza. Later!

In the mail today...

New t-shirts. Thanks, Mom! We finally have some officially licensed collegiate apparel! 

 

Chicken update

Our chickens are a week old today. They've all made it and seem to be growing well, though one barred rock seems to have epilepsy (we have named him Chicken Caesar). His attacks are getting less severe, but we're not really sure what to do with him/her yet. We don't want to breed Caesar, which will be easy to control if he's actually a hen, but not so much if he is a rooster. To be honest, I don't really want to eat a chicken that has seizures either....

We have noticed a real difference in the breeds. The barred rocks are running around, scratching at the bedding, flapping their wings and being curious when we change their water and food.


On the other hand, the broilers (Cornish Crosses) don't really do anything. Seriously. They do...nothing. They lay on their bellies, eat and poop. Notice all the poop:

I changed their litter about 12 hours before this photo was taken and I washed their food tray this morning, because they poop on that too. I think they freak Bill out. He says they are unnatural.

They are also much bigger. They feel like actual chicken when you pick them up while the barred rocks feel like baby birds.


In further proof of the broiler's laziness...I put this one in the barred rock box to take photos. He was in the box for less than 30 seconds with all the chickens he hasn't seen for days, in a new, exciting environment and he did this:

Plop! The barred rocks were fascinated with him, but he just wanted to lay in a blob. They are growing fast, though and already need a bigger home. Bill is working on getting some electricity out to our garage so we can move them out there. With all their pooping it takes a lot of work to keep the smell away.

Silly freakish birds.

The Coop, Day 1.

Ok... well, I was hoping to frame the coop with old barn lumber, because we have a lot of it, the thing is, it is apparently imported from the petrified forest. 2x4s are easier to work with and cheap.

Here's another thing, having a plan may make things go more smoothly and quickly, but it is not nearly as much fun. I envision this as a 4 day project. Tomorrow (or whenever the next nice day is) I'll hopefully get to the roof and siding. Bought some steel roof panels for that. Day 3 will deal with nest boxes, doors, and miscellaneous stuff, day 4 we paint.

 

Good Food. You are invited to Eat Here.

Our food blog has transitioned to invite only. If I haven't sent you an invite and you'd like to read it, leave a comment here or send an email. It's not dramatic and we're happy to explain.

Chicken coop.

Time to build a chicken coop. I honestly have no plan at all for how to best do this. I know a couple of things - I'm cheap, I want it to be at least 6'x8', and I don't want to have to rebuild it in 3 months. The coop needs nest boxes, perches, and about 4 sq feet per bird (according to everything I have read) of floor space. It also needs a small chicken door, and a big peoplr door. Needs to be proof against raccoons and the black cat that lives in our garage. 

We're planning on having a flock of no more than a dozen birds at a time. This makes 48 sq. feet just about right. My uderstanding is that if birds have a lot of room to roam (these will) then they actually need quite a bit less room than that, cause they'll pretty much spend all day wandering around outside and then return to their roosts at night to sleep. Better safe than sorry though, so a minimum of 6x8 it shall be.

It should not be excessively drafty, but there should be good ventilation so that we don't develop excssive moisture/humidity in the coop.

Regarding the cheap factor, here's my plan of attack - start with all of the junk that is on the property, build as much as possible with all this scrap, spend ONE DAY messing with the scrap, then go to Carter Lumber and buy whatever else we need.

Here's a small selection of the exquisite scrap that I have to work with. This should be fun.

Random bits of OSB, etc scavenged out of the dumpster from the roofers last year. 

 

Look - a nice wooden window just sitting in the garage!!! I wonder if I can find the handle to open it up.....

 

Have a couple 6 1/2 '  (4"x4") fence posts leftover from the garden fencing. 

 

Lots of barn lumber, also the barn doors. These doors have blown off their hinges twice since we've moved in, , and we've decided to quit patching them and just side over them over sometime later this summer. Probably should save some of the lumber for that... 

 

We also have a bunch of 2x4s, 1x10s and siding left over from last year's barn repairs and door builds, though admittedly this isn't scrap as we still have a lot of repairs left to do this year. Eh, we'll pretend. As long as I don't have to buy it this week, all is good. 

We'll have an update on progress later tonight. 

Chickens have arrived!

At 6:30 this morning (on our day off), the Post Office called to say our chicks had arrived! They actually arrived yesterday and spent the night in the Post Office. Bill went out in the dark to the frosty car and brought them home.

They were all huddled together in a lump in their box, but everyone was ok after the journey from Iowa.


We took them out of the box one at a time and dipped their little beaks in water so they would start to drink. Eventually (after tasting the wood chip bedding) they found the food too.


The black ones are Barred Rocks. There should be 8 females and three males. They are an old breed and are good egg layers, as well as good for meat. They also brood and forage well and are cold hardy. So these we are keeping to be our farm chickens.



The yellow ones (there are 15) are Cornish X Rocks. They are meat birds and will turn about half the food they eat into delicious stir fry. Even though all the chicks are 2 days old, the Cornish rocks, or broilers, are nearly twice as big as the Barred Rocks. They are not particularly intelligent birds, and if we wanted to breed them they would be fairly useless. But, because we had to order 25 chicks (so they could keep each other warm during shipping) we have a small brood of these guys. In about 8 weeks they'll be 4 pounds and in the freezer.

While most of the chicks make sweet, soft chirping noises, one broiler has an ear-piercing churp. We have named him Thai Basil.


This lone ugly ducking is Fuzzy Longbottoms. S/He is a bonus rare breed chick, perhaps a Dark Brahmas.


The brooder box is kept at about 95 degrees. Every week we'll make it 5 degrees cooler until it's down to 70. In 3-4 weeks (or when Thai Basil's churping drives us crazy) we'll move the chicks out into the garage and eventually into their coop or the freezer. Until then, Bernie and Sugar will probably be sitting quietly together outside the chicken room door.


Random adorable chicken photos: