100% un-fooled-around with

Bill took these photos two nights ago as a storm approached near sunset. The entire world turned orange.

I cowered in the living room with the storm radio. Gotta love the midwest in the spring.

13,000 words

Ready for some pictures?

Our coop (Coop d'etat) has been beautifully painted thanks to help from the family.

The chickens quiet enjoy it.




The bathroom has also been painted. Before:


After:


Growing in the garden...
Onions:

Potatoes amongst many weeds:


Dessert:


Beans, which we hope do better than last year.


Flowering peas:

The condemed

Last weekend was rather productive for one that included a planned half-day tequila-recovery couch session.

All of our cornish cross meat birds are now in the freezer. They had gotten pretty big and...well we wanted the space for our barred rocks. We processed nine birds in about 4 hours. They were 7 weeks old and already huge.

While we'll be keeping the barred rocks for a while, we don't intend to raise meat birds again. Hybrid chickens are just a bit too unnatural for us. We started with 15 birds seven weeks ago. One wasn't growing well at all (we named him Colin Creevey) and started acting pretty sick. He was actually growing a lot in his rear, but not anywhere else. Odd genetics for poor little Colin. He was euthanized a few weeks ago. We also lost two birds to, we assume, heart failure. Corish x's, as a result of their breeding, have a tendency to eat themselves to death. While the barred rocks can be trusted to ration their own food, we learned we could only let the cornish crosses have access to food for 12 hours a day.

But now they are gone and our life is lot easier. They were unintelligent, high-maintenance birds. This will be the last you see of them, but expect lots of adorable barred rock photos to come.

And some socks!

Bathroom yick

We have a "master bedroom" on the first floor that we haven't paid much attention to since we moved it. It is currently a glorified closet and a night-time kitty jail. Not the nicest room in the house. Which is pretty sad, because in its prime, this was probably a lovely front parlor.

Some day it will be my crafty room (does "Fiber Studio" sound too snobby?), but now it is just yicky. This is due in part to the odd bathroom that was insensitively placed in the corner of this room - hence the "master bedroom" title. The room is now so oddly shaped that it could never function as a bedroom, unless the owner had a little tiny bed.

The bathroom is also disfunctional and poorly planned. For one, there is no heat register - we worship a small space heater in the winter. Also, there is no outlet for the humid air...no fan and the window, despite an hour of conjoling, scraping and banging, is inoperable. The moisture combined with lack of sufficient bathroom paint, has led to this:

And bubbles in the wall paint:

Plus, dirty brown is not the cleanest feeling color for a bathroom.

Someday, once the upstairs bathroom is functional, we'll get rid of this one in a creative way that allows us to keep the vital, pipe-carrying walls, but gets rid of most of the room. Until then, we are covering the multitude of sins with a coat of clean-colored, fresh-feeling paint. More photos soon!

A Grand Chicken Day Out: the Sequel.

It was a lovely day today, so we built our chickens a little temporary playground for some fun in the sun. They are one month old this weekend.

The barred rocks - Rocket and his crew:

A broiler and a barred rock - these chickens are the same age!

The reason we call her Fuzzy Longbottoms:

Chillin chicken:

More photos than you really ever wanted to see are in our chicken album.

A Grand Chicken Day Out

Our cornish crosses had their first outside adventure this week. It was time to change their litter so we took them out into our enclosed garden to wait while we (that is, Bill) made their home all fresh and clean. (I had to stand guard over the chickens and protect them from hawks. Or something.)

Being the lazy, unmotivated beasts that they are...all 15 chickens huddled together in one small part of the garden and just stood there. Eventually a few started pecking and investigating the dirt - and, of course, they pooed - but it was rather non-eventful.


They are cute though!


But they also appear a bit silly as they are growing feathers and shedding their down. It seems an awkward phase like adolescence.

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!