Chicken Pen Progress

It's still winter! Sigh. It's been in the 40s day and night, with plenty of white fog. Or low clouds...it isn't foggy on the ground really, but the sky has been uniformly white. This is the view looking up 17th: pretty dismal and gray.

So, I had to do a few indoor chores. I fixed my chair situation by reupholstering an old chair I had, making it suitable for the living room. My zebra chair looks great now. And no, this has absolutely nothing to do with the farm.

Saturday, while Rick gathered up his tools, I amused myself by looking around our front yard for a few signs of impending spring. The narcissus are blooming in the verge.

And a few bits of paperwhites are fighting through the oxalis in the front.

And the unmistakable sign of spring: the first violets:

Then we headed to the farm and got to work. We needed to move the red cage thingy to where the chicken pen is going to go. But... it's big, heavy, and unwieldy, and we only had Rick, me, and Buddy. So

Buddy had the clever idea of using rollers. We had some big stakes and we used them to roll the cage acrss the lawn. Rick had the hand truck on one end to help propel it, while Buddy pushed by hand. And I ran around taking the poles out from the back and putting them in the front.

Here it is, set up where it's going to go. We'll raise it off the ground on metal poles and make "chicken feet" cement supports. Our current thinking is to just use a plywood bottom for the pen. The cage is 4x8 so one piece should make a fine floor. This will protect the hens from drafts and be easy enough to clean out. The whole thing will be under a shade structure, and we'll just use tarps to keep it warm and dry in the winter.

It's hard to notice in the above picture, but what we spent the most time doing is weeding the area that the pen is stitting on. We also spread all the rest of the straw out. In fact, that little patch of green in the foreground is the only remaining weedy bit. We got REALLY tired and decided we had done enough for one day. So we sat, drank, and planned.

We'll be running a water line out to the garden edge anyway, and we'll run a spur over to the fence. That standpipe will run the float-fill automatic waterer for the chickens, as well as provide water for another sink.

We'll put in a table and sink under the shade structure so we have a good place to wash both eggs and produce. We can clean our veggies and toss what we don't want right in the chicken pen. And it also makes sense to have composting going on near the chickens. I want to have a series of wire enclosures, like tomato cages but with just bungee cords or some such holding them closed. We'd fill these with the chicken waste and veggie scraps, and when one is full, we move on to another. After a while, when the first one is cooked, we can open it up, and spread it around or turn it. The plan is to really work the compost, rather than let it take a year to make. We'll probably still have a "slow" compost pile for the big stuff, but if we accelerate the chicken waste, we'll have more usable compost faster.

Sunday we stayed in and watched football. Today, it's more of the same cold, clammy, gray fogginess. It's not enticing to go work in the yard. However, my Burpee seed order came, so I've got peas for the world.

We got some bad news: Renny and Cindy's landlord is selling their house, and they have to move. So that means no cornfield for us! /Cry. And of course, we hope Rennie and Cindy can find another nice place to live. But I have a plan... we'll just dig up as much of our backyard as we can. It's big enough for a 3-sisters field, and it has irrigation already in. The "lawn" is mostly weeds anyway.

The other thing I'd really like to do is put in an earth oven at the farm. Then we can bake pizza and bread, and generally use it to warm ourselves as well.