With apologies to Anne Lamott, here’s what I’ve taken to doing with novel drafts. My local feed store ran out of wood shavings, so I’ve been using shredded office paper inside the coop. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before? Maybe because in Livingston’s famous winds this can sometimes get messy, but the girls really really like the shredded paper. They’ve been making little nests with it. And this is one way to keep oneself from getting too precious about “the work.”
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Seven chickens, it turns out, was a little more than my yard can really handle, and for the past several months, I’ve only been getting 2-4 eggs a day from the bunch. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do — and while I thought about trying to pawn them off on someone else, really, I knew all along that the responsible thing to do was to cull a few of them. (And for all of you Angry Vegans out there, I have heard your arguments, especially in light of my post at Ethicurean about how I don’t consider…
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Ever since last fall’s episode of food poisoning, I’ve been meaning to finish enclosing the garden. However, I had to wait for the ground to thaw, and well, the freelance life means that finances have been just tight enough that I didn’t want to go out and buy copper pipe. But this weekend, I finally got it done. I tried to come up with some solution other than more expensive copper, but since I’d done the rest of the trellis/fences that way when I built the garden (this is summer number eight — how did that happen?), well, I just…
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According to the BBC, the town of Mouscron, in Belgium, has 50 pairs of chickens it plans to give to residents as a way to decrease the waste stream. I have to say, my chickens have both significantly lowered my household and garden waste, and here in the arid west, they’ve exponentially sped up the composting process. Composting is a real problem here, because it’s so dry. Because there was an 8×10 concrete pad in the back part of the yard, that’s where I built the chicken coop. And because the compost heaps were already in that part of the…
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I’ve been meaning to blog about this for ages, but my vacation got in the way. We finally finished the chicken coop. Chuck built the actual coop part ages ago, but after Ray killed the hens, we had to enclose the whole space, which took a little while. And I’m proud to say that the only thing we bought for the coop was a roll of plastic bird fencing. Everything else was recycled. There is chain link fence along the bottom part of the enclosure and then I covered it with old twig fencing that I’d saved when I replaced…
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Looks like another hen managed to escape via the compost heap this morning, because when I went out to see if there were any new eggs, there were feathers in the yard. Raymond had gotten another one — and had her hidden between the tall iris and the rhubarb. It’s my fault really, I didn’t insist on building an enclosed chicken run like I thought we probably should because a) Chuck was being nice enough to build it for me in the first place and b) we had the recycled chain link, and I hoped it would work. But it…
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The two surviving hens are laying eggs. On Saturday, Chuck put in the fence for the chicken yard (which is great — photos to come) and he was rewarded by finding the very first egg. Since then, they’ve each been laying one a day — little eggs, about half the size of a commercial egg, but then again, they’re still sort of little hens. Here’s a photo of an egg in the nesting box. It’s like a prize every time I find one — very cool. We also let them wander around the yard, which seemed to entertain them mightily.…
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Well, it finally happened — the little red hen went over the fence this morning, and before I could get my robe on and get out there, Raymond (bad dog!) had done her in. I sort of figured I’d lose one to dogs before it was all over, but frankly, why couldn’t it have been the problematic rooster (who could also have given him a run for his money)? Ray’s in the doghouse — no breakfast, bark collar turned to high, not looking at him, locked in the front yard where he can’t even go look at the chickens or…
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Thanks folks for all the camera advice both here and on Facebook. I wound up with a Canon Powershot SD890 for just under $200. It’s so tiny! I like it a lot, and you all saved me much angst. I hate choosing things like this. So back to life on the backyard farm. The chicken coop and enclosure wound up in the same corner of the yard as the compost heap, which is working out really well. They like taking dust baths in the more composted bin, and I’ve taken to throwing them buckets of weeds to let them pre-compost…