Ruling the Roost

I am finally starting to feel better. Jordan and I went out to Quilcene, WA a few weeks ago to go shrimping and as a result I came down with bronchittus. I am finally over it, and as such I have not had the time to do any gardening or yard work that needs taken care of.

I am proud to say that we now officially have 3 chickens! They have been named Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather (of course after the three good faireis in sleeping beauty). I opted for three differet breeds of hen.

The first hen Merryweather is the Rhode Island Red (RED ARROW). I really wanted a Rhode Island becuase they are above average layers. If well kept, they can lay well over 200 eggs per year! So far we have had her for just shy of two weeks, and I have gotten 9 eggs from her. As far as personality goes she is the loudest one. Every time someone approaches the coop, she has to announce herself by making small clucks and a couple whines. Overall, this is the extent of the niose coming from the coop. The two other chickens don't have much to say. In Sleeping Beauty, Merryweather always tells the other fairies what is on her mind, so I felt the name was more than appropriate.

Flora the Ameraucana ( On left with PURPLE arrow), Merryweather
the Rhode Ilsand Red (on the right with RED arrow).

The next hen would be Flora the Ameraucana (PURPLE ARROW). I had considered an Ameraucana but was on the fence until I saw her. She has beautiful black/dark bronze feathers on her body, and gold feathers on her neck. She is a big girl and pretty. She is pretty quiet and indipendent, mostly keeping to herself. She makes no noise and is content to mind her own business. Ameaucanas lay "easter eggs" or blue eggs. I got my first of these blue eggs this afternoon. They are not royal blue, but more of a pastel sage or periwinkle. Her eggs are only about three quarters of the size of the other girls. I may need to look into adding something to her diet.

Lastly is Fauna, the Turken (also known as naked neck) (YELLOW ARROW). And, if you didn't infer it from the name, she has no feathers on her neck. I first saw this breed at one of our friends farms, at that moment I decided I had to have one. Turkens are not actually a cross between a chicken and a turkey, they just happen to look a lot like one. From what I have read online, they are immune to most diseases and are decent layers in the winter. I thought it important to get a breed that could be a steady layer in the cold. We get enough cold weather in the Northwest and I wanted to ensure year round egg production. I had to go with the name Fauna for this hen because she is such an airhead. With the 'hairless neck' and the brainless personality, I thought it was a perfect fit.

Fuana the Turken (on the right with YELLOW arrow)

New Daily Chores...


I must admit, I really was not expecting the time investment that they have become. I was really only anticipating 5 minutes every day to feed, water, and move the coop... but I underestimated. Each day I probably invest 20 minutes into the chickens. I feed twice daily, once in the morning before work (5am) and once more right when I get home from work (5pm)... Also, when I get home in the afternoon we move the coop for some fresh pecking ground, I wash the water trough (which has grass and chicken shit in it) and fill it with fresh water. I scoop the piles of poop out of the hen house, and replace the pine shavings as necessary. I then hose down the grass where the coop was previously to dilute the poo as much as possible... to attempt to save the grass.  Then finally after we eat dinner, all left over vegetable and bread scraps go out to the chickens.

 So far.. so good.  I think that given some time and some more learning and a few adjustments, we might have more eggs than we know what to do with.

To much to do and never enough time...

As our weather graduly starts to warm (gradually being the key term here) I find that my 'to-do-list' seems never ending! When I start working on one of my 'projects' I feel like I only end up finding three or four more items that need to be completed before i can finish the first!

All in all... I may be over exerting myself... and it would then make sense as to whey I have come down with some sort of cold/flu bug.

There have been some updates with the status of chickens and the coop!

So There has been some going back and forth on the coop and how I was going to "finish" it. I did not have the time, nor the carpentry know how to build my own coop, so I bought one from a guy on craigslist. I was acutally surprised by the number of people here locally that build and sell chicken coops as a second income. Apparently living out in Puyallup/Grahm area there are lots of city farmers. So... I ended up buying a pre-made 7' x 4' fully enclosed run and coop from one of them.

The coop has a sliding door that can be locked and opened or closed from the outside of the run so that it will be easy to close the girls in for the evening. Closing them up for the evening will be essential to keep them safe from the multitude of raccoons that we have and also from the neighbors nosey cat.



The finished product!  The left end is the coop where they can
sleep and lay their eggs, and the right side is a run that they can
peck around and scratch in from the safety of the predators



I also made a few modifications to the coop to help make it easier to clean and better suited for our weather here in Western Washington. I put a double coat of prime and a double coat of USDA approved farm safe paint on the exterior of the coop and run to keep the wood protected from the constant rain. I also covered the floor inside the coop with leftover lineloum tiles from our bathroom re-model project. Before covering the floor it was just exposed cedar slats, and the lenolium will be much easier to just wipe clean of poo.



Inside the coop in the nesting area where they will sleep



This is a view of the nesting area.  The lower tier roof is hinged
for easy access egg harvesting and cleaning.



I also added wheels to the end of it to make at a 'tractor' coop (just one of my new chicken lingo terms) that will wheel around the yard. This makes it easy to give the chikens fresh pecking ground where they can constantly fertalize my lawn and eat small bugs and worms.

Today I stocked up on all the necessities such as feed and bedding. Interestingly enough, I live in a rural enough area that I have a Del's farm and feed supply just down the road from my house. This should make for easy re-stocking, and save me from driving through the awful traffic getting out to Grahm. I really would hate to drive out that far just for chicken food!
The gal at Del's was really helpful and I ended up getting a 50lb bag of the 'Laying Chicken Pellets' that have extra calcium to help the hens produce the eggs shells. I also got a feeder, waterer, chicekn scratch, and dust free saw dust for bedding. Honestly I am still a bit confused about the conundrum of 'dust free' sawdust. All in all, I actually walked out of the feed store having spend less than $50.00! I was quite surprised at how inexpensive the feed was! it was just under $14.00 for 50lbs, which means about 2-3 weeks of food for 3 chickens. I guess I am just used to the outrageous price of dog food... so it was a nice surprise to find out how low-budget chickens acutallty are.

I had to buy a mouse-proof storage bin for the chicken food.
It took forever to find a bin large enough to hold 50LB's of feed
and a lid tight enough to keep out those tiny mic

Del's was also a great place to go because the manager's daughter raises chickens to sell too! I was really glad to hear that she had the breeds that I have been looking for also! She can deliver the chickens to my house for no fee! SCORE! I was really not looking forward to stuffing three chickens in three sepparate boxes and strapping them down to the bed of Jordans truck. Nothing seemed appealing about that!

I hope to have the girls delivered either tomorrow or tuesday depending on when she is available! I am really excited. I have a list of names in my head but think that it is best to wait until I see the personalities.

As if I didn't have enough to do getting ready for chickens, we have also been working the garden to get it going for 'Garden 2011'. But since the weather has been less that permissable we have yet to get things completed. We have 1/3 of it tilled and hoed into rows, and the other 2/3rd's still left to un paper and weed.

This is the garden as it stands now, on the left is the tilled portion, 

the lighter colored paper on the right is from last year still and not yet tilled.

Last year, Jordan and I decided to experiment with the black weed block fabric that people lay under their bark and in their beds. We covered the whole garden in it and cut holes for the plants and seeds. For the small amount of work it took tacking it down, it saved us hours upon hours upon hours in time weeding later!!! We really could keep the garden clear of weeds with less than 2 hours of weeding every week! I will never go back to exposed dirt ever again! I upgraded this year and we will be laying down better quality paper so that hopefully for the next few years we can just re-use the same stuff.

But anyway, I lost focus... we have not yet gotten the garden going! The only plants in the garden are the ones that made it through the winter and that would be the thyme, chives, and the strawberries.



 And these are the straberries that survived.  The mothers are
 ones on the top, and the daughters are growing in the rocks.

      


The left over chives!



Hopefully I will have more to post about the garden this week, as I need to get all the starts that I bought last week in the ground asap!

These are the three flats of starts that I have still to plant.

              

Spring has Sprung

Ahhh… spring.

I have spent all winter thinking about what we would be doing through the spring and summer (of course the two most beautiful seasons in Washington!). And now that spring is finally here, I feel as if I have already fallen behind! The garden should have been started, I would like to have had the chickens already, the yard needs work, the roof needs replaced… the list goes on.

Realistically I should be planting right about now. The lettuce and broccoli would have withstood the last few frosts that we have had recently, but I think the warmer weather plants, like tomatoes and corn, may not have made it through the cold spring start. Never the less, we should have already prepped the garden for planting.

I really am avoiding it… as once the garden is done for the winter, we don’t weed until we plant again. As you can imagine the weeds take control and flourish and it will be a solid day of weeding and soil prepping.

As for progress on the chicken coop, I have finally found some time to invest in it!

After much deliberation with Jordan about whether or not to paint the coop, I have decided that in the interest of preserving it through the elements, it must be painted. Unfortunately, I had no idea what a monumental task it would be to find paint that would be safe for the chickens! I called store after store, and spoke with too many irritated paint counter clerks. After about the 10th store, I finally found a paint that would suffice.

To sum it all up, I found paint that was non-toxic and USDA approved for use in contact with farm animals and food. Apparently the paint that we all buy at Home Depot and use on the walls in our homes is pretty toxic to most living things when ingested or when it comes into contact with food. It makes me wonder what would happen if we started licking the walls… would we grow a third hand or ear? Either way, we have no need for those chemicals around the food that we are going to eat.

As soon as I got home with the paint I started to it. In order to best protect the coop from all the rain, it was recommended that I put a double coat of primer on the whole thing. I had no idea what a task it was to just get the whole coop primer-ed! For mobility and ease of painting, I thought it best to paint the individual disassembled pieces of the coop. This way I could easily paint the pieces in the front yard if the weather would allow, or I could move them into the garage and still continue to paint regardless of what mother nature was tossing at me.

As expected, it rained and I did most of my painting in the garage. What a surprise.

It took me about 7 hours to just get the two coats of primer done! I had honestly thought that I would have been done painting the whole thing in 4! So, by the end of this evening, I have only gotten one of eight pieces with the first coat of ‘communist grey’ one the siding of the actual coop portion. I was highly disappointed in the lack of instant gratification.

As I have been busting my butt all day, I think that this is where I will close for today. I have a one hour shower ahead of me to try and scrub all the primer of my hands and face. I am not a very clean painter, it looks like I was trying to paint my hands as and arms as well as the coop.

I will try and get some of the picture of the coop uploaded tomorrow.

Good Night For Now.

A few months ago I started watching a show called "The Wild Within" on the Discovery channel. The show was about a guy who had made it his personal goal to get back to the basics, to dig up that primal instinct within every human to hunt and gather. He travels the world (obviously a bit unrealistic, but the traveling is what makes it interesting on a weekly basis) hunting game and gathering food from the earth, taking pride in being able to literally bring home the bacon (or venison) for the family. The point of it all being that we as a society have lost that age old connection with mother nature, we have lost the natural ability to eat from the earth.
Over the course of the last few years I have slowly started to get back in touch with nature and the cycle of life. Two springs ago Jordan and I planted our first garden in the back yard. We ended up with a plot that is about 25 feet long and 10 feet wide. At the time I had absolutely no idea how much work it was to maintain that much space! I mean what was so hard about it? You plant, water, and enjoy the produce, right?
Not!
The truth of it was that the first summer was time consuming, laborious, tedious, repetitive, dirty, and exhausting. And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, I probably haven’t done it justice. But come mid-summer when things really start growing and you pick that very first sweet pea pod off the vine all those bad memories fade away. You forget about all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it… and savor the best sweet pea you think that you have ever had! To be fair, it really could be the most rotten pea pod ever, but you grew it from seed to vegetable… and it is damn good!
In all reality, that first year I really hated that garden. It seemed like one thing after another disappointed. We spent almost a whole weekend removing all of the grass (as we decided on a spot in the middle of the lawn for optimal sun / shade patterns), tilling the soil, hoeing it into rows, and fencing it off from the dog. That first weekend didn’t even include any of the planning or planting!
We did get the garden planted, we reaped the benefits, the next spring came and I had forgotten all about hard work. I was really excited to start that garden again. We had learned so much, tweaked some of our plans and got a new garden planted. It was amazing how much easier things were the second time around! And this year, with all of the knowledge I have from the past two years, I am confident that this year will be even better. We have learned tricks to cut down on the weeding time, learned about the best times for watering, optimizing plant output by appropriately pruning, and now we know what plants are best for our area and soil type. All in all, I am confident that Garden 2011 will be successful, and a relaxing hobby to enjoy. JThis year, I have decided to go a step further in my "not-so-urban" experiment. I finally took the plunge and purchased a chicken coop and will be bring fresh eggs into the mix. This seems to be a slightly less bloody way to get back in touch with raising my own meat or protein in this case. I don’t know that I would be able to kill a creature for food that was not a fish. It is difficult for me, as it is for most modern Americans, to look at another living animal as a slab of raw meat, so chickens for me are a way to satisfy that need without all the… guts.
For those of you that know Jordan and I, you most likely have heard us talk about Thomas Jefferson. We first were introduced to Jefferson by a radio program on NPR called the "Thomas Jefferson Hour". Jefferson had wanted the new United States to become more of an agrarian society. He ran a self sufficient farm and was quite the farmer. Jefferson was also fastidious man. He kept a multiple journals in which he would take notes on everything; weather conditions, planting notes, pruning notes, general farm notes, correspondence notes… do I need to continue?
Jefferson has inspired me… these are going to be my notes. I am going to write (hopefully on at least an every other day basis) about my agrarian conquests in my city home. I am embarking on my "not-so-urban" experiment.
"A Jeffersonian resists the dependencies of modern life; at least in some symbolic way." - Clay Jenkinson in ‘Becoming Jefferson’s People"