No, I’m not giving chickens away–sorry. They’ve just been freed from their tool box and are now happily peeping about their big new yard. Sweet husband took most of last week off to use up some excess vacation time before he lost it and we were busy in the yard and garden most every day (hence the sparse posting). Anyway, here’s one of the fruits of our labor last week:Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Now you might not think this looks like it should have taken very long (we only built the yard, not the house–it’s borrowed), but you didn’t build it with my perfectionist husband. The yard slopes, but all the posts are perfectly level and the chicken wire is tight all the way around. Really, this is not an easy task. We sunk our corner posts in the ground that was super hard (he did the digging) because of wind around here. The door is 1″ steel frame with 1/2 inch hardware cloth, brick underneath and still waiting on a latch (bungees doing a fine job in the meantime). Oh yeah, and it exactly fills the doorway with no gaps when it closes. Did I mention my building partner is a perfectionist? Still need to build our permanent coop on the temporary end by the door and cover the whole mess with bird netting to keep everybody in and everybody else out, but those are projects for another week off ;-).
The crazy chickens don’t know to go in the house at night, so we have to go gather them up and throw them in there. The food is in the house, but they don’t go eat it until I pull it out and show it to them, then they ambush the feeder as I try to shove it back in the house–you’d think it might occur to even one of them to go in the house to eat or sleep, but as my mom told me: “you’ll constantly be amazed at how dumb chickens are.” I was hoping my chickens would be above average! Maybe they’ll figure it out sometime . . .
