Humorous farm diversions

We took a break this week from our big project to work on a smaller, cute, fun project: a portable chicken house! We can’t actually bring any chickens onto the property until we live out there, but we felt inspired to build the chicken house anyway. Our inspiration came from our next-door neighbor who had the perfect portable chicken house base:

An old baggage trailer from the airport! He bought it years ago with the intention to make it a cart for giving hay rides. I guess that never happened, and we offered to buy it, and he accepted. So, we took off the chains:

… and then we built walls (some of which open for ventilation in the summer) and installed a nest box we bought from Mossback Farm. We used all leftover scraps and materials from building our house, so these chickens have a pretty posh pad: galvanized metal roofing and Western red cedar! Fancy!

Our plan is to pull the house around our fields and let the chickens range (safely within portable electric fencing) in our old garden beds. We’re excited to see how well they can help us clean out our beds and eat bugs and weed seeds. Oh, and we’re looking forward to the eggs too, although that’s almost secondary to the bed cleaning and companionship/entertainment.

Here’s the chicken house’s maiden voyage down the road:

And the finished product in the fields, with the pop-out walls up to provide breeze and shade in the house (the windows are secured with chicken wire, so we can leave the doors open on hot nights without worrying about predators):

… from the back:

We’re pretty excited about the house, even though we don’t have chickens yet. We can’t wait!

We didn’t entirely put off our other work, however, even though the chicken house occupied a few of our days. The hot house is almost full already. Here are some of our onion starts (and a surprise daffodil that popped up in the house!):

Of course, it couldn’t be entirely smooth. We have a problem that we haven’t encountered before: a little pest (mouse or squirrel) has been eating seeds out of the plug cells. Every morning we discover more carnage, so today I set six baited mouse traps. We’ll see tomorrow morning whether we catch anything. I can’t imagine getting through the season with this pest pressure.

On a different note, here is a new addition to our land: St. Lafiacre. Katie’s mom gave us the statue—I think because maybe he’s the patron saint of gardening? Anyway, he’s holding a shovel, so it would seem so … except we’ve decided that for now he’s the patron saint of trench digging, because we’ve been doing more of that lately. In fact, in this picture, Casey and Katie’s dad are both digging.

Soon the digging will be done, however. We’re making good progress on the house. Today we installed our insulation, and we hope to install drywall soon. (Speaking of which, does anyone out there have drywall experience that they’d be willing to share? In other words, would anyone be willing to spend a day helping us drywall??????????)

I’m sure there’s something else exciting I should talk about, but lately we’ve been tired and scatter-brained … so we’ll post again soon. Until then, think lots of green and happy thoughts!