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Our plans to install our wood stove this past weekend were derailed when we discovered (surprise surprise) that we didn't have all the parts we needed. Some are still on order at Lowe's, and others we'll have to buy in store, but that won't be until this coming Friday. In the meantime, we decided to get a woodshed built!
We bought a few pieces of pressure-treated wood for this project, but we tried to use up a lot of scrap from other projects on this one, particularly as it's hidden behind the house and doesn't need to look pretty.
A cord of wood, according to The Internet, is four feet by four feet by eight feet of wood, so those are the dimensions we used, kicking the front up an extra foot for accessibility--and to allow snow to slide off the roof in the winter.
I love any excuse to wear my tool belt...
Our outer frame is finished! Now to add side panels, a roof, and a floor.
But first, we added side supports for the three stacks of wood that will fit inside. We used more scrap wood here, so the pieces are uneven and mismatched.
While Wendi and I covered the walls with old flooring pieces left over from the construction of our house, Jo was charged with shoveling sand from our leftover sand pile for the base. She ended up playing more than shoveling, but she helped out.
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Mental Floss recently did a post with weird facts about chickens and, since we're nominally chicken wranglers, I thought I'd pass along some of the strangest chicken facts:
3. What is pasty butt, and how do I prevent it?
Chickens have a multipurpose hole for excrement, eggs, and mating called the cloacal vent. If this hole becomes clogged with excrement—a condition known as pasty butt—a young chicken can get backed up and die. Without a mother hen to clean them, baby chicks raised by humans are particularly susceptible to pasty butt. That’s why chicken keepers must be vigilant in monitoring and cleaning their brood’s bottoms.
Yikes.
6. How do I hypnotize a chicken?
The chicken mind is an easy thing to control, and chicken handlers have found several ways of hypnotizing the birds. Here are three surefire ways to make a chicken very, very sleepy:
• Hold a chicken’s head under its wing and gently rock its body.
• Hold a chicken upside down and wiggle a finger in circles around its beak.
• Stare intently into a chicken’s eyes.
Generally, they’ll stay spellbound for several minutes, or even hours, until a loud noise snaps them out of their trance. Scientists think this state is a form of tonic immobility, a defense mechanism in which animals “play dead” in order to shake off a predator. Hypnotized chickens can be pretty useful, though. Former Vice President Al Gore recalls using them as doorstops during his childhood days on his family’s farm.
Ten Provocative Questions About Raising Chickens...Answered!
A couple of days ago Jo and I came home to find feathers in our yard. A lot of feathers. I hoped that our hens were molting, but I had a bad feeling as Jo called in the chickens. Sure enough - only five showed up. Wooster - our handsome, gentle, protective, not-
too-loud rooster was gone. We thought a hawk took him, but today we chased a coyote away from the remaining hens. Maybe he was coming back for seconds? I hate to do it, because they love free-ranging, but we're keeping the hens cooped up until we can come up with a safer situation for them.
Their coop is big and has a run so it's not like they're in boxes, but I loved hearing them scratch around in the woods.
As for Wooster, Jo keeps saying things like, "I think he was a happy rooster. He had a good life." I think so too - and now is as good a time as any to share how he got his name. I thought we had shared this long ago, but a quick search of the archives says no. What an oversight!
So - shortly after we got the chickens Jo struggled to come up with names for them all. One day, as Alan and I were building the coop, she came out and announced that she had the perfect name. "Pecker! Because he pecks at me more than the others do." Jo does
not like to be laughed at, so we struggled to keep straight faces while we explained that she needed to keep thinking. Her next option? "Cock! Because when he gets older he'll crow cock-a-doodle-doooooo!" Now, what are the odds that the first two names she'd come up with would both be so wildly inappropriate? We told her to keep thinking, and finally she came up with Wooster. "Because we like Jeeves & Wooster and Wooster rhymes with rooster." Good enough for me - Wooster it was.
RIP Wooster the Rooster.
I've spent a good bit of my free time this week helping Jo make some labels for her egg business. There's a Farmer's Market tomorrow (indoors, of course) and it'll be her first chance to sell to people besides friends and our favorite pizza restaurant. She drew lots of colorful chicken pictures (and a pretty buxom version of herself!) and chose her five favorites to represent our five hens. I scanned them and then GIMPed them together into labels for her egg cartons. A little busy - but cute, no?
She wanted Wooster (her rooster) in on the action too, but he's not a "chick" so he only got placement on one of her business cards. He is authentically noisy.
She's got a gallery of ten cards to choose from - she had a great time coloring all the chickens with the fancy new Prismacolor colored pencils she got for Christmas. She came to work with me one day and used the quality colored pencils there - and promptly asked if we could throw away the cheap ones at home and replace them with Prismacolor. What can I say?
So if you're local, come see us (and lots of other farmer's market favorites) tomorrow at
Mountainside Wine on Upper Street in Spruce Pine. I
really hope Oak Moon Creamery will be there - I want some of their orange goat cheese for my roasted beet salad!
I've been meaning to put out bird feeders ever since we moved into the new house (a year ago now!) but I just got around to it the other day. Of course - we don't own any bird feeders, so Jo and I made a couple.
First up was the paper-towel tube feeder. Want to make your own? Spread peanut butter all over the outside of a paper towel tube and roll it in bird seed. Tie a length of twine (more than twice the length of the cardboard tube) around the center of a popsicle stick. Thread both ends of string through the tube so that the popsicle stick acts as a stopper at the bottom. Tie the ends in a knot and hang it outside.
We had to wait for an empty milk carton for the second one. Poke a hole through the top of a milk carton. Thread some string through it and tie it at the top for a hanger. Cut openings in opposite sides of the milk carton - not too close to the bottom - the seeds will only go up to the bottom of the opening. Poke holes an inch or so below each opening and thread a dowl through these holes. Fill with seeds, hang outside, and wait for the birds to find it.
No birds have found them yet. It's been so cold and windy out that I hope they're all hunkered down. I think I've seen one bird in the last week. One. Except for our chickens, of course. We did see one ENORMOUS opossum yesterday, walking down our driveway in the middle of the day. It was the biggest one I've ever seen - the size of a smallish dog. I wonder why it was out during the day. It certainly didn't look hungry.
Anyway, until I have photos of actual birds to show, I thought I'd leave you with
this lovely wool bird from
Cat's Miaow. Isn't he a cutie?
The water in our chicken coop keeps freezing! What's a backyard poultry farmer to do? Build a homebrew chicken water warmer. Here's how we did it:
To start, you'll need a large tin coffee can, or something comparable. It just needs to be metal.
Next, buy an "Electric Water Pipe Freeze Protection Cable," also known as a "Pipe Heating Cable." These are supposed to be used for keeping exposed pipes from freezing. Our local Ace Hardware had a nice selection of lengths. For this project, you'll want the one that's just three feet long. Out of the box, they look like this:
The black part is the heating cable.
The larger orange case is the thermostat, and the black circle is the sensor that must be touching whatever you need to keep warm. This Easy Heat model kicks on when the temperature falls to 38 degrees Fahrenheit, and warms the water until it reaches 45 degrees F. The documentation says it works down to -38 degrees. If that claim is ever tested, our chickens are going to have bigger problems than a frozen water dish.
We came back from our Wednesday night out for pizza to find this spectacular double rainbow across the valley from our home. From the foreground back: Jo's swing set, the new house we built, and the mobile home we lived in while we built it.
Wendi ran inside to get the good camera. Afraid the rainbow would go away before she could return, I snapped these shots with the camera phone. Besides the double rainbow, we got one full rainbow that arched across the sky. Absolutely amazing. It was so big I couldn't get the whole thing in one shot, so I took three:
Left.
Center.
Right.
It's a good thing I took these: the batteries in the house camera chose just that moment to run out of power. (Of course.) We still don't know if she got anything--we just put the camera batteries in the recharger. In the meantime, here are some more shots of the sky today, post winter rainstorm. No rainbows in these. These are back over the mountain, where the sun was setting.
