50 Shades Of Grey ... Farm Style.

A Lovely View

I know it sounds a little ominous, but don't panic. Steve has not been naughty. You'll laugh when you see the photos. Steve got the first chicken and turkey tractors finished today while I was planting and getting the running around all done. After he was done I guess he looked at it and thought 'Hmm, that'd make a good work bench' so he built a second one above the first for use by the chickens. I couldn't resist taking photos. Maybe I just get a kick of seeing my husband behind bars. 

It's been a very productive day! Even Jordan got in a full days work despite being in a play at school and taking half the afternoon off for the final show. It was awesome.

We got some herbs in, half a dozen roses and a rhododendron are planted, 800 feet of potatoes, a hundred pumpkins plus we transplanted out the 4 giant pumpkins from the greenhouse. Mateo our wwoofer and the sister missionaries all he lped with the first rows of market crops in the green garden, the girls helped me plant chives and Meghan cut the grass. So it's slowly beginning to look like a house with a yard and garden instead of a trailer park after a tornado. I even cheated and ordered pizza for supper because I still don't have an oven and the time saved gives me more time to get the turkeys moved to their new home before it gets dark.

Caged Husband

Ok, my drink break is over. Time to get back to work. I think I've absorbed as much water as I'm going to for now.

(10pm Update)

W ell it's too dark to work so I'm inside now avoiding the bugs. All the animals are tucked away except the ducks who are out hunting for their new crunchy June bug treats. The wind has picked up so I popped out to give all my plants one last watering while the bugs were relatively light. I sprayed myself first and still got a few bites despite the wind. 

The turkeys are settled into their tractor (that's the name for a movable poultry pen) and are all roosting up on their perch. They look so cute! The chicks have moved from the dining room to the greenhouse where the turkeys used to live. We moved the feeders that they're used to out there and I'm trying to teach them how to drink out of the watering nipples. If they get that figured out it'll be lovely because I can set up a gravity fed watering system for them when they're ready to move outside in a few weeks. It's hard to believe that just a few weeks back we were worried about the turkeys getting too cold on those frosty nights where it dropped below freezing. Now the problem is the heat. The greenhouse topped out today at over 51 degrees Celsius, that's 124 Fahrenheit. Yikes! And that was with the main door top open. I quickly opened the back door and vented the whole place. The tomatoes are all ok and we'd moved the roses out to the garden at that point so the real worry was the turkeys. They were totally fine and had plenty of water while they lay in the shade. It took them a few minutes to adjust to going from their greenhouse box to the great outdoors and their new grassy run, but they have settled in and are having a very good time now. I was thinking I'd put a solar light in there to attract bugs for them to play with in the evenings. Turkeys love bugs.

It's an inside job

If the weather is wet tomorrow I'm going to build a display rack and pot up more tomatoes. I'm taking them over to the Co-Op Country Store in Middleton for sale so feel free to buy some :)  The basil should also be okay to get into the garden and some into pots. The oregano in the greenhouse isn't doing very well though so I'm going to make a nursery bed in the garden next week and plant it in a nice sandy spot. The weather is supposed to be gusty and wet tomorrow so I'm glad it'll water in my new veggies and give me a break from digging. Maybe I'll even sneak my radio and bench out to the greenhouse and commune with nature for a couple of hours after church. That's the thing about the weather, it dictates so much of what we do here at the farm and so we just have to always plan for a backup activity if the weather turns inclement.

Well, I'm off to shower and scrub off the layers of sunscreen and repellent. I have a lovely tan but I'm pretty sure it'll wash off too. Then I plan to collapse into bed and stay there. Have a lovely day guys. I probably won't have time to post tomorrow but if I can, I'll get some photos of the gardens as our 'before' shots.

What comes after 2 days of Rain? ---- Monday

We had another cool and wet week but the brunt of the rain is over for now and the sun is shining. It's cooled right down again with evening temps dipping below freezing. Still, the sun is out today and since the kids have a day off school we're going to make another attempt at getting a 40x60 ft sheet of plastic over the greenhouse roof without the wind carrying it away like a kite with children attached. The wind is supposed to be light after lunch so we'll see. With the moisture in the ground now and the sun shining we'll hopefully see the lawn growing soon. We did put on some 17-17-17 fertilizer to give it a boost since it's looking thin and weak. You can't really be spreading liquid manure in a neighborhood where the neighbours are mere feet away from your yard. So to keep the peace we used slow release pellets instead. We didn't fertilize the garden area though, I'm going to dig in compost, leaf mold
and composted manure when I till it this weekend. I did overseed some bare patches in the lawn too but resisted the urge to plant oats as a nurse crop for the grass, it works great in pastures though because the faster growing oats provide shade and water deflection for the smaller grass seeds to get established.

Yesterday Steve and Chris built me some hen houses with a removable panel on the side for easy cleaning and egg retrieval. We moved the buff orpington chicks out with the 4 hens but the hens chased them pecked them mercilessly and generally beat the tar out of the new arrivals. I've seen hen fights before but this was bad so they are now separated and doing well. We might try to reintroduce them once the chicks are physically bigger.

The houses measure 4 feet on a side (4x4) and it takes 2 sheets of OSB or plywood to make one house. Additional materials needed are some 2x2 or scrap lumber for edging so you have something solid to screw into and also some hardware cloth for vent screening, screws and some angle brackets to act as a rest for the side panel, to stop it from sliding off. To remove the panel you just slide it up a few inches and it comes right off. The houses do have a few exposed edges so for year round use they need to have a waterproof covering and currently ours are simply tarped. Venting is very important because chickens do have a tendency to get damp in their houses so ventilation provides a drier and healthier environment. Each house has top and bottom vents as shown in the pictures and are covered in hardware cloth to stop rats and mink from getting in. A roost runs along the house and we cover the floors of ours with shavings from the feed store or the high school wood shop. Cost for each house was about $24 and end triangles were cut from a 4x4 piece of wood with the front panel being a whole piece and the back panel being the leftover pieces joined together. If you need better instructions, let me know. This shape makes it easy to attach a run and is good for a chicken tractor, especially if you add feet or wheels t raise the house off the ground. Ours will be outside in the summer and then in the barn for the wet season so they're fine for now. They're not beautiful but they're cheap and functional.