I think my desk is in the coldest corner of the house.  It’s definitely the furthest from the furnace, and I think the square of floor under my desk is influenced more by the outside temperature on the other side of the wall than by the heated air blowing down from above.  A slab foundation, hardwood floors, and forced air heat from the ceiling just aren’t a good combination for warm feet.  Any concrete floor that I ever pour for myself, even for a chicken house, is going to have pipes for radiant heat.  That would feel really good right now. Read more »

I don’t think this is my first “Catching Up” post, and it probably won’t be my last.  I promised myself that when all the holiday parties were over (I attended nine get-togethers between Dec. 20th and Jan. 2), I’d get back to blogging regularly.  So I’ll start by catching up on the past couple months. Read more »

Two years ago, we started a leaf pile.  I staked down a circle of chicken wire at the far end of the back yard, and we’ve piled all our leaves in it ever since.  The reasoning behind it is that, if you put your leaves in your compost pile with other stuff, the leaves will mat together and take forever to break down, especially the big flat leaves like maples.  So you compost your leaves separately, and after a few years you get this really great leaf compost.  It just takes a long time. Read more »

I’ve wanted to put wheels on our chicken house for a while, to make it easier to move around.  It’s about all I can do to shove it from one spot to another, and I need to be able to move it every day to give them fresh grass and keep them from digging holes in the yard.  It should make for about a two-week rotation.

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We’ve been seeing some shiny slug trails on the patio lately, but when Pepper’s dog food was shiny one morning, I decided something needed to be done about it.  There seem to be a lot of them this year, maybe due to the cool, wet weather.  I suspect they’re also responsible for the holes in the cabbage leaves, since I haven’t seen any cabbage worms.

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We’ve answered the age old question: the chickens came first, in late March; the eggs about four and a half months later.

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I’m having trouble getting rolling on a topic lately, so I’ll just start typing and see what comes out.

I just got done moving the chicken house to a new spot.  Since I haven’t put wheels or handles on it yet, this basically involves walking it across the yard one end at a time, until I get it where I want it or run out of steam, whichever comes first.  I really need to get wheels on it, so I can move it more often and keep it from being so hard on the grass.

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We’ve been feeding the chickens a batch of wheat sprouts every few days, and they really like them, so I took pictures of the last batch so I could write up a little how-to on it.  We’ve also sprouted millet and radish seed, but mostly we’re doing wheat.

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