We haven’t posted about the chicken sedan in a while, but progress has been slow.  Skipper made it by a couple weeks ago and added the nesting boxes.  Then we both started puzzling over how to deal with the hinging lid.  The last time I saw him he proposed a perfectly workable solution, so I suppose that’s on the todo list, along with trim, a rough door, interior sheathing, and blocking around the top.

Funny how quickly your opinions change.  When we started on this design I thought it was the perfect box for 12 to 15 hens (Robin has 25 on the way), but since then I read Open-Air Poultry Houses for all Climates, a 1912 book on the subject which you can find as a free scan by Google.  You can also find a similarly titled 1924 book available as a modern reprint.  The basic idea is that people build coops too tight, and that an open-front chicken house will greatly reduce the risks of disease and still provide sufficiently shelter from poor weather.  So now I’m not sure if I should put a glass window in our coop, and were I to do it over I would build several smaller more mobile units.  But then again, maybe our design is more suited to an integrated chicken-coop / greenhouse, as suggested by Introduction to Permaculture, another book I’m reading.  Live and learn, eh?

What did they do? All move in together in a minivan?

We got rid of a bunch of chemical products that were left behind when we bought the property. Lee brought them down to a hazardous waste round up today. Some of the bottles you couldn’t even tell what was in them originally because of the labels being gone.

My Uncle came over to look at our old fruit trees, give us a lesson on tree trimming,  and then trimmed them up for us (Thanks a bunch). Unfortunately the ones we have are in vary bad shape. They will probably be taken out later on. But he did a really good job with what there was to work with and then showed us several times how to not trim a tree. I had to not look and think thoughts about how close the hospital was in case something bad happened.

We have mice! YUCK. The nasty putrid little vermin had the audacity to poop on my counter. Which then inspired a kitchen disinfection cleanup. So far we have killed three in mouse traps.

It all started with a noise that we heard late one night. It didn’t sound like squirrels so we went and got some mouse traps, baited them with peanut butter, and set them. We checked them the next day and nothing. So we then promptly forgot about them. Then for about three days in a row I started smelling something in the stairway that reminded me of when we moved in and I was cleaning up dead mice and their nests. I finally said something about it to Lee and made him check the traps. Yeah. We had one that had been there for a few days. So he told me to go check the other trap. Ditto. Oh how I hate them. Cute outside but don’t come in please.

Now I have been keeping a close eye on my counters as I knew how many dead mice we found in the house when we moved in. The house had to be alive with their rattlings of them at one time. I had never found so much as a dropping. Then the morning after we found the two dead mice I had two places show up where they pooped on the counter as mentioned above. We checked the traps again and we had one tripped trap and another dead mouse in the other.

So far we haven’t had another dead mouse today and no mouse droppings in the kitchen. I am so grossed out. Why now do they want to move in when the weather is getting warmer?

We rented a D R Brush Mower and had fun taking out sticker bushes. It was wonderful. Okay so maybe it was exhausting and I did get three blisters. BUT, it was so nice getting rid of some of those nasty buggers. We have read that it takes several mowing downs of the bushes before they are killed all the way and don’t come back. Our work is cut out for us. It is going to take several times of renting a brush mower before we get all of them mowed down. But once the forest of stickers are mowed down then it will be easy to keep it under control and keep the small stuff down.

We’re still here.  We haven’t frozen.  Don’t let Robin tell you otherwise!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but we’ve been working on a bunch of small things at once and none of them were particularly blog worthy.  Oh, and we’ve both been sick.  Like 3+ weeks and still coughing.  But, updates (with pictures) will be forthcoming.

We’ve been worried about our wood supply lately.  Our 5th cord for the winter is dwindling fast, and Oregon decided to have a cold snap again.  Tonight it’s a little warmer .. 40° at the moment .. so we haven’t had a fire in 24 hours.  I believe that’s first for the new year.  Robin’s still complaining about the cold of course, but hey, that’s why we have a big furry sheepdog–bed warmer.