Tired...

Lots of things have been happening around here...

Potatoes are blossoming.

Spinach has bolted.

The chickens have been moved to their permanent scratching grounds after using them to kill grass and fertilize our new corn "field" (small patch about 10x15.)

This is where being tired comes from.  See I have little to no carpentry skills.  My husband is a wire cutter and saw pro.  Somehow we managed to cut windows in the chicken coop for better ventilation and then attach mesh over them so there are no escapees.  Then we built a little box with wire mesh to act as a tunnel from the coop we rebuilt to their wire dog cage.  Then I remucked their coop (why not...it's nice sometimes to just start fresh.) 

We managed to fill the compost pit.  I am thinking about letting that decompose while I build a real compost bin and use that.  Our compost pit is beginning to not serve it's purpose as well as it used to. 

A sock has been almost finished (one of my year's goals.)

And June is just bursting out all over here.

We got a new camera after months of issues with the old one, but there is a distinct lack of pictures here due to the screen on our camera compatible computer (say that 10x fast) now won't turn on so no pictures now.

Sorry it took so long to post, but we've been working from after work to bed time for about a week to get everything finished before the blazing heat began.

So I am about to go learn how to use the new camera and then maybe try to fix the old screen...wish me luck.

What the hay!

Well, we've run out of hay.  

Last winter we deep littered the chickens.

Instead of a weekly muck out of the coop, we first put down a deep layer of leaves and grass clippings from the fall cleanup and then put hay in the chickens' laying boxes.

Every week, I'd take an old feed sack full of 2 flakes of hay down to the coop and put it on top with a hand full of corn on top of that.  This way the chickens would stir up the layers and the coop would stay sweet smelling.  I would also dump out all the hay from the laying boxes onto the floor and put fresh hay in.  This way I had pretty clean eggs.

After mucking out the coop a few weeks ago, I realized we had gone through the hay we had bought and put in the  garage for the deep littering.  

The laying boxes were getting a little muddy from the chickens' feet and thus, the 10 eggs I collected yesterday were in desperate need for a good washing.

What's a girl to do when she is all out of hay and the boxes are getting muddy...and she's out of wood shavings, hay and other good items for the job?

She gets thinking.

My husband taught me how to get our lawnmower going a few weekends ago.  All the clippings from the mowing job went into the compost heap...and hay is just dry really tall grass (well kind of)...so I bet you can figure out what I did. 

The chickens had to go immediately into the boxes and check out what the new item was...I am always amazed by how curious creatures they are.

Was I rewarded with nice, fresh, non muddy eggs...

Not so much...

maybe I should teach them to wipe their feet off before coming in the (chicken) house.

A quarter pounder without cheese

A quarter pounder

Two eggs from the same chicken

This egg was the only one layed the day after the great mucking. 

 I consider it a thank you from the girls.

I'll pay for this tomorrow...

Monday is usually my work day.  I work one day a week and am home for the rest.  I had a cancellation so I went home for a few hours in the middle of the day.  The weather has started taking a turn for the damp coolness that usually precedes the blasting heat of summer around here. 

 I figured I would hoe the beds I started last summer and fall.  It took all of 10 minutes to do this as the soil was the best I have ever seen.  Soft, crumbly, dark and rich, it will be the best food for our food.  I then decided it could maybe do with a little nitrogen from our chicken coop aka "chicken poo."  I went in with a bucket and extracted a mass of our deep litter from the past 6 months.  It was starting to mature to a nicely aged mass of fertilizer.  So I put one bucket on each of our raised beds.  

Then I figured I shouldn't stop there. 

 I opened the muck door in the back of the chicken coop that goes straight into the compost heap.  After 2 hours, I had finally cleaned out 6 months of weekly layering of chicken litter.  I also took the time to use some of the compost from last year and layered compost with chicken litter in order to get a lovely bacterial colony going in the heap.  Worms were everywhere in the deep layers about one foot below ground, a sure sign of healthy soil that has been produced.  

With the work all done, I jumped in the shower (I bet my afternoon clients were happy I did this!) and went to the local feed store.  There I bought a big compressed bale of peat moss for lasagna beds and mulching later in the season, and on a whim asked how much for a discarded pallet.  The pallet recycler gives them a dollar each so he'd give me the same deal.  I also got a few seeds that I saw and liked.  

With all that done, I went back to work, clean, energized, and hopeful about my garden.  But I knew after all the lugging, pushing, and tugging, I'd be paying for it the next day...

and boy o boy am I ever.