Flower Explosion, Farm Stuff and a Birthday Party!

What started out as a pretty little Moonflower (one of my all time favorites so I bought one for Kevin for his birthday last year) has turned into a monster!

Check the size of it here in this picture. The Butterfly Bush behind it looks really big in comparison. Now look at it, the Butterfly Bush doesn't stand a chance! I had to trim back three or four feet just so we could get up the steps. The picture does not do it justice. The flowers are beautiful. It has taken over the whole garden. We are going to encourage it to grow more and scatter the seeds all over. It is a really good way to discourage the weeds. Kevin split open the thick leaves to show his dad the base of the plant and look below what is hiding in there.

Our beautiful Polish Crested chicken!

She is hiding her head because she thinks I can't see her. He moved the chicken to try and shoo her away but she has about 20 eggs under her and we have no idea how long she has been sitting on them. We will let her go and see if any hatch. I hope they do, it will be really fun to watch them. We have three of this breed and two of them are so broody. The other broody one has been sitting in a nesting box all summer, to no avail because I take the eggs every day.

Here is our other flower explosion. What started out as a few day lily starts has turned into huge plants. I like the background so much better! A chicken house instead of a pool. I'm going to cut the flower tops off soon. I'd rather be able to see the rock and the trellis instead of the flowers. Kevin wanted me to wait because there are still so many buds but it looks too messy to me. I'll put a before and after when I do it.
Here is the trellis I want a clear view of. It has a passion vine on it that we transplanted a few weeks ago and it is getting ready to bloom already. They are such fast growers. I hope it has time to fill in a little. I have been waiting since last year to transplant this. I finally found a really reasonably priced trellis, only about $20.00 so we finally transplanted it.Here are my sweet water lilys. Not a very good picture though, the camera wanted to focus on the cattails and not the lilys. When I was in Sugarcreek (Amish Country) a couple weeks ago I picked up three Amurs for our pond. (Grass eating carp if you didn't know) I was really worried about them eating my lilys but the lady at the fish hatchery said that the lilys are probably not hardy and won't make it through the winter anyway. They look nothing like anything we had in our lake when we were growing up so she may be right.




When we in Sugarcreek I found this really well made napkin holder. There is an Amish family that makes these and the kids sign and date them. Really cute don't ya think?

I also found this awesome buzzard to put by my pond.

Pretty creepy don't ya think. I love him!

While online looking for ways to water the food eating, water drinking demons that they call meat birds, Kevin found this amazing Bell Waterer. He ran a garden hose from our pond and it works great. It's a low pressure kind of thing that uses gravity to get water.

You can see the hose coming down the bank from the pond. We had to get the birds away from the house cause they are pretty stinky and ruin grass pretty fast. We really should move them a couple times a day but it's too much, working 10 hours a day. We do move them more on the weekends though. Here is my garden, all of it! Only one plant survived, all the rest were scratched up by the escapee chickens. I didn't have very much to start with though. There is a tomato with two leaves left on it but I'm sure it's days are numbered. I only have this one extra fence section.We had a birthday party for the youngest yesterday, 10 years old! Lots of Hannah Montana and pink stuff. We found this ice cream maker and I made frozen custard. Loved it!


I'm such a loser, I had to wrap her presents in used gift bags (they looked new though) and had to turn Christmas paper inside out for the big one. I covered it all up in a bunch of bows, girls love bows! We got her a Ladderball game (aka Hillybilly Golf) and Kevin, me, the youngest and her big brother played it all day today. She was at her Grandpa Mikes for the Fourth of July and played it there and loved it. She said she rocked at it. That was great but she and I were on a team and let's just say that neither of us rocked at it. The guys beat us two games to one. We will get our revenge though.



If any ones feeling bad about the heat take a look at this and be happy!

Til next time,

stay cool!

Beth

Chicken House Details

This creature is one of the reasons for our hard work and inpeneterable fence. His mama pulled one of our Guineas thru a 1" crack in our stall in the barn. She also tried to get another but it got away and had a very broken up foot for awhile but recovered eventually.

We caught three little whippersnappers and promptly took them far, far away to West Branch State Park. Well, only about 2 miles but to a racoon it was far, far away.

You can see the scraps of plywood that I had to use to make the wall. That is why it is not so pretty.

I split the chicken house at about the nine foot mark. They got nine feet I got seven feet. We thought the turkeys would spend a lot more time in there but once we put up the lean-to they all seem to stay outside if the weather is bad. And by bad I mean 30 mile an hour winds and the temp somewhere at five degree wind chill.

The tom turkeys have not spent one night in the chicken house. Even when we had temps of 20' and winds gusting to 50 miles an hour they hung on for dear life up in the tree. Their heads hanging down low with rain dripping off of them. You can see in my videos how they spend the night.

As soon as we put down the straw Cleo moved right in. It was so cute, she just layed right down and didn't want to leave.
Mr. Turkey, also known as "my buddy" (he is the one in the video that pecks me!) hopped right up on the new perches, he is so nosy. Always in the middle of everything. We made the perches out of some small trees that we had cut down. You can also see the two heat lamps, one for daytime and another with a red colored bulb for at night.

We covered the windows with heavy cardboard to stop drafts. I can't wait til spring and I can take it off and see them looking through the windows. There is a thermometer hanging there too so we can watch the temps inside the coop.

Above and below you can see how we spray foamed all the cracks. Next time we will spray between the timbers during construction instead of after.

The sun comes streaming nicely through the roof. We hated to put the chickens in there cause it was so beautiful, the 12 yr. old said he would like to move in!


We bought some fence boards that were really cheap and made our door. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE our door. I just wanted straight boards across, not the slanty ones like a horse barn door has. I understand that the slanty ones hold everything in place but the straight ones look more like an old-fashioned cottage.
A close-up of the door. Kevin is the best at this stuff. I describe what I want and he starts cutting lumber and poof, it appears. Perfectly.
Here we are the day we moved the chickens in! My sister, Amy and the girls and I moved them from the barn to the chicken house after her husband helped Kevin put the fence up. (We don't put pictures of the kids in but one of them took this picture of us.) All went well until the last batch and Amy tripped going into the doorway. She was carring a large wire cage with a fie or six chickens and I had one under each arm. She saved the chickens instead of herself and hurt her leg really bad. Below is a picture of the damage.

Surprisingly, the swelling went down really quickly. It looked REALLY bad at first. Kinda scary.

After the rough looking picture of us I thought I'd better include this one of us all cleaned up and looking a little better. The first couple is my sister Diane and her husband Norm who hosted our Thanksgiving dinner. The middle is me and Kevin and at the right is Amy and Tom. In most cases we look like the picture by the chicken house. I am going out later and take pictures of my fence and the little door that Kevin cut for the chickens to go in and out of their house.

Have fun today everyone!

Beth

Building our Chicken House

Hold on a minute...I've gotta open my blog in another tab so I can see where I ended.


OK, I checked...I've gotta write about the roof and all the rest of the finish stuff. Not that it is even finished yet. We still have some aesthetic details to take care of.

Here is a close up view of the brackets that we used to attach the roof boards. They are called hurricane straps or something like that. Kevin is sleeping and I don't want to wake him up just to make sure that they are called "straps" and not "plates" or whatever.

After we sawed off the ends of the timbers and added the roof boards, he added these cap plates to the ends of the boards.

Kevin and I went to Home Depot to find some roofing material. There were basically two different kinds. He wanted the wavy type that lets light through so the chickens would have light all day if it was cold out and they stayed inside.We found a product called- "Suntuf — General purpose corrugated polycarbonate sheets"

The picture above shows a piece of it. It was kinda pricey but it is worth it. It lets the light in but not the damaging UV light. We got the "Solar Grey" color. It says it lets in 35% of the light. It was funny, the first really heavy snow that we had, we walked in and said uh oh... snow does not let light through. It was really dark in there despite being a sunny day. We did not plan on snow being so dense. It melts pretty quick around here so it's not dark for long. Plus we have two heat lamps set up. One that comes on at 3:00 pm and off at 9:00 pm that is a regular light and another that comes on at 9:00 pm and stays on all night that is red so they will sleep.

Here is a closeup of the roof when we were installing the "closure strips". Of course, they were installed on top of the boards as the picture below shows, not next to them . They were just laying there til Kevin attached them. The next picture shows a close-up of this.

This diagram is from the Palram website. It shows a much better installation diagram than I can ever describe.

I am going to go out and take a picture of the roof later today and add it so you can see the finished roof. I cannot find a picture anywhere. I also need to take some pictures of the little lean-to that we added to the side so the chickens and turkeys had somewhere dry to hang out and eat. It's funny, some of the chickens have decided that they would rather lay eggs outside in the lean to rather than in the chicken house.

OK, we went out and here is a picture of the finished roof. But guess what, there is snow all over it and you can't see a thing.

Here is the back side of the lean to and below is the inside. The chickens love it and hang out in there all day.

We keep the feeder, a bulk feed storage tub and we have the heated waterers in there too. The upper bucket has the nipple waterers in it but we are afraid that all of the chickens won't find the nipples so we have a regular bucket out there too. It is for horses and kinda tall but we keep a skid next to it the chickens are able to step up reach in and drink just fine. This way we only have to worry about watering them every few days or so. I feel for the people who have to carry water every day.

Here is the windows that Kevin cut in with a chain saw. We are going to add some more trim boards this summer. I put plexiglass over the this one and then covered it with cardboard when it got cold.

This one had poultry netting stapled onto it and when it got cold I added the plexiglass and then when it was really cold we put cardboard over that one too. With the roof letting light in we didn't have to worry about it being dark if we covered the windows to stop drafts. Eventually we want to make some kind of shutters to close for the winter.

Kevin made these nesting boxes out of 5 gal. buckets. The chickens love them so much they sleep in them and they are always dirty. He used two buckets for each one and cut a hole in one for the egg to roll back through and I got some fake grass stuff to line the bottom so it wouldn't be slippery. As you can see below it works pretty good although they all fight over the bottom right one. Sometimes there will be three chickens in it all at once.

See, works pretty good!

Here is one of the independent girls that have to lay outside under the lean to, so every day I have to climb through the fence and get the eggs. We have maybe five or six chickens that lay outside.

Here is the free standing unit before I built the wall around it. I built a pretty temporary wall between the two spaces in the chicken house because we were not sure of the final space and we didn't have any good lumber so I had to use scraps. It's not pretty but it works.

I went to the lumber yard and got this inexpensive screen door for about $25.00 and cut it down to fit. I stapled poultry netting to the bottom and covered the top half with plexiglass. I wanted to be able to see in but keep the draft out and most of the dust. The only thing I think I didn't cover was the fence. I didn't take any pictures while we were building it so I need to take some pictures of the fence and post them next time.

Earlier when we went outside we fed and watered the chickens. Everyone was happy except we seem to have a broody chicken. I just don't have the heart to take the eggs away but I guess we are going to later on today.

Here she is the poor thing. She's got 5 or 6 eggs under her. I have taken the eggs away a few times but she stays there anyway. I don't really want to take them away but it is way too early to have baby chickens. Besides that, our rooster is a Golden Phoenix and the chicks will be probably small, not too good for eggs or meat. We are going to get a larger rooster sometime soon. Our Phoenix is beautiful but he is kinda mean, always chasing the kids. He has attacked me a couple times but I chase him til I catch him and I kinda got him a little scared of me I think, maybe just respectful?

The other day I took all the eggs and lined them up to see how they compare. As you can see, we have more brown than the green, then white, then the small tan ones in front. The brown are from the R. I. Reds and Buffs, the green from the Americanas, the white from the Polish Crested and the tans are from the Golden Phoenix.

I held the largest Americana egg up and compared it with the smaller Phoenix... you can see why I am definitely getting a new rooster!

Onward with the Chicken House!

When we decided to construct this chicken house, we wanted something that was really low cost for the square footage but we also wanted it to be draft free and nice looking. We built it close to the house so it was important that we enjoyed looking at it. We ended up splitting the house into two sections, one for the chickens and the other half for us for storage and maybe to start some seeds in the spring. The roofing allows sunlight through so it will be perfect for some plants.

We always sit on our back deck and the chicken house is in full view so we can really enjoy watching the chickens and turkeys all day. Although today it is only 11 degrees with a -6 windchill. Brrrrrrrrr! The chickens and turkeys don't mind too much. They have been outside all day.

At this point in the construction, we added 2 x 4' s as a guide for the framing. It was really easy from then on and much faster than trying to use the level, constantly checking for straight lines.

When we priced different types of structures, all in all, this seemed to be the best for us. We love how it looks and the walls are already thick. In the end we put spray foam between the timbers to seal the cracks. We weren't sure how much air would get through and it ended being quite a lot because the timbers are far from perfect. We were also thinking about some type of rubber weatherstripping but the spray foam worked great, also acting like a glue. Next time we will definitely apply it between boards while we are building. We think it would take much less foam and would help to hold everything together.

By the end of the first day we had the wall up this far. At this point we went ahead and ordered the rest of the landscaping timbers. We had them delivered from Home Depot. They were on sale for $1.99 so we ended up spending about $350.00 for 170 timbers. (Plus $70. delivery fee.) Add another $50 dollars or so for the nails. I think we ended up getting 30lbs. of nails all together. We used three nails per timber.
Here is the second delivery of timbers. At first we weren't positively sure about the finished size but eventually we decided on the 8 x 16 foot size and we also decided to make the roof in a "shed" style so we ended up ordering more timbers. We were able to calculate exactly what we would need at this point. We had wanted to gather the runoff water with a gutter and run it into a watering system but the turkeys decided to spend time on the new roof and poop all over it. Not good for them to drink! We are still trying to come up with a good way to keep them off. Ideas anyone?




After we had a good start on the walls Kevin wanted to go ahead and lay the floor down so it would raise us up higher, making it easier to reach as the walls got higher. He had left an edge exposed when he laid the first timber down on the base so he could use it for a nailer for the floor.

We got the floor boards for free. We work at a place that gets steel delivered every day. The sheets of steel have 2 x 4 x 8's in between them as spacers. That was a real savings. The quality of wood is not high but it works for simple framing and definitely chicken house floors.

There were a lot of timbers with slight bends in them. We would nail one end in and then push as hard as we could and nail the center and then the other end. We put the most unsightly ones in the back, you can see some of the bulgy ones in this picture.

It was at this point that we started on the roof. I kinda wanted a peaked roof but it was more cost effective to go with the slanty one. Plus it fit with the idea of making a greenhouse/seed starting area and it seemed a good way to gather water. In this picture Kevin is checking the roof pitch and how many timbers we still had to add to get there. The sides are really high now and the timbers were getting heavier and heavier the higher it got.

I had to add this picture because I took it while we were building. I came across it in a folder with all the chicken house pictures. I love this plant. It is a Passiflora - Passion Vine, and it it the coolest flower I have ever seen. The three lobed leaves are different than most plants too. For those of you that have not seen these before, they are really quick growers and would cover a trellis their second year. I am going to train them up a trellis on the side of chicken house (to cover the seam between the sides) this summer. If you'd like to know more about these plants here is a link.

http://www.plant-care.com/passiflora-passion-vine.html

Here he is attaching the roof trusses... trusses?... yeah, I guess that is what they are called. He left the sides rough and he cut them off with a chain saw after he had the correct roof line.

Here is the front view. You can see the timbers sticking out in steps and below is the back side after he sawed them off. He used to work for a tree company so he is awesome with a chain saw. That is how he cut out the windows and the small chicken door too.

Below is the front view very nicely trimmed up too.

You can see our back deck in this picture. As soon as it warms up we will be sitting here every spare moment. We used to sit and watch the kids swim but now we watch kids play with chickens. As you can see, the house need painted and a new roof really bad. You may not be able to see but there is a large cooking pot over one of the old vent pipes in the roof. There is also a coffee cup over another small pipe. For some reason Kevin thinks we need a new roof and we also need to paint the house.

I really want a lean-to shed built onto our barn for some cattle. He thinks the house is more important. He said NO MORE ANIMAL PROJECTS until the house is done! Oh well, we will see. All I know is that when I'm on the deck early in the morning drinking a cup of coffee watching the animals I can't see the house. It's behind me.

But I've got my chicken house, I'm HAPPY! (You watch come this spring, he will be itching to work on the barn.)

Next Post: the roof goes on, we build an inside divider wall and door, nesting boxes, perches and a fence that no dog will ever get under!