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

More Chicken Coop Details

I took some more pictures of the movable pen that Kevin made so you could see a few details that weren't finished when I posted about it. We put flight netting over the top and added a pole so that we could walk around in it. Zip ties made the whole thing very quick to assemble. There is not a nail or screw anywhere in the pen. We were going to make it 6' tall but changed it to 4' to accommodate the fencing we had left over from a previous project. Every time I go in there to put feed in the feeders I wished we had gone with the 6' because I usually have my hair up in a clip and it invariably gets snagged in the netting as I am walking bent over. Nice!



I slid a shovel through the fencing to make a fat perch so that Missy, our little handicapped poult, could roost. Her foot was injured, I think from big, fat Flipper stepping on her from when she was tiny and in the pen with him. We kept two poults in with Flipper for company when he hatched so he wouldn't get lonely. Now they are inseparable. Her foot has gotten better and she can perch normally although she has a funny rolling gate and cannot run very fast.



Buddy is attached to the little chicks that were in with him too. When the chicks roost at night Buddy sleeps right below them as close as he can get cause he cannot get up on the roost to be next to them.

Here is a closeup of the gate detail. Kevin used a chain link fence gate hinge for the door. He had to modify it a little cause the plastic pipe was too large.

The top hinge, pretty handy huh.

At work we got something delivered in this huge wooden box so I asked if I could have it and we brought it home. It made a find little chicken house. My attempt at making a ramp is a little rickety but it worked. Flipper looks like a goose now. He is only seven and a half weeks old. Amazingly the turkeys that are older than him are small in comparison. I feel guilty saying this but if you wanted a bird strictly for meat an Ebdon goose would be it. They grow so fast and eat tons of grass and weeds and would need minimal feed once they were a few months old. I guess they reach mature size at like three or four monthe old. (Sorry Flipper and Buddy for saying that)

Speaking of turkeys, here they are and boy do we have a problem. We do not want to put them in with the older birds yet so we have left them roaming the yard close to the house so we could keep an eye on them. (We have a Coopers Hawk that visits our pond looking for frogs. I got to see him swoop down and catch one a couple weeks ago, really cool!) But then the turkeys discovered that the deck rail is a really nice place to roost. Well you can imagine! Eight turkeys walking all over the table and lots and lots of mess under the rail so now they have a little fenced area off by themselves. I loved watching them run all over the yard though. They looked like the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park.

See ya next time,

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!