Moving Day

The chickens moved into their new coop yesterday. We’ve upgraded from the urban yard coop to the small farmstead coop, with room for more chickens next year.

It’s made from pine boards we salvaged from a house when I was eight months pregnant with Nemo. One of the benefits of being a carpenter is that you are able to bring home unwanted yet useful building materials.

 

For the roof Glen used shingles that he found in the garage when we moved in. Roof guard he saved from the dumpster at work was used to paper the walls and roof.

In the spring we’ll use siding we had for the house to finish of the outside. Oh yes, the base of the coop is an old section of dock Glen scavenged off a job site, as well as the window. If you ever buy a fixer-upper, it wouldn’t hurt to get a part time job as a grunt at least, you never know what you’ll be able to bring home!

For nesting “boxes” we’re currently using 5 gallon pails turned on their sides, which will work until spring when we’ll need them again, and at that point Glen will build shelves of wooden boxes for nests.

Glen is currently designing the chicken run to attach to the coop so we can contain them. This will be the most interesting part because those chickens like to roam, and they won’t be happy unless they get a significant amount of room to move.

We’ve been giving away eggs to the neighbors who have been so gracious to let the ladies scavenge on their yards, but we’d like to keep them on our property now that we know they will just keep traveling down the road in daylight.

Last night the ladies spent their first night in the coop. We let them go into their old home and then Glen carried them to their new place. When he got up this morning he peeked in the window and they were still wandering around the coop, as if they hadn’t even gone to bed! The heat lamp might be confusing them as to the time of day.

I left them in there a while today, hoping that it would help them to get used to it, but they still returned to the old roost this evening. I hear it can take a while for a chicken to be trained to seek out their new coop, so we may end up covering the old one with a tarp for now. It’s so much more convenient for them to come in for the night on their own than carry each of them to their beds!

Welcome to your new home ladies!

As an interesting side note (how could I forget!), on day 2 of this operation, the power drill equiped with a screw tip slipped off the screw while Glen was trying to attatch the rafters (the drill was not on), and he managed to make a nice hole in the side of his left forefinger. But no worries, with plenty of peroxide, antibiotic cream, a popcycle stick splint, comfrey salve and lots of bandaids it is healing up quite nicely. Glen reassures me that it really didn’t hurt that bad since his hands were numb from the cold anyway, and he never lost mobility of his finger so it looks like his body is doing well in healing itself. Yay!

Just another day…

I currently have several ideas for posts I’m working on, related to home and children, among other things, but the past week has been crazy busy, and I just can’t seem to find the time to write anything that requires thought. Finishing up Christmas gifts, tying together loose ends on my book (which I’m still hoping to have published through Amazon by the end of the year, by the way), and visiting with family and friends. Sorry mom, I don’t think I’ll be doing any more mending for you till after Christmas! Oh yes, and Glen and I celebrated six years of marriage last weekend!

Needless to say, I was planning to write about goings on today, when I got a call last night from a dear friend begging me to take her four kids today (ages 11 months to 7 years) from 6am to 4pm-ish because their babysitter stepped on a manure-covered nail. And, I had also invited another friend and her three  children to come build with Lego this afternoon. So I had seven kids to watch myself, and then three more came to play… and Glen stayed home from work today to rest for a while because he was up all night with a cough. It sure was a full house! But I was impressed with how well the kids behaved and it was really quite fun, even if I am exhausted.

So, no deep thoughts or long stories to share today, just some anecdotes and random pictures of family, friends, and the last Christmas present I made for the kids. And, my sincerest kudos to all stay at home moms of large families!!

This really has no “appropriate” place for the post so I’ll just say here, that I love the cute things kids say. My friend’s 5 year old who visited today was playing with Atlas and said “He’s so cute, I just can’t stop looking at him!” I’m in the same boat, but I couldn’t help but fast forward another 10 or so years…

But, because I can’t help but give plugs for blogs I love, I have really been enjoying Handmade Home in my spare moments, a book by Soule Mama, which I won at Fun In My Back Yard. I’m looking forward to making some of her projects, and I think it’s really cool that she included some which Nemo and Daphney may be able to help me with.

I’ve also been collecting ingredients to make hand lotion with at least some of my next two quarts of herbal oils. Perhaps they would make nice Christmas gifts?

And, I also have to put a plug in for my new favorite herb, Yarrow. I’ve been growing it because I knew it had a lot of good uses, I just hadn’t found many applications for my family at this point. Until Daphney came down with another fever yesterday morning. Granted, her temp had gone from 102 to 101 when I gave her the infusion, but each of two sippy cups full she had of yarrow tea brought her temp down over the course of the afternoon and by nightfall it was hardly a fever at all. No return today! And now I’m wishing I had more than 1 small bunch of dried yarrow left :0( I guess I’ll just have to start growing it indoors over the winter.

So here are the pictures of the road map I sewed for Nemo and Daphney. It’s a little smaller than I was hoping it to be, but it’s still bigger than most of the roads we contrive out of paper and cardboard. I’m excited because it’s made out of materials I already had, it’s supposed to be a map of our town, it rolls up cute, and I know they’ll both love it. What more can you ask for?

And while I’m on a train of random thoughts, anyone want to preorder a chicken coop for spring? Check out our website at www.nopoopcoops.com!

Gardening and stuff

You know it’s really hard to only post once a week when there are so many things to talk about. Before I follow through on my promise to talk about our garden I’ll share a couple exciting things with you.

We sold our first chicken coop! We’re very excited about this because it marks the beginning of a (hopefully) successful business that, who knows, may support our family if Glen’s progressively slower workload drops off the map. A lot more people have been buying chickens in the past year and Glen saw it as an opportunity. That is one of the great things about our country being capitalist. If you want to see more info about our made in Maine coops visit our website here.

The sewing machine is buzzing. I’ve been putting off curtains for the camper for a while now, mostly because it’s in the middle of the woods and no one is likely to drop in on us unexpectedly. However, we have discovered that the sun likes to peak in and shine on our faces very early in the morning, which leads to grumpy children much earlier in the day. So I’ve begun working on curtains to hang, using two different types of fabric I had been given, since I don’t think I have enough of any one pattern of fabric to cover all the windows. So far I have the curtains done in the kids’ room, and Glen is going to make the curtain rods out of plywood.

Century is a success! Glen designed a board game, probably a year and a half ago. Our family has been looking forward to trying it out, but Glen got a bit discouraged with all the time it was taking to hand stamp and write on each game card, and he needed something like 1,200? Yeah. So it sat in the closet for months, until we started spending days at camp and he had more time to think about an alternative to all the cards – a spin dial, duh! This past week Glen and I tried out the game for the first time after the kids went to bed, and we were having so much fun we accidently stayed up until 12:45am. It’s a little complicated to describe the goal and rules in this short clip, but eventually I’m sure I’ll write a post all about it. His goal is to sell the, but first we’ll have to figure out a way to produce each one more quickly.

Little Girl’s accomplishment. Daphney has been sick this week again, another bacterial infection I think. I wish there was some way to keep her fingers out of her mouth! At least one day she’ll have a super strong immune system. But I had to tell you that last week Daphney made a stack of 20 blocks all by herself! She has never stacked more than 5 or 10, so this was a big surprise to not only her parents but to herself as well! Look how proud she is!

Digging in the dirt. Or, my war with the weeds. The week following Memorial Day weekend I spent an evening up at my grandparent’s garden planting veggie seeds and since then have gone up at least once a week to weed. Unfortunately I really need more than one evening a week to weed this garden and it has ended up looking really sad. I was spending my time weeding about six inches on either side of each row and before long the aisles were overgrowing the seedlings!

So after much whining and bugging, I finally got Glen to come help me put a barrier over the aisles to help slow down the weed growth and give me a little breathing room. We used tar paper stuff that’s supposed to go under shingles, just some extra building materials we had kicking around.

I had really intended to write a post about my garden before now, but held off for two reasons. One, there is always something else exciting to talk about and the garden will still be around later. And two, I’ve been waiting for the perfect moment when my garden will be picture-worthy. But I’ve come to realize that my garden probably never will be picture worthy, so I’m just going to bite the bullet and show you just one more part of my life that isn’t pretty but at least it functions. At least I’m getting rewarded for the work with my home grown radishes and green beans so far!

So far we have peas, carrots, spinach, onions, broccoli, green beans, corn, and squash. I’m also watching over the carrots and tomatoes my grandfather planted while he’s away, since this is his garden! At home we have tomatoes and a few herbs growing: comfrey, yarrow, and skullcap.

And as for lessons I’ve learned, here they are:

• Avoid planting a garden away from home
• Make plans for babysitters if you have toddlers and babies
• Don’t start out too big
• Plan well

And…

• Enjoy digging in the dirt, the breeze on your face, and the sun on your back. The peace I’ve gained from working in the garden really has made it worth it all.

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