Difficult Week

Part of life, especially an out of the ordinary life, is problems. Right????

This week was a frustrating one.

First of all....

It was difficult to sleep in the tent because last weekend it rained quite a bit. I didn't notice any specific leaks, but it was exceptionally humid. The comforter always felt moist and I kept waking up sweaty.

So the next day I was taking the sheets off to put them in the dryer, and I noticed that there was a small portion that was soaking wet. I also found a small slug on the floor next to the bed, which at first I thought was the culprit. But THEN, I lifted the mattress up (which was resting directly on the ground) and it was soaking wet as well. It seems there was a seam in the tarp-floor which must have leaked some moisture from the ground up into the mattress. The mattress was not only wet, but also MOLDY on the bottom. MAJOR BUMMER! We ended up propping the mattress up in my mother in law's living room to dry in front of the heater and fan. I think we will still be able to make it work, as long as we put the mattress up on the metal frame rather than on the ground. The reason we had initially put it on the ground rather than on the frame was because the ground is, shall we say....unlevel? So it was easier to make the bed level directly on the ground rather than on the frame. But, alas, we will have to just make it work on the frame, so we don't make the mattress moldy...

So this was on Tuesday, and we managed to make it until Friday until we reached yet another snag.

We let our chickens out, as usual, on Friday around noonish. A few hours later, Trystan informed me that the neighbor, whose property is a vacation home, was upset because the chickens had gotten onto her property and supposedly pooped on her car....

So this means that we can't let them free-range anymore. This depresses me exponentially. They loved going out and having free reign of the property. I truly believe it wasn't the chickens that pooped on her car, but just a regular bird, since I have never seen the chickens actually climb onto any of our cars.

We built them a little make-shift fence out of some free fencing we got from our awesome, amazing, wonderful friend Judy. They seem to be happier than being in the tiny coop all day, but one of them escaped today. We just let her hang out outside for a while (mostly because I couldn't find her) and eventually I found her pecking around in the coop, and then I put her back in the fenced area with her little chicken friends. We plan on putting the coop up next to the fence so they can go in and out as they please, but until we can do that, we will have to get them from the play yard to the coop manually. This means luring them into the enclosure with feed at the beginning of the day, and then one by one carrying them back into the coop at the end of the day. This has become more difficult as they figure out ways to evade being captured. But we will soon put the coop next to the enclosure so it will be easier.

So that was our week, a bit more exciting than usual!

chicken magic

As a follow-up to the last post, concerning chickens in the tree post of a few days ago...

I went out one night to make sure all of our clucky friends were safe and sound in the coop and not in the apple tree, and as usual a few were still in the tree.

I think there were 3 or 4 and I was able to get all but one out. This one was being a very stubborn little pullet hen, and I eventually made Trystan go and pluck her out since she had positioned herself in a way that she was sort of blocked in by small branches and inaccessible to me, and I did not have the height (or the nerve) to maneuver her out. She was in no way stuck, I was just afraid that if I were to pick her up she would fall TOO far and get hurt...but mostly I was just being overly cautious. I think I shall start calling this particular chicken "Stubborn Bessie". Yes yes, that suits her well :)

So the next day I was discussing the issue with our neighbor, Art, and he gave me a GREAT tip for getting them out of the tree. The trick is to push very gently on their chest with one hand, just enough to get them off balance and then they will jump onto your hand. That night I tried it and it works amazingly well. I did it after it started getting dark, and the chickens were all kind of in a trance. I don't think they see very well in the dark. When I tried setting them down in the coop, they seemed very scared and confused about letting go of my arm, and it took them a while to make their way up the ramp into the sleeping area of the coop. Eventually they found their way up, I think they just listened to their little friends softly clucking and followed their sounds. Lately they have gotten more and more friendly and affectionate. Have I mentioned I love my chickens?

Bedtime for Chickens

A recent blog post of mine talked about the chickens, and how we have been letting them out every day for the afternoon/early evenings, and how they put themselves to bed.
Well, in the past week a new development in chicken behavior has occurred. Around the time they usually put themselves to bed in their coop, they have been all climbing into the nearby apple tree and trying to sleep there.They would have stayed there all night and been dinner for owls, so we decided, as hard as it was for us to disrupt their cuteness, that we would have to get them into their coop. We did this fairly easily by picking them up and just putting them on the ground. They then beelined it very obediently to the coop. The picking up was the roughest part, as they like to flap and squawk like you're about to kill them. It was a little scary at first I'll admit, but then I learned that they were fine, I just kinda kept my head out of the way lest I get hit in the face with a wing.
So there's the story, and now here are some pictures of cute chickens in an apple tree. Enjoy!
(Don't worry, the cat didn't get them, he is kind of intimidated by them...)

Reaping the Fruits of our Labors

Hello All!
today was an EPIC day....EEEEEPPPPPIIIIIIC!
We just returned from a fabulous weekend trip to Portland, in which we enjoyed lots of bike riding, met some cool new people, and ate at a REAL restaurant for the first time in sooo long.
Unfortunately, before we left on Friday I had forgotten that we ran out of eggs from our favorite roadside stand, hadn't bought more, and now they were closed since it was Monday.
Trystan was getting in the car to go get some from a stand further away that may or may not have had eggs, when I decided I would go and look in the coop to see if the chickens had been busy. Now I have been doing this every so often for the past two or three weeks, to no avail, as the chickens are still a teeny bit young to be laying. They are about 4 1/2 months old, and from my research MOST chickens don't start laying until 5-6 months (they have been known to lay as young as 4 months).
So, out of curiosity I opened the hatch and LO AND BEHOLD.......AN EGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I can't even describe how excited I was! I felt like a kid in an Easter egg hunt. One you'd been waiting 4 1/2 months for, and you weren't sure when the easter bunny was actually going to start hiding the eggs. Needless to say, I was pleased.
Another happy surprise was the other day when we started digging through the soil in our potato patch and discovered lovely, large potatoes hiding like little jems in the dirt. We fried up a whole bunch the other night and they were like no other potato I'd ever eaten. I was amazed at how easy it was to grow them. We virtually put them in the ground and left them for two months. Can't wait til we can have delicious omelettes and home fries using all of our homegrown stuff!