Mid-winter update

Two eggs per day now...usually. It's easy to tell who's egg is who's since they are such different colors. The light colored one is Cleo's and the darker one is Blondie's. Blondie's eggshells are very thick and kind of hard to break. Cleo's crack very easily and it's mostly yolk. I think she is a Jersey Giant. Hopefully they will all be laying very soon.

Fall Elderberry cuttings 

Elderberry cutting in 10"pot

The elderberry cuttings I took in the summer have done well. They are indoors and continue to put on new growth. It's basically a bullet proof plant to propagate.

Most of the goji berry cuttings have done well also. I have at least a dozen of them growing in pots indoors now. I believe that I paid around $15 for the one that I bought and it was about the same size as the ones I have potted.

Propagated goji

The goji's are just ridiculously easy to propagate. I don't remember having a single one not strike.

I cut up a long branch that fell off into little pieces and nearly all of them are now growing. Only the green section of the limb didn't take, all of the woody pieces are living in a couple of coffee cups filled with rain water.

Probably 10 or 12 4" long cuttings.

A few of the fig cuttings are now growing in pots. But I didn't have one hundred percent success with them.

I have a few of the raspberry root cuttings that are still going but they haven't been very vigorous. I think they are dormant.

Most of the comfrey root cuttings survived but the cats were eating the leaves and they got set back some, they are starting to rebound now. I put several goji, elderberry and comfrey plants from cuttings into the yard in the fall. The elderberry I put into a raised bed is going good but the cold hurt the goji a bit. The others in the yard got hammered by the chickens so it remains to be seen if they will come back up in the spring. I think there is a good chance they will.

Persimmon seedling

Seedlings
There are a few seedlings coming along quite well at the moment as well. Back in the summer I put about thirty wild persimmon seeds in a flat and of those two germinated. I put them in pots in the fall and they are indoors now. Persimmons grow very slowly. The tap root goes way down before the above ground growth shows itself. Both of them still have the seeds attached.

Lately, I've started a few citrus seeds from some fruit from the market. I've got four grapefruits growing from seeds I started with the damp paper towel method.

I also saved ten quince seeds and put them in a damp paper towel inside a zip bag and one of them germinated. It's now in a pot.

Quince seedling

Five tangerines germinated using the same method as well. I transplanted those over the weekend.  They are yet to break the soil.

I saved a lot of Bosc pear seeds and they are in the refrigerator until spring because they need to be stratified before they will germinate.

Grapefruit

Although the fruit trees in the yard are said to be dormant over the winter, that isn't exactly the case. Buds have been forming on a lot of the trees and also some of the shrubs have them too. So they aren't totally "asleep". The apricot has by far the most but the peaches also have a lot too. The last frost date for us is the last week of March, so it's just around the corner.

Coop renovation

The weekend before last we built a new coop for the chickens.

The old one was only meant to be temporary anyway and it was difficult to deal with. I didn't expect the chickens to start laying yet and there wasn't really a spot for nesting boxes.

This one is a easier for them to access and they have a nest box area contained inside the coop. It's the part on the left. Those boards swing up on a hinge to the right. They have been laying there already. They can go underneath the nesting area too, so if I don't let them out at daylight they've got somewhere they can go to get down off the roost.

They seem to like it so far.

It's all repurposed scrap material. Building out of scrap makes the job go really slow. Hunting pieces that will work and then having to go to plan B when you don't have the right material will double the amount of hours in a build. That and having four chickens and a dog right in the middle of the construction zone. It also rained about four inches the first night after I started the build so it was a mud bog the entire time. Never fails...

New Coop

Tractoring the chickens through the yard gets tiring fast.  Especially when the weather turns cold. And chickens get big fast.

So we've had to come up with a permanent coop location for the girls. Zone 1 is the perfect spot if you can do, because you will probably be making at least one trip to the chicken coop per day.

We've identified a place on the west side of the house that will probably be ideal since there is a door there as well. The exterior wall of the house where it is joined by a fence gives us two walls already in place. It's a pretty big area that is already fenced in and not really being utilized, so it's the best solution.

All of the materials are re-used from other projects, except for two posts I had to purchase for $16.

Inspection

At present, the coop is only about 4'x6' but eventually we will extend it to the left in the photo. So it will likely be about double the area. I am also going to put in a screen door so that we can access it.

Not a whole lot phases the chickens. They put up with the dog fairly well, but sometimes they let her get themselves upset. But not too much.

They hardly even move when you want to shoo them to another place and then they come straight back to where you moved them from.

Now they are about 4 months old and they cluck. So I guess that their gizzard is formed now. I'm not sure how much they've needed it. All the green in the yard has died off from the cold. They pretty much stay near the coop all day.

Nearly complete

The coop has water and a food dispenser now and so hopefully I won't have to make as many trips out there as before.

A couple of months from now they should begin to lay, so we are really looking forward to that.

If you want to buy some chicks, go to Meyer Hatchery.com.

They will send them through the mail in only a couple of days. It's seems a little weird but it's completely safe and the best way to go outside of physically going and getting chics locally.

Chickens 6 wks

The chickens continue to grow and they are now 6 weeks old.

Just six weeks ago, little peeps.

They have a mobile coop called the Chickshaw!

Chickens

Jet lagged from Cleveland 

Chicks arrived on the thirteenth of August from Meyer Hatchery. The post office called at about 6:30 a.m. and left a cryptic message that I was somehow able to decipher. The post office is very nearby and I drove around there at around 8:30 to pick them up.

The people at the post office were pretty tickled with the little peeps chirping through the box and actually checked my i.d. before they handed them off to me.

Pit Bull & chicks

Their home for now is in the garage in a kiddy pool. There is a coop already made that they will move into once they are big enough.

I wasn't very keen on ordering chickens through the mail but it turns out that it is so commonplace that it works well enough.

We ordered six pullets or hens. They are mixed brown egg layers so we don't know exactly which kind they are yet. I believe that one is a Buff Orpington.

The Genesis of a Chicken Coop

The last couple of weeks I've been working on building a chicken coop out of the scrap wood that I have around the homestead.

I have been replacing the soffits on the eaves and I have been able to repurpose some of the old plywood that has been removed.

I thought that the tiger stripe paint job would cut down on the predators or at least look pretty cool.

I used some old posts that used to be borders around the yard as legs. The top of the table used to be the door to the basement.

The exterior is made from the old soffits and I used the eave vents for ventilation in the coop. So in essence the coop has been zero cost except for time.

The top lid is hinged and will open up as will the front if needed.

I found it to be quite time consuming building on the fly without a definite plan to go off of. Cobbling together scraps of wood and trying to match one piece with the next is a slow process.

I'm really not fond of working this way because although the scrap material was free, the extra amount of time that it took to figure out a design offset the money saved on material.

I'd much prefer to spend a few hours drawing a plan and then buy the material needed and execute the job, even if it is more expensive.

Time is our most valuable asset.