Month: February 2015

Not a pullet.

Steve HardinLeave a comment
Chicken coop

Yes, chickens really are dirty.  They are the dustiest creatures known to man.  My perch needs to be about two inches farther out from the wall to prevent the poop paintings.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the room for that as I would have to move every perch two inches forward.  I am thinking about adding another high perch directly over the lowest perch.  Almost no one uses the low perch and with a second high perch I think its use would vanish.  The chickens want to be the tallest person in the room. 

I seem to have stopped whatever virus/disease was present in my coop with some timely vector elimination practices.  Not a sick chicken to be had in the last week.  I am going to have to cull another rooster.  My babies from this fall should start laying in March and I just noticed this week that my “pullets” are not all girls!  One of them is a boy, he is starting to grow a larger comb and develop darker neck feathers and some longer tail feathers.  We are going to let him live and kill off the old rooster.  The rooster will help integrate the flock and having a new rooster will make the old guard more prone to integrate.  They won’t be so insular, at least that is the theory I am going to postulate.  Time will tell if I was right.  The egg yolks are starting to get a little more orange in color.  The chickens are starting to roam about more during the day. 

Today I used a metal rake to finish getting the mud in the barn lot out of the front creek and spread out more pasture grass seeds along both banks of the creek.  I am hoping the grass will grow and help stabilize the bank.  I would love to plant the bottoms in new grass seed but I am going to wait until after March.  I don’t want a freeze killing my new plants.  A little area like the creek bank is easily replanted.  I have 300# of chicken food left out in the coop.  Just enough to get through the winter.  I need to start watching out for the sales again.  I think I will buy it in 1000# increments.  It certainly makes it easier and really cuts down my feed costs. 

We had another set of twin lambs on Friday.  On Sunday, I decided that the momma needed a companion.   They just do better with a companion.  I decided that our old lead ewe #1 is pretty pregnant and the friendliest of the bunch so she should be easy to wrangle into the baby area.  Yes she is friendly, but she is also a Dorper so she is our largest sheep.  She did not want to go in the baby area despite the food quantity being endless.  I ended up having to catch her and straddle her body and neck and drag her forward with my legs and arms while straddling her.  Not the most gracious movement.  We were almost to the pen gate when she decided to bolt for the open door out into the barn lot.  I had to catch her by the neck at the last minute, I finally got the pen gate open and the dog stopping her from rejoining the main herd caused her to go into the pen.  The worst part was it had been raining all day long and her wool was saturated with water.  My jeans were soaking wet!  They have been doing fine and today I noticed her udder filling up with milk so hopefully she will have her babies in the next few days, or she is feeding the other ewe’s babies. 

Kitchen coming along nicely.

Steve HardinLeave a comment

I am making real progress on the kitchen.  This is a good thing, as even I am getting tired of cooking and cleaning in the laundry room.  The backsplash countertop seam was caulked today.  I will need to clean it up a little once it is dry.  I am not the worlds best caulker.  I tore the faucet out of the old sink and spent a couple hours cleaning it all up and got it reinstalled into the new sink.  Found a solid stainless steel drain for the new sink.  I thought I was going to have to get a bronze plated with stainless steel.  I had forgotten that those have to be put in with plumbers putty so now I have a little container of that.  I used 100% silicone around the sink and then set it in place.  The fancy 3 inch stainless steel sink attachment screws I ordered at $6/each made it possible to set the sink.  I broke two of them tightening them down.  The sink was a little bent and had a 1/32 gap at one corner so I ended up running silicone all around the outside of the sink.  I am going to let it dry and then cut all the excess off with a razor blade.  That is the one thing nice about working with polished stone tiles.  You can treat it like glass and it cleans up very nicely with a razor blade.  I even hooked up the sink to water and the drain on the FIRST time with no leaks!  Truly amazing for me, I always have to redo any plumbing at least twice. 

Tomorrow, I will clean up the caulking and put in my spacers for all the wall outlets.  Once the new outlet covers show up next week it will be five minutes to screw them in place.  I need to reposition the fridge and then it is onto the downdraft fan.  I cannot install the window trim until the tile is installed behind the stove.  This will be the final item I do in this kitchen project. Tile cannot happen until the downdraft fan is in place and hole through the wall is cut and ductwork installed.  I want to be able to tile around the duct so I can insulate and get a good fit with the tile.  I brought the fan in from the car a couple of days ago.  It was very awkward, it is a rectangle 4x4x2 feet and weighs around 80 pounds.  I made it to the front porch and had to have Annmarie help me get it through the front door when she came home.  Once inside, I could get it into the library.  I have built the custom cabinet about 25 times in my head already so I think I am ready for the real thing now.  That is next weeks project.  I still have to find the appropriate vent to tie into the siding.  We found our new cabinet and drawer pulls today on a restoration company website.  We are going to get a colored glass pull and knob.  I will pick up paint for the ceiling and walls after I do the down draft fan.  Annmarie came up with a great idea to take all our old farm pictures and transfer them to wood and we will put them up on our dormer in the kitchen.  We should be able to get at least 25 pictures mounted.  It will look great. 

I had a chicken die two days ago.  A coworker, Michelle, came out with her husband and baby to see the chicken coop.  They are thinking about building one and wanted to see the layout and get some suggestions.  We went into the coop and there laid a dead Turken chicken and a Buff Orpington was kinda slouched over.  I tried to put the Buff Orpington on the perch but it was so weak it just kept trying to fall off.  I didn’t even think about anyone else being in the coop with me and just wrung the chickens neck.  In hindsight, a little warning to the witnesses might have been a good thing.  I gave my lecture on isolation cages (I don’t have one) and disease control.  I stop my diseases by eliminating the vectors.  I disposed of the carcasses and we went back into the house to talk more chickens. I have not had a sick chicken in the last two days.