Sunday Morning Snow Call

After a full day and night of rain, I woke up this morning to a nice dusting of snow on the ground. It's amazing how fast the temperature drops here. This week I installed a gutter on my chicken coop so all day yesterday I was collecting rain water in trash cans. This morning the third 35 gallon trash can was almost full. The roof is 24'x16'. Actually, that third trash can is probably almost full now that the snow is melting.

Installing the gutter on the chicken coop took me one step closer to its completion but there are still a couple of finishing touches before it is ready to house 50 chickens. The whole design and construction of the coop has been a big success for me. There are 19 chickens and one guinea hen (it moved in from next store) living in it right now. The chickens have been laying on average 8 or 9 eggs a day. Two days this week I collected 13 and I also had a couple days with 7.

The coop has semi-temporary straw bale walls which stand underneath a permanent roof. There are two rooms: one big room, which takes up about 75% of the space, is where the birds sleep at night. There are roosts and nesting boxes. The smaller room will be for raising baby chicks. The goal is to let a couple of the hens sit on a few eggs and then raise their own chicks. They need their own space while they are brooding so that the rest of the chickens don't disturb them. Eventually the yard around the coop will be divided into two sections so that we can grow something in one half while the chickens forage in the other half. This will primarily be their winter home. My goal for the whole farm is to have about 60 chickens. During the growing season they will be divided between three or four chicken tractors and will be moving troughout the fields and orchard. In the winter they will live in the straw bale coop.

My favorite time on the farm right now is the early morning. The days are so short that I have to get up at sunrise in order to get enough sunlight to maintain sanity. Yesterday was cloudy and raining, I was inside building a chick incubator out of an old wooden wine box. Today is bright and sunny, I'll be outside helping my coworker Wade build a small bungalow for he and his family.

One of my favorite things to do in the morning is take pictures. Today I got up and took a few of the chickens and the new snow. I went inside, downloaded my new pictures and ate some breakfast. When I left the house again to use the office computer to post this, it was a much brighter and sunnier day. So I went back and got my camera, unfortunenately the brighter, sunnier pictures are still on my camera.