Baby Chicks

Monday we got the phone call that our babies were at the Post office, 30 meat chickens and 26 Rhode Island Reds. What fun we had getting them settled. Warren's chicken house is nice and warm with all the sun pouring in. This is the south (bay) side. He boxed in one of the bays on the small machine shed, covered the floor with hardware cloth, insulated it and put plywood on the floor.Here is the front door, it's pretty fancy!
The inside is all insulated and cozy. He didn't get the nest boxes and roosts made yet. Here is another picture of the chick boxes.Jayce spent some of his own money to get two Americana pullets and a Rooster. We have to have rules so they don't get held every minute of the day. But chickens are just so cute and fun.We walked the hay field and decided it would make hay this summer if it got mowed. Jayce spent three hours mowing it with the trail mower. Now it needs to be raked but I'm not doing the whole thing by hand, it is over 5 acres. We raked a little bit up for bedding for the chicks and that was enough work for me.The garden is rotor tilled and planted. It is the biggest garden I've ever had. It will be mostly potatoes so I don't have so much to weed this first year. It was solid grass last year and it will be a constant battle this year. I got the raspberry patch all cleaned up and weeded. It will be interesting to see if they produce anything this year or if I need to start over with new plants.

We started pulling up the old fences, what a mess. There are posts every 8 feet and the barbed wire is held on with aluminum wire twisted around the whole mess several times. It is going to be a summer long project, cutting off the dead trees, getting the wire down and the posts out. Here are the girls and Warren in the field hauling away old fence posts.Warren's bird houses are filling up, there are at least 8 pair of swallows around and some other little sparrows using them. Wenge, the kitty, is going nuts trying to catch them but she is just too slow. She and a Northern Goshawk were trying to eat each other last week, the hawk would dive for her and she would jump at it. They are big birds, almost as big as bald eagles.Finally the hawk decided it didn't want to catch that cat after all and flew off up the driveway with Wenge chasing after, leaping up into the air at it. She was very pleased to have chased it off.