The Broody Bunch

I’ve finished filling the vegetable gardens today.  In the four garden beds, we have pumpkins, squash, spinach, cucumbers, watermelon, tomatoes, radishes, yellow peppers, carrots, beans, onions, beets, leaf lettuce, head lettuce, corn, green peppers, and I’m out of room!  After looking through some scrap lumber, we’ve found enough boards to make one more bed.  I’m going to fill the whole thing with potatoes. 

I finally got my lilies planted yesterday.  I bought the bulbs almost 3 weeks ago at the Bangor Home Show.  they’ve been sitting in my refrigerator ever since.  GH dug up the sod in front of our house.  I put down some peat and vermiculite (which I picked up yesterday) before planting the bulbs.  Then I put down a layer of black mulch.  I added some marigolds today and planted some mint in the corner.

I called the LFS today to find out when our chicks will arrive in.  Looks like the 13th!!  Wow!  Only four more days.  That’s about a week sooner than I expected!

Since buying our house set on a rural 1.59 acres, I’ve been frantic to start growing our own food.  Even in our second story apartment, I attempted to grow carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers on our fire escape landing.  When I was a kid, my Grampy (who lived just across the road) instilled in me a love for nature and growing things. 

My grandparents had a small farm on which they had a few horses, raspberry patches, an apple orchard, they harvested hay and had a beautiful garden.  When it came to harvest time, all the family that still lived locally would come out to pick fresh veggies for their own families.  That was how it was intended. 

Looking back now, I have tremendous respect for my grandparents who spent the time, effort, and money to plant and care for a garden to continue to provide for their family long after the kids had left home and started families of their own.  People in general aren’t like that any more.  Our society would be so much better if we all looked out for our neighbors… not because we have to do it, but because we want to do it.

GH went to Lowes today to pick up some supplies this morning.  He picked up chicken fencing and posts for the chicken run.  I haven’t quite decided where I want the fencing attached.  GH also brought home some pressure treated 8×2”x4’ planks for two more SFG frames, and two bales of peat moss for the mix.  I picked up some compost a couple of weeks ago.  We screwed together the frames and put them down on the fabric black mulch beside last year’s frames.  We filled them with the compost and peat moss.  Now we have double the gardens we had last year.  I still need to get some vermiculite.  I have to pick it up at our local nursery.  I’ll get some seedlings at the same time.  We don’t usually put in our gardens until Memorial Day weekend, but with all this warm weather, I think I may put it in early.

4×50’ green chicken fence $26.80

6 5’ fence posts $3.93 ea. =$23.58

It’s been a beautiful sunny day!  We’ve had some unseasonably warm weather lately.  Especially for Maine.  it’s been in the 80’s today.  The kids are visiting their grandparents this week for spring break.  So I took advantage of the warm day and no interruptions.  Last week I bought a five-gallon bucket of barn and shed paint in a barn red color.  And now our chicken coop is barn red!  I’m sure the chickens will appreciate it.

Today was absolutely perfect!  The temp was up in the mid 50’s, the sun was shining and the sky was blue.  We’ve had some pretty harsh winds for a few days but it’s dried up a lot of the water that was lying around.

I finally had the opportunity to do some yard work.  Little Maiden helped me rake the leaves from around the gardens.  I cleaned up the leftovers from last year’s garden, pulled a few weeds (extremely few thanks to SFG!) and turned over the soil.  That loose black soil felt so good in my fingers and smelled so fresh!  I can’t wait to start planting.  It still goes below freezing at night so I guess I’ll have to wait.  Most planting in Maine doesn’t start until Memorial Day.  ~sigh~  However, the rhubarb is already coming up!!

I’m already anticipating eggs for Easter next year!  I wonder if people with Ameraucana chickens sell more eggs around Easter because Ameraucanas lay blue or green eggs?  I think I’d like to have some just for that reason.  No dyeing necessary!

The winds are blowing pretty hard today.  Hopefully I can get out and do some yard work when things dry out and warm up a bit.

I took my dog for a walk for the first time today.  Dapper is a Doodle.  GH won’t admit that Dapper is a doodle.  He says that the dog is a dachshund/poodle cross.  Well, he is, but I like the word Doodle.  Anyway, Dapper is a small dog and get’s plenty of exercise by running around the yard with the kids, so walking him isn’t necessary.  But I’ve decided that walking is necessary for me.  I’ve been trying to get up before the kids to get in a little exercise before the day begins.  It feels great, invigorating even.  And now that the sun gets up before 7 AM, it’s a whole lot easier to get myself up before 7 AM.  So when I got up this morning and decided to go for a walk, I thought Dapper might enjoy walking too.  I got out his leash (which is only used on road trips) and hooked him up.  He was really excited!  We started off down the road but I realized quickly that I’ve never really taught Dapper how to walk on a leash.  It took a few minutes for him to figure out that I wanted him to walk beside me on my left side so he wouldn’t be in the road.

Well, it turns out that Dapper is scared of sassy chipmunks, mailboxes, and trash cans.  He nearly jumped out of his skin when the chipmunk started yapping.  He tucked his tail and skittered in front of me, nearly tripping me in the process.  He’d duck behind me when we passed a mailbox with the door open and I nearly had to carry him passed the garbage can that was tipped over.  I had to keep telling him what a "big dog" he was so he’d be brave enough to keep going.  But Dapper isn’t scared of one thing… cars.  He wasn’t really interested in chasing them, but every time we heard a vehicle coming he’d run in front of me into the road.  I kept him on a short leash so he didn’t get more than his front feet into the road before I pulled him back.  I don’t know what the deal was.  I guess the car seems safer than the chipmunk.

Yup, I think Doodle is the right word.  A sissy name for a sissy dog.

I wonder if Dapper will be scared of chickens…

So you know what they say about Maine?  We only have two seasons… winter and mud.  Well, mud has hit full force.  We’ve got probably 4 inches of rain in the last week.  The ground is saturated and we’ve got standing pools on the lawn.  The good news is that all the snow is finally gone!  That doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow… in fact, it flurried yesterday.  But hopefully I can put my snow shovel away and trade it in for a rake and a hoe!  I’ve got the springtime itch.  I just want to get outside and start on the yard work!  My gardens are under a layer of fallen leaves.  The compost and the gardens need to be turned over.  I need to clear out around the border of the herb garden.  But right now, I sink up to my ankles in mud when a step onto the lawn.  I kind of like having grass on the lawn so I’m waiting for it to dry out a bit.

In the meantime, I’ve priced out fencing for the coop at The Home Depot.  Fifty feet of 5′ fence costs about $35.  100 feet of 5′ fence is about $70.  I think a 7×8′ area should be plenty for 8 chickens.  I may increase it to 10×10′ later on if I decide to get more chickens.  Which, right now, I’m planning on it.  I think I’d like to add some Ameraucanas to the mix.

So now that we have chicks coming, we are trying to figure out where we are going to keep them.  We live in a suburb of the city of Bangor, so we are sort of in the country.  Not like the country I grew up in, but there are trees and critters and birds (other than pigeons and crows).  We have 1.6 acres of land.  Some of that is wooded.  We have neighbors on either side of us.  Our neighbor on the right is separated from us by a wide stretch of trees.  Our neighbor on the left, however, is not separated from us at all.  We actually share the lawn with them.  Our property line runs right down the middle, so we are trying to be considerate.

We plan to have a fenced in run so that we can keep our chickens safe from predators and so that we can keep the chicken dropping mostly contained to one area.  Especially since Little Maiden and I are very fond of going barefoot in the summer.  So, my original thought was to build a small coop behind our garage.  There they would be out of the way and still have plenty of space.  A couple of concerns have popped up, though.  One is how much are materials for a coop going to cost and two is where are we going to put our swimming pool?  We’ve always put our little swimming pool behind the garage because it’s surrounded by trees and offers a lot of privacy.  There really isn’t anywhere else to put it that’s not out in the open.  We’d have to give up the swimming pool.  And then the other thing… Well, to say that our finances are tight would be an understatement.  We could probably scrounge enough scrap wood for a small coop.

I put these questions to my husband.  He asked if I thought the chickens would bother the gardens.  Last spring I experimented with Square Foot Gardening.  I have two 4×4 foot garden frames to the left of the house, close to the property line.  I think the chickens my trample the small plants.  GH (Geek Husband) said that he had thought of building the coop off of the small out building by the gardens.  The out building holds our riding lawn mower, our small collection of gardening tools and odd and ends of the kid’s summer toys.  The out building resembles a small barn so we’ve always called it the baby barn.  "Actually, the baby barn would be a perfect chicken coop," I said.  "Truthfully," GH returned, "we only need it for the lawn mower."  We discussed finding somewhere else to keep the lawn mower.  Then we’d have a ready-made coop.  All we’d have to do is add the fencing, nesting boxes, and perches.  So that’s what we’ve decided on.  We’ll get the baby barn chicken ready, park the lawn mower somewhere else and still keep our swimming pool.  Problem solved!

I started doing some research online today.  I found a few websites that help with the basics.  Backyardchickens.com has a lot of helpful information on what to do with your baby chicks.  There are instructions on building coops and making your own chicken feeder and waterer. 

I also talked to my friend and chicken authority, Willhimenia.    She’s raised chickens for years and will be on call when my chicks arrive.  I’m getting four Rhode Island Reds and four White Leghorns.  I had originally wanted Buff Orpingtons and Black Australorps.  I was going to order them from Mcmurrayhatchery.com but they have a minimum order of 25 chicks!  I was originally thinking of getting just 6.  I found another place that had a minimum of 15 chicks.  But still, that was a few more than I wanted to start with.  So, Willhi told me to check our LFS (local feed store). 

When I went in yesterday I found that they weren’t getting either breed in.  So I picked up an order form for May (they had one for June also).  I took it to the back of the store and stared at the list of breeds that they offered.  Honestly, I didn’t know what the difference was from any of them unless the colors red, black or white were included in their names.  Luckily, on the shelf by my head was a book called Pocketful of Poultry.  I was able to look up the names in that book to see what the chicken breeds looked like but also if they were good egg layers.  That was kind of the point in getting some hens.  So anyway, I decided on the Rhode Island Reds that are great layers and lay brown eggs and the White Leghorns that lay white eggs.  The eight pullets cost me a grand total of $23.92 at $2.99 each.  My first and most important expense of this adventure! 

I was told that the chicks will be in the third week of May but I could call during the first or second week to find out exactly what day they chicks would be arriving.  Hopefully that will give me enough time to prepare!