Long-sleeved knit shirt

I made most of this shirt during the Knit Know-How class at Stonemountain and Daughter Fabrics. I'm quite pleased with the fabrics I picked out. The fit is good but not perfect. I would need someone with much more experience sewing clothing to help me fiddle with it.

Garden update and new routines

I set up a second raised bed for shady plants along one edge of the chicken coop. I currently have arugula, a cucumber start, and seeds for various leafy greens and alliums in it. Next to the bed, I set up a potato tower (with Kennebec seed potatoes from Pollinate, as I'd heard they like shade), and a pot with lemon verbena and a gooseberry. Can't wait to get tea and fruit from the last two!

Here's a picture of a second potato tower in a sunny area:

Finally, I caved and purchased a tree mallow (Lavatera maritima) at East Bay Nursery, as it's a plant I've loved for a long time. It's a little one hanging out right by my door.

My new morning routine is to check on the raised beds, pull any weeds I find, and harvest anything that's ready.

I grab a handful of extra weeds and check on the chickens. The older girls love the weeds and I can see that they are filling up on them and eating less of the feed.

In the evening, around 9 or 10 pm, I put on a headlamp and check on the raised bed again, this time plucking slugs (and any extra weeds I come across).

I give the chickens a final check, and the Australorp eats up the slugs. (Currently the Red and Ameracauna turn up their beaks at slugs.) After a week straight, I'm finally making a dent in the weed and slug populations.

Roosting bar

It took over a week, but the older girls have finally figured out how to hop/fly onto the roosting bars. The Australorp and Rhode Island Red make it all the way to the top and huddle together, but the Ameracauna only makes it to the second bar. The cord wrapped around the bar is for the heating lamp.

New chicks

The younger chicks have been here for a week already. They are in the coop with the older ones, but separated by a fence because the Australorp keeps picking on them.

The Gold-Laced Wyandotte is the most amenable to handling from this batch:

The Welsummer (who will lay dark chocolate-colored eggs as an adult) looks similar, but doesn't have the dark spots around her face.

The Cream Brabanter is the most unusual-looking of the bunch. She is a rare breed who will have awesome spots on her feathers as an adult. Currently her little wing feathers have a pink tinge to them! It's not just my red sweatshirt tricking the camera. Unfortunately, she somehow hurt her leg during the first night in the coop. I brought her and her sisters inside for half the day and made her drink sugar water. It perked her right up and she was back to normal a few hours later, but she now hates being picked up. It was hard to get a nice picture of her because she would start SCREAMING. (She's calmed down significantly at this point, but these are early pictures.)

SCREAM

They look so funny when they sleep as chicks, face-planted into the dirt/woodchips.

Spring equinox

Happy equinox, everyone!

I picked up the second set of three chicks yesterday morning. What a great start to spring!

At sunset, my sister and a friend and I said goodbye to the long hours of night by taking a flashlight hike through Redwood Regional Park. At one spot we stopped and turned off our lights. The tops of the trees were silhouetted by the orange glow of the city, but beneath the canopy it was completely dark and completely quiet. (Other than whining from one of the dogs, who got upset about being in total darkness.)

And now, I'm heading off to East Bay Nursery! I need to finish my spring gardening.

Chick runway

They are mostly in the "ugly adolescent" phase right now.

Ameracauna:

Australorp (still my favorite, and the cutest, I think):

Rhode Island Red (damn is she ugly right now. i can see how she descended from a dinosaur.):

Chicken run

The run is finally complete! I moved the chicks from my bathroom to the coop, but I'm keeping them locked in there for the next month or so. Next Friday I'm getting another three babies, and I'm not going to feel comfortable letting them into the run without supervision until they're bigger.

Here's their current set up:

With the door closed and locked, I feel comfortable that they're safe. There is now hardware cloth running 1.5-2 feet out from the bottom of the coop, and it's buried underneath the woodchips. No animals should be able to dig inside now.

The run makes a larger rectangle around the coop, and then runs in a corridor across the width of the yard. The right side is partially made up of a rock wall terrace, which is overrun with weeds that the chickens should take care of once they're outside. I pruned the large bushes on top of the rock wall and tossed the branches onto the floor of the coop to create more insect habitat and organic matter for future composting of deep bedding.

They have a couple of stumps set up for hopping around, and two dust baths containing diatomaceous earth to prevent mite problems.

The back corner required creative arrangement of PVC and hardware cloth. It may look like there are gaping holes under the PVC, but the "skirt" of buried hardware cloth continues there. I made sure there weren't any gaps!

This is the view standing from the far end and looking back toward the coop. The tarp covers part of the roof to provide protection from the rain. Yes, we're in a drought right now, but when the rain eventually returns it's likely to be a torrent.

The door to the run. There's a bit of a gap between the far side of the door and the frame at the bottom, due to the PVC shifting around while we put up the wire walls. I'm going to put a triangular piece of hardware cloth across that corner of the frame, so that animals won't be able to push the corner of the door in.

Cai is trying to figure out how to get inside.

There is a path going across the slope of the yard to get down to the run.

The view from up the hill. I love how the run is bordered on two sides by tall shrubs/trees, making it feel like it's inside a forest (a chicken's native habitat).

I had chosen to construct the run out of PVC rather than wood because it was cheaper, lighter, and easier for a single person to put together. It's also very easy to customize and could bend in a couple of places where rocks or tree stumps were in the way. The downside is that its flexibility meant that the run leaned downhill and we got the problem with the door no longer being aligned. It was also a huge pain to attach all the wire panels with cable ties. In retrospect, it would have been better to build the frame with wood from Urban Ore, collected over a longer period of time since they didn't have enough 2x4s or other posts at the time I was buying the wood for the coop. Besides being more sturdy, it would have been easier to attach the wire panels by hammering in u-shaped nails.