Home improvements are a constant thing for most of us, right? Well, around here many of the home improvements are for the chickens! They out number us, after all, and we want to keep them happy and laying.  Happy chickens are productive chickens! Here are a couple home improvements that went on today.

New chicken ingress and egress for the littles. For a time now we’ve had Imen and Maeve in with a gimpy Speckled Sussex on what we call “the littles side”. We call it that because that’s where the littles reside in the brooder area and, if you’re a chicken on that side, you are a “little”. It’s been quite windy again lately and we’ve wanted to keep the covered screen door closed in the hopes of keeping down the interior wind tunnel that crops up from time to time; however, when we do that, it means that the 3 “little” hens are trapped inside until it calms down enough to let them out. We thought about putting a dog door in, but the one we had remaining is huge! It’s left over from when Sue had a Greyhound at home. So, I asked if we could just make a small opening in the screen to let them in and out. I didn’t think that Sue particularly liked that idea, but today I received a text with the photo above.Sue took this from the Biggies side, looking through the screen onto the “littles” door. Don’t get distracted by the chickens in the foreground – look behind them to the little rectangle of white light in the sea of orange wind break. That’s the Littles’ new little door. I think it’s great! Sue took time to stabilize it with 2×2’s, I probably would have simply cut the wire and bent it back so that there weren’t any rough edges. That’s why she’s the carpenter!  They seemed to take to it pretty quickly and are now coming and going as they please and the wind is kept down to a minimum inside!

Home improvement number 2 is for the little Littles. They will need to migrate out of the brooder next week, because we have 29 new littles coming in! What? I know, that’s what I said too, but we talked about that already. Anyway~ to give the old little Littles some growing room, before we let them be out with the little hens, Sue fixed the wind damage to Dad’s original little green coop so that they could have a snug home. She added a couple of additional roosts inside and put wire over the next box access door so that there could be nice ventilation for the day. Always good to air out the coop! Doesn’t it look really roomy? We just need to add some straw inside and they’ll be set! I’m glad that we can still use it, it was home to my originals for quite a few months – and it has sentimental value to me. Thanks Dad!

We’re very excited about the 29 littles that we’ll be getting. We were just talking about the fact that the old littles will be about the same size as the new littles – and that we should put up that comparison photo so you can really understand what we’re talking about. I’ll try to remember to do that when they get here. It’ll be quite interesting, trust me on that. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

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Today’s Weather: warm and windy. High was 90°, low might be 58°, but it was 60° when Sue checked at 5:30 this morning.

Egg Report: Tuesday we had 21 chicken eggs and only 2 duck eggs. Today we had 20 chicken eggs and back to our normal 3 from the ducks.

Cool Sighting: This is the lizard who watches over the goat food. He’s been living in the garage for about six months or so and has gotten quite big. So far, this is the very best photo we’ve been able to get. He seems to sense when the phone comes out of the pocket, because – otherwise – we can get pretty close to him before he scurry’s away. The photo is a bit pixelated because I cropped it way down. I think we should name him, but Sue doesn’t like “George”. What do you think his name should be? Sue says it needs to be a “slinky” name. And… go!