When ever I travel, I always have a lot of catching up to do – blog wise – when I get home. I may not be able to cover everything that I missed over the weekend and Monday, in one post today. But I thought I’d give ‘er a go, then maybe Friday we can go over the remainder and talk about the special report from my trip. So, let’s get going…
Sue was GREAT at taking photos while I was gone. She and Ron worked more on the RCW (Romny Chicken Wagon) Thursday and they were able to get the door made. Doors are interesting little things. They really are so temperamental. Just get one little corner out of square and things don’t work at all. Sue and I both have trouble with doors. Making them
and hanging them. So, I bet Sue was relieved to have Ron around to help out on that. Looks like they did a wonderful job on the door and it fit right into the end wall they were creating. That final end was completed, the door was hung and they were able to prepare for the roof next and some inside work.
Traditional
One of the inside projects is nesting boxes. I guess I should say, “two of the inside projects are” because there are going to be two types. I talked about the “best nesting box” earlier that allows the eggs to roll away to prevent eating and keep them clean. Those nesting boxes arrived on Friday – some assembly required. Sue put them together lickety-split. Prior to their arrival, she was working on – what I consider to be – “traditional” nesting boxes. She wants to have both available to the chickens, in case they
New Fangled
don’t like that new fangled gadget. It is true; chickens can be young and yet traditional, recognizing the old ways as worth while. We call them old souls. 🙂 Hey! Don’t you be laughing! Chickens know what they want, it’s just up to us to try to figure that out. The reason we’re not sure that they’ll like the new fangled box is that they often prefer to lay where there are already some eggs – that’s why we have fake eggs in some of our boxes; it encourages them to lay in those instead of on the floor or in the walls, etc. The new fangled boxes don’t give us that option, so we’re not sure how they’ll be received. The layers have just begun laying in the last few days and Sue is finding them on the ground, behind the screen door of the coop. We hope they’ll take advantage of the boxes soon.
Extra Room
Another happening while I was out: Sue called our neighbor Gloria to ask if she would be interested in helping to move the chicken fence. Actually add another fence to the littles side to try and keep them from jumping over. We have two roosters on that side, well actually three at the moment, but one is in the brooder with the banty hens. Two are out, one for the Layers, Long Legs, and one Banty for Maeve and Imen, Mister Mister. Mister Mister likes to chase Long Legs around, which is quite funny since Long Legs is twice the size of Mister Mister, but younger. When this nonsense is going on, the hens just run everywhere, and sometimes they would get so excited, they’d fly over the fence. Sue figured that if they
Gloria working away
had more room to run, there would be less flying. Since she and Gloria added the additional space, there haven’t been any escapees on that side (Thanks, Gloria!). So, seems to be working. Once the the RCW is completed and ready for use out in the Pasture, we’ll take the large fence and the laying chickens and give Mister Mister, Maeve, and Imen smaller room. We may let them out during the summer for a few hours each day to keep down the bug population. We’ll see… how that works with the rest of the Banties which will go out in the chicken tractor that’s on the leaf pond right now. They’ll go out there when we’ve had a chance to process the roosters. We are hoping that the weather cooperates to do that this Saturday. Whew. That’s a bit of information, there. I think there is still some I haven’t covered, but we’ll get there next time. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!
Today’s Weather: We can break this down to one word… SNOW! Ok, here’s a few more. We had some snow in the forecast, was 70% starting around 1am, in reality, it didn’t really start down here until almost 7 this morning. It was snowing on me heavily all the way to work and even for most of the morning and off and on through the afternoon in Sierra Vista . Sue tried to get photos of it here, but it doesn’t really show up. I took a very short video at work that kinda shows it. Not that you’ve never seen snow before, but it’s interesting (somewhat) to have it snow here in the desert. I’ll add the video at the bottom since it comes in so huge. Currently it is 41° at 6:18 p.m. Looks like our overnight low may be down to 28°. Brrrr.
Egg Report: We had some excitement over the weekend… Roma, the goose, started laying eggs. Here’s the report starting from where I left off after Friday: Saturday we had 1 Duck, 10 chicken eggs, plus one chicken egg that was pecked. Sunday: zero Duck, 15 Chicken eggs. Monday: zero Duck, 10 Chicken eggs, plus one faerie egg. Tuesday: one GOOSE, zero Duck, and 16 Chicken eggs. Today, we simply had 11 Chicken eggs. The photo above is of the goose eggs, they just don’t fit into the egg cartons! We took the top off of one and are just using the bottom like an egg stand for them. Pretty darn fun.
Hey everyone! Here I am on the road again. Took mom out shopping and we’re at the Ramona Library using their wifi for a bit to get a little information out there to you. Let me tell you – their wifi works better than ours at home! So nice to have this available 🙂 and for free! Anyway, I found out that all the fun stuff happens when I’m on the road. Roma laid a huge egg today – it’s twice the size of the large chicken eggs! This is her first one of the year! We’ll see how many we end up with. Geese lay about 35/year; more than every other week, but not quite one a week. I think last year we ended up with only 3 all together. So that was a fun happening this morning. 
The winds that is. Every time I think we’ve seen the highest winds, they get higher! Today we caught a high of 54 mph as it was showing on the weather station. At another time, I think the meter was overwhelmed because we had an amazingly strong gust, which did some minor damage around outside, and it never moved from 28 mph. We’ve had a slight chance of rain all day, and have had some; right now it shows we have around 41% chance of rain, but the humidity has dropped a bit in the last couple of hours. We might not have a respite from the wind until late tonight or early tomorrow. 
Do you feel the love? Our chickens don’t think they got much love today, it was wet and stormy. We, on the other hand, are so grateful for these wet things falling from the sky!!! The weather continues the tradition of raining on my birthday. I used to hate it as a kid, but I really have come to enjoy it as an adult. So far, our little rain guage has recorded .11 of an inch of rain, but it’s supposed to rain through out the night and into tomorrow, perhaps. It has been rather cold, with the wind that has accompanied the rain. 
layers. I say “a couple of weeks”, because they can’t work on it every single day. Take today for instance; Ron and Kathy – who have company, remember – held an “E-Day” luncheon at their home today (has something to do with the 
