We made it to midweek. The last couple of days have been lower wind days – at least in the morning. Sue’s been able to tackle a couple of her projects and we’ve done some other things. My folks will be here tomorrow for a visit, so we’ve done some cleaning around the house. Things kinda going slow. Here’s the midweek roundup.

Yesterday morning it was calm enough that Sue started the major spring coop clean. She got the littles’ side all cleaned out with fresh hay down and everything. The chickens love to scratch through all that fresh hay. All you need to do is give them the flakes and they will get it all spread around for you. Then Jolene came to work on the goats’ hooves. Taco George is so used to it now that Sue was able to get a photo of Jolene working on his feet. In this photo she is rasping off the the hooves – you know, like filing your nails. She also took a look at the babies, thought they were adorable, and said they were just fine for right now.

In the evening we worked on Duck-Duck’s bumble foot. We were sooo hoping that this would be the last time we had work on it, but – no. She still had one little hard spot of infection. So we let her bathe for a good long time in the tub, then soaked her in the warm Epsom salt water and were able to get a small plug of infection out. We wrapped it back up and we’ll look at it again in a couple of days.

Today it was calm just long enough for Sue to do get the other side of the coop cleaned. That’s a bigger and longer process than the littles’ side. To the left is at the beginning of the process… taking all of the old straw out. You can see one of the ducks is refusing to get out of the nesting box. We aren’t sure if she is thinking of going broody, or was just stubbornly protecting her one egg this morning. Sue ended up moving these nesting boxes because they were just too darn difficult to reach, being under the regular roosts. The didn’t originally fit under the newer nesting boxes because the straw was piled up so high. But moving them after the straw was out from under the newer nesting boxes was great. Here’s a photo with everything all cleaned out. You are supposed to leave some traces so that the microbes don’t have to start all over from scratch. Then, like I said above, you just throw in a bunch of flakes and the chickens have a ball spreading it around. Sue said she used to bales of compressed straw on this side of the coop this time. They always have fun. By the time we did chores, you could not tell that these flakes ever really existed. There was just nice soft, new, clean straw all over the floor. Works great!

Now we’ll just have to see what we’re able to do to work on the RCW. Friday I believe I’ll make it to the Neighborhood Market, here in Hereford, so I’ll be able to talk a bit about that next time. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

Today’s Weather: Really quite warm today. 95° still at 5:55 p.m. Hope it cools down a bit while my folks are here.  It’s still a mite windy, but only gusting up to 18 mph today. I’d like that to lessen as well.

Egg Report: Tuesday – zero goose, 2 duck eggs, 34 chicken eggs. Wednesday – zero goose, 1 surviving duck egg (2 broken), 40 duck eggs.