Hey, y’all! It’s spring time around here. Blooms are blooming, grass is growing, roosters are crowing.  Stuff is happening. Of course, spring time means spring cleaning and Sue has been hard at work doing all the coop cleaning while I’m gone. Thanks, Sue! Dustin broke out the lawn mower and the weed whacker and cut down the “lawn” around the dinky house. If you don’t stay on top of it, it becomes a jungle – especially by the time Monsoons hit in July. So, it’s a good time to get a jump on these things. This post will mostly be photos, I’ll explain them – as best as I can – while we go through them, but most of these were sent along by Sue this week.

Sue has spent a good couple of days cleaning out the main coop. Luckily – she has some help from the chickens. When the spring cleaning goes on, first all the old deep litter comes out, almost completely. Gotta leave some in there with the good microbes that help to keep things healthy. This is the nearly empty coop that you are seeing here. Of course, then we need to figure out what to do with the old litter. It’s great for the land, sometimes we use it around the trees as a mulch, sometimes we use it in the garden, in the compost pile, but sometimes we just leave it in the coop to help replenish the soil right there. Here’s the pile from the “nesting side” of the coop.  that’s a heck of a lot to deal with. The chickens enjoy shoving it around though. That’s where they are actually helpful. After it’s all cleaned out, the new straw goes in. All this time the chickens have been checking out what is going on – they are extremely curious. Sue took a couple of photos of the helpers from yesterday and today. I think I’ll probably end up with a montage of many of her photos at the end, because she took so many good ones that it’ll be hard to put them all in the body of this post.

I really enjoy the spring time around Hereford. As things green up and start blooming, you forget about the brown season. You can enjoy the differing views and take artful photos of the RCW through the blooms of the apricot trees brightened by the morning sun. Makes photo taking fun. The pansies and jonquils are blooming, the walnut tree is loaded with catkins, the cottonwood has started to bud, the almond tree has already bloomed and is now leafing out nicely; it’ll be interesting to see what the fruit and nut yield will be this year.  Guess, I’ll leave you with the photo montage. Hope you enjoy. We’ll see what we come up with for Friday. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

 

Today’s Weather: I really don’t know the exact temps from today. My phone weather app says the high was 83°. Currently, at 10:06 p.m., it is 59° with 29% humidity. The overnight low is going to be 43°. Sunrise today was at 6:13, sunset was 6:36. The temps might be going back down over the next few days. Lower 80’s and high 70’s.

Egg Report: Tuesday – 47 chicken, 3 ducks, 1 goose. Wednesday – 37 chicken, 3 ducks, 0 goose.