Chicken House is almost ready:

I haven't had much time to work on the chicken house this spring but I do have it ready to paint on the inside.  We have decided on a nice eggshell white (even though the chickens we will be housing here will be laying brown eggs).  After the interior is painted the dividing wall will need the chicken wire stretched on it and the door made and hung and then the nest boxes assembled and painted, then we will be ready for little peepers.  Hopefully by June.

This side is for the chickens.

This side is for grain storage.  We will use some metal barrels with secure lids to keep pests out.


This photo shows the chicken door opened.  It slides up and down in the wooden track.  I will attach a hook to keep it open.

Spring Garden Update:

The following photos will show we started some of our plants indoors too early.  I hope when the time comes (maybe another month yet) to plant them outside that they will survive the transplanting.


Not the only cucumber growing on the started plants.

The pumpkins have been blooming for weeks.

Some peppers and cabbages.  I am not going to show the tomatoes, they are the only ones not growing, many have died.

Latest Visitor

Mrs. Wags-End captured this photo of a recent visitor.

Leprechaun

If you close one eye and squint with the other eye you'll see a picture of our resident leprechaun. 
Happy St. Patrick's day.

Garden Starts

With less than great results last year when we started our own seedlings, we ended up with only a few of the many plants we started that actually grew very well and made it to the outside garden and survived.  This year we decided to enhance our process.  We bought a seedling heat mat that heats the starts from the bottom and keeps them about 90 degrees.
Look at the pictures below, these seeds were planted last Tuesday, 5 days ago. 
Cucumbers, cabbage & cantaloupe.


Tomatoes:


If these keep growing at this rate I am sure we will picking cukes and tomatoes before we can plant them outside.
The weakness now will probably prove to be the light.  We do have a couple of full spectrum bulbs over the top of these but I do not think it is enough.  Next year we may spend the money on a table light system that provides more light, this year we will see how these do with what we have.  At the worst we will buy starts again.

A Brief Update

Just a quick note to show I am still here.
Yesterday was a beautiful day, so spring like and different than the last two Marches.  Last year and the year before we were still buried under snow.  We have had hardly any snow this winter.
We put in our first outdoor workday of the year yesterday.  While the chores were not too onerous we still felt sore when the day was done.  Some of things we were at:

• Adjust doors on the chicken house, they had swollen over the winter and did not fit well.
• Get the last window in the chicken house.
• Clean up scraps of wood leftovers from chicken house construction.
• Adjust door on the cat house.  Same problem as the chicken house doors.
• Put up some decoration on the Multi-use shed.  A couple of old saws that hang on the wall.  These I had taken down last fall prior to the painting project.
• Tessa cut off the old dead Peony stalks from last year.
• Wanda cleaned up the pile of leaves from the backyard I had raked up the other day.
• Organise storage shed, just in time for more junk from house to arrive.
  

A lonesome feeder

This cute little bird feeder we got for Christmas.  We have had very few guests so far.  There was a few Chickadees a couple of days ago.  Perhaps it's the mild winter.