All Cooped Up!

I will start this out by saying that I don't have a lot of experience building things.  My dad was a great woodworker and built all sorts of things, but other than the occasional birdhouse, I never built anything.   I take that back, I once built a fence from scratch, using only hand tools.  It didn't look bad and it did the job, but I kind of messed up the gate.  Oh well, it kept the dog in the backyard.

Last year, when I decided that I was going to take the plunge and get some chickens, I started looking at pre-built chicken coops on the interwebs.  Wow.  Talk about sticker shock!  Combined with the fact, that so many of them are made overseas out of press board and who really knows what's in that paint anyway?

The next stop was surfing the web maybe doing it myself.  I looked at lots of designs... I mean lots.  Days were filled with various websites and I even bought a book with really cool designs in them. That's when I discovered this site.  The Garden Coop has some slick, sophisticated designs and their plans, according to the reviews were very, very thorough and easy to follow - perfect for someone like me.

After some thought, I decided on the Basic Coop and purchased the plans.  My thought was to build a run onto it, so I played around with some graph paper and the basic design and came up with the idea of building the coop section with longer legs and extending a run of the same height off of it.

Did I mention that I've never used a circular saw before?  There were some parts of the cutting that made me nervous, like the plunge cuts, where you basically plunge the spinning blade into the middle of the board where you want a cut.

The Internet is full of helpful advice and I did a bit of research on safely using a circular saw, purchased some safety glasses and set about cutting all the wood to the sizes I figured out I needed. True to all the reviews, these plans are amazing!  Every step was laid out for me and it was really easy to follow along.  I'm sure experienced builders might find them a little too detailed and probably didn't have to refer to them like I did, but I sure appreciated them!

The coop and run are almost a year old and the inhabitants seem quite happy with it.  During the worst of the winter, I did wish that I had insulated it, as there were a few nights where I was worried about the little dears and ended up wrapping the coop with a thick blanket and closed off 2/3 of the top to keep it a bit warmer in there.  You have to be careful about closing things up so tightly that no air gets in, because that's how frostbite happens - the moisture from their breathing builds up and then ice crystals form.  The girls made it through just fine though.  My only issue was the drinking water freezing solid.

Hello??  We're waiting for our mealworms here.  Hurry up lady!

I'm really happy with my efforts and it is hen approved.  I mean, it's not perfect and a few times, I had to let go of my perfectionist tendencies, but considering that I never built anything remotely similar to this, I'm pretty proud of myself!  It looks nice in the yard, too.

All in all, it did turn out to be more money than if I had bought a ready made cheapo coop like they sell on Amazon, but this is sturdy and I think it is going to last a long time.  The girls are safe and secure and since we do have raccoon and opossum (and fox) in the area, that was important to me. The total cost to build this from all new materials (wood, hardware, screws, tools, etc.) was around $500.

With Silver Bells...

Every year I begin my gardening adventure determined that this is the year that everything will grow like it does in the catalogs or Organic Gardening.  In my mind, my little back yard is neat and tidy, which a totally weed free path and lovely flowers nodding their heads in approval along the way.

Every year, just around this time, things just kind of get away from me.  There are good reasons for this.  I have a full time job so my time on the weekend is limited and there is always something to be done, laundry, cooking, etc... so when weeding becomes a full time job, I start to lose the battle.

Really, I should do something about landscaping the brick path so that weeds don't grow there, but I'm not really sure what I want to do there.

At any rate - I thought I would share what was working this year and what wasn't.

What's working - my strawberry patch and the sweet potatoes.  Both are growing like gangbusters!  I'm expecting a bumper crop of the first next spring and of the latter this fall!  I'm really happy with the strawberries, as this was the first permaculture bed I made last year.

NOM NOM NOM

Sweet potato (Georgia Jet, I think) growing in a trash can.

What's not working too well - well, interestingly enough - it's my cucumbers, peppers and squash.  They've never gotten bigger than about 5 inches and they are just sitting there.  I didn't even bother to take a picture, because, well... they aren't worth it. Maybe when they hear about this public humiliation, they will be shamed into bursting into fruit.

My little greens section has been doing okay, although it has been beset by cabbage moths and I've had to share the collards and kale with them.  The lettuce was a huge success, as are the carrots.  I've had marginal success with the beets, but I think it is because there is too much nitrogen in the soil, from what I've been reading.

The beans are starting to come in and I've harvested a few bags of decent looking potatoes.  I made smashed potatoes with them the other night and they were awesome!

the rounder ones are Lehigh and the oval ones are a variety called Nicola.  

The apple tree is still doing great - the apples are getting to be a decent size.  I hate to hope, but if things keep up the way they are, I might be making some apple butter from my own tree come fall.  This is the MacIntosh that I've been trying to rehab.  At first, I didn't think that many apples had set, but I looked up tonight and I'm going to have to buy one of those fruit pickers on the long handles.

The other fruit trees have had their summer haircuts and are putting out another flush of growth from the cuts, which is what I want.  Their next haircut will be in late February to take out any unwanted limbs and help them establish a strong framework with which to bear fruit.  Out of all of them, I have a feeling the only one to set fruit next year is the plum tree I picked up at HD for a song last fall.  I think I paid $10 for it.  It is growing like crazy and already has a couple of inches of new growth from the cuts I made.

The crazy plum!

Apricot Tree

Tomatoes... I have fruit set - Here's a pic of one of the Indigo Roses that I have been cautiously drooling over.  Still nary a ripe tomato yet though.  I hope they all don't ripen while I'm in Texas.

Indigo Rose Tomato.  When it ripens, it will be deep red with a blush of nearly black purple and oh, so sweet!

Well, that's about it.  My next blog post will be about my foray into the world of carpentry, but I'll leave you all with this pic of one of the happy girls roaming around, eating worms and bugs, dandelions and lamb's quarters to her heart's content!

The Return

Greetings Gentle Readers,

I know it has been a while since I posted and... well, life.  Some of it is good and some of it is not.  You know that saying, "Time flies when you're having fun?"  Well, time also flies when you have tragedy.  You see, this year started out just like every other year in my life - with a lovely New Year's Day full of home cooked food (slow roasted pork shoulder, kale, home made bread, etc.) and progressed swimmingly towards my sister's birthday on the 8th of January.

Early on the morning of the 13th, we got a call that my mother had been rushed to the hospital in respiratory distress.  My mom's house is four hours away and before any of us could rush to be there, she was gone.  Just like that.  No warning, no chance to say goodbye or tell her how much we loved her.  Nothing but disbelief, shock and crushing sadness.  It will be five months on June 13th and I still have moments when I just can't believe she is gone.  It is as if a portion of my brain just doesn't want to cling to the reality of a world without her in it.

It is a strange thing, losing a parent.  We all know it is coming - it is the natural order of things.  Old people die.  We all know that, just as we know that one day we will be old and then we will die.  When both parents are gone we become unmoored, in a sense.  Suddenly, the only person that remembers our childhood is us.  Our parents take the memories of our first steps, our first words, and our first day of school with them when they go and we truly cease to be the child, literally and figuratively.  It is a strange feeling to be cut adrift in the vast sea of humanity without the parental shelter awaiting our return.  We are thrust into the role of reigning adult and are now the repository for the family history and lore.  

When my dad was sick with Alzheimer's, it was tough on all of us, losing him a little bit by bit and even sadder, he lost himself bit by bit.  In June 2013, as he neared the end of his life, we all gathered around him and after I kissed him on his forehead, I whispered to him, "It's okay, you can let go... we'll all be fine."  It was true too.  As much as we all loved him, watching him lose the essence of himself was, I thought worse than losing him all at once.  Alzheimer's is a horrible disease, robbing its victims of their families, their memories and finally, their dignity, so there was a sense of gratitude that he was no longer suffering.

In my mother's case though, there was no long goodbye.  She was there one day and gone the next.  No mental preparation, no sense of relief that she was released from suffering - just shock, pain and sadness.  

It's a human thing to play the "what if" game and especially when we have a sudden loss like this.  "What if she had listened to me and gone to the doctor the last time I talked to her?"  "What if I could have spoken with the ER doctor and said, Yes, please resuscitate her?"  But the biggest thing is always, "What if we knew that the last time we talked with ..... (fill in the blank), was the last time we were going to talk with them?"  What would we say?  What would we want them to know?  What was left unsaid?

For me, this at least carries no guilt.  I told her I loved her.  Every time.  Because I did.  She's gone now and carries a piece of my heart with her, but at least wherever she goes in her travels now, she knows that and that is the most important thing - to know we love and are loved.  

We will be taking her ashes back home in September.  Back to El Paso, where she came into being 84 years ago upon this earthly plane, to rest beside my dad, underneath the rocky shadows of the Franklin Mountains and the vast, impossibly blue sky of her desert home.

I'll be back tomorrow with a garden up date.  In the meantime, hug your parents, if you can.

Until then, gentle readers, Be Kind to each other.

Another bed and some ideas for next Spring

I've wanted to get back out in the backyard last week, but laboring in a sauna is not something I was willing to do, so I did other things this week.  Mostly sitting on the couch looking up stuff on the internet.  Productive stuff.  No, really.  It was.  Scout's honor.

See, I found this youtube channel by a guy named  Larry Hall.  Basically, you take some vinyl rain gutters and some two by fours, some containers, net cups and some potting mix and you create a self-watering system in which you can grow amazing vegetables in containers.  Since I have an entire driveway that extends all the way into my backyard that gets sun all day long, I've wanted to do a container garden there forever.  These are cool, because it will eliminate me having to water those containers to keep everything alive.  The nutrients go right into the water, which is pretty efficient, sort of borrowing from hydroponics.  I'd probably use compost tea in mine, as I don't want to use chemical fertilizer.  The other thing is that here where I live, I would have to take steps to prevent creating a mosquito breeding ground.  Still, I love the idea - it's simple as can be, inexpensive and I can use grow bags, which are better than buckets or plastic totes since the roots self-prune instead going round and round and eventually killing the plants.

Then, in my travels, I found this guy.  Another thing I've wanted to do again is to grow potatoes in containers.  Besides having a great accent, I love what he is doing with the potatoes, even if he does use chemical fertilizers.  That's easy enough to bypass and again, watering with compost tea would work wonders.  So again, I'm filing this away for next year and in fact, I think I would combine the two ideas and grow potatoes with the rain gutter self-watering system.  I wish I found this in the spring, because I would have done it this year, but oh well.  The possibilities for next season abound!

In the meantime, I decided to start another permaculture-type garden bed with sheet mulching.  I surveyed the backyard this morning and narrowed down two possible sites.

The first site is near the fence and at the moment is a tangle of pachysandra, ivy and thistles.  Probably a few dandelions there too.  You can see the last of the phlox flowering and there is a rose bush struggling to the left.  Sterling, I think.  It doesn't get sun in the morning, because its close to the back steps of the house, but I knew I wanted to put one of the fruit trees I've ordered there.  Possibly the apple, since it would be fairly close to my existing apple tree and cross-pollination, ya know.



The second site gets a good amount of sun every day and would be a great place for tomatoes, peppers and possibly another fruit tree.  Right now, there is a type of perennial sunflower/daisy thingy I purchased at Fordhooks on a whim and it is much, much too big for that space.  I keep it cut back, but if I didn't, it would get over 8 feet tall.  This is actually what grew back after I dug it up and replanted it toward the back of the yard where the size made sense.  So, yeah... this one is going to have to go.

After mulling over both possible sites for the new bed, I ended up choosing the first one for a very simple reason.  (and this is where my youngest daughter should stop reading)  Bees.  Those yellow flowers are a bee/moth/butterfly magnet and I figured I would give them a few more weeks of luscious pollen before tackling this bed.

Decision made, I hauled out the weed whacker and discovered several new curse word combinations.  I hate that darn thing.  It's inexpensive (cheap) and the strings don't advance automatically like they are supposed to and most of the time, whirl back onto the spool.  

At any rate, a short vocabulary building exercise time later I had this

Chop and drop.  

I spread some newspapers I purchased this morning (I should have read them first, I suppose), wet them down and added a layer of cow manure and wet that down too.

Then I mixed a five gallon bucket of my compost with ten gallons of peat moss, about 3 gallons of vermiculite, two big handfuls of pulverized lime and a handful of Epsom salts.  

I spread half of that mixture over the manure, wet it down, then another layer of manure and topped that off with the remaining soil mixture, wetting each layer down.  Once I got that smoothed out to my liking, I spread a layer of pine shavings over the whole thing and gave it a good soaking.  

Here's the finished bed.  I would like to get another couple inches of pine shavings on top before winter hits, but I'm pretty happy with it so far.  No digging is always a good thing.  Time will tell whether or not the pachysandra and ivy actually succumb to this method or not.  They may just rear their heads, look in my direction and say, "Thanks for the manure, lady."  I'm also wondering if the poor little rose bush will benefit from this sudden glut of nutrients.  Hope so.

For those of you who may be wondering about the addition of lime and epsom salts, the lime is for the calcium and the salts are for the magnesium, both of which prevent blossom end rot in tomatoes, melons, peppers, etc.  It's not enough to neutralize the acid that the manure adds, but will make a difference to the plants.  The peat moss and vermiculite were added because I have a fairly dense clay soil and I wanted to aid in drainage, especially at this particular bed site, since it sits pretty close to my downspout.  

After everything was said and done, I weed whacked the walk again and then decided to take a few pics of my backyard as it is now to share with all of you, plus one of the tree well bed I finished a couple of weeks ago.

New bed and walkway  

Coral Bells in flower

Creeping Charlie.  Someday, I'll make beer with it.

Bed I did a couple of weeks ago.  I ended up planting Russian sage, lavender, Greek oregano and English thyme on this side.  The other side is all seeded with garlic, which has not made an appearance yet.

Well, gentle readers... that is as they say, that.  At least for now.