Feeding time at the zoo

The chickens are really cracking us up these days. The seem to enjoy it when we're working outside. They really are very social creatures.

I sometimes feel like I'm in Australia or the tropics somewhere with the wacky noises they make. There's the eagle-like sound, the screaming Welsummer, and the one that I think sounds like a kookaburra. I haven't gotten any of this on tape yet, but I hope to soon.

We've got them "trained" just enough that every time we come out of the house or approach the coop, they think we're going to feed them. You'd think they were starving or something (but they're not!). Sometimes Jeremy teases them by walking up to the coop and then walking all the way around the coop. They follow along in a clump all along the inside of the coop.

There are a lot of things they really like to eat. While I've been doing digging for the garden, I've been digging up these nasty grub things which turned out to be stag beetle larvae. They eat rotten wood so they're a relatively harmless, even beneficial bug. But the chickens go crazy when I throw some in and swallow them down whole.



Once or twice we've had some milk that we didn't want to drink any more (just slightly off) so we poured it in a dish for the chickens. They love it. Drink it down and they usually have milk dribbling down their fronts.



The other day we had some pasta that was getting a bit old and we didn't want to eat it anymore. So into the coop for the girls!



I'm hoping some day to get a good video of what we like to call "chicken football." This is when one chicken gets a tasty morsel and runs with it - with all the other chickens after her. For some reason she won't just swallow the thing down, she wants to pick and peck at it. So she usually ends up losing it to another chicken who is then chased. This can go on for some time. They really are hysterical!

Not waiting for the other shoe...

...to fall apart. Though I guess by this point they both really had fallen apart. Once half of Jeremy's sole came off, he really did need to get a new pair of shoes. We ended up finding a great pair, almost new, for less than $10, at the local thrift store. I'm sure he'll run them ragged soon enough.



I had to laugh the other day at my own shoes. I looked down to discover this:



What can I say? Weeds will grow anywhere around here!

One face (almost) done

A couple weeks ago I posted about our progress with the back of the house. We've had a lot of rain since then, but Jeremy finally got the rest of the siding up and I got the painting done. There is a little bit more to do, but it looks done, doesn't it? And that's the important part. =) We had the cable company come out and remove the cable box and cable coming to the house - one less wire, one less box, one less hole in the house. That was very satisfying.



Back in the mudroom, here is the new door/hatch into the attic crawl space. (And yes, that red-painted wood is left over from the chicken coop.)



Jeremy also got trim up around the door and a ledger up. This is for the little back deck we intend to build - in like 100 years when we get around to it. Hopefully it will be sooner than that because we're both excited about it and it will be a really sweet deck.

Peaches

We did not can nearly enough peaches last year. The peaches turned out to be so tasty and we went through our 7 or 8 jars very quickly.

So this year we decided to do more. Seward Co-op had their peach sidewalk sale last weekend so we picked up a 25 pound box. By Monday most of the peaches were ripe enough so we set to work.

First you throw them in boiling water for about 60 seconds, then you put them in cold water. If things go according to plan, you should be able to peel the skin right off.



And where do all those skins go? To the chickens of course!

Then we sliced ours in quarters and put them in water again to heat up.



Right when they came to a boil we ladeled them into hot jars, screwed on the lids, and them put them in a hot water bath for 20 minutes. We did three batches, back to back, for two dozen canned peaches! Yum. And we still have frozen peaches from last year. =)

She's got freckles...

Recently our darker brown eggs have been getting even darker: with freckles. I'm curious if they'll eventually become a solid dark brown. I think we like the freckles better.

Raingardens

I've been meaning to post about our raingarden for some time, but haven't for some reason. One of the first things we did here was put a rain garden in the front yard. The French drain along the north side of the house is supposed to take water and channel it down into the garden.

For those who don't know what a raingarden is, here is a little blurb from my Blue Thumb Guide to Raingardens:

Have you ever wandered what to plant in that low spot in your backyard where the grass won't grow because water puddles there after it rains? Or how to fix the erosion gully where rainwater drains away from one of your downspouts?

Well, there may be an easy, attractive solution! Try planting a raingarden!

A raingarden is simply a garden with a depression that is designed to catch rainwater runoff in your yard, growing plants that don't mind getting partially flooded on occasion. Raingardens provide wildlife habitat and an opportunity to create beautiful landscaping. And, by soaking up rain where it falls, raingardens slow stormwater runoff, help prevent erosion, and remove pollutants in the process.

The point is to catch as much rainwater as you can and give it a place to soak in. We've had some spectacular downpours in the last couple weeks and I've never yet seen standing water in our raingarden. We have great drainage! We just wanted to encourage it to drain into the earth - instead of into our basement.

Here is the beginning of our raingarden, before and after we dug out the Gingko tree:





Here you can see things have begun to leaf out a bit and our rose dropping petals all over. I transplanted quite a few things into the garden - at first mostly creeping charlie!


That last picture was from June; this is from July:


It has filled out even more since then. This is one of my favorite parts of the garden. Just under the rose and little cherry tree there is a mass of violets, wood sorrel, wild geranium, and some other unknown ground cover. Spraying out from the midst of that and draping over into the garden is a patch of this decorative grass. It hangs into more wood sorrel and creeping charlie, and whatever else is hiding in there.


Many months ago I started noticing a type of grass growing. It was so thick it made me think of corn - so I didn't pull it up. It eventually grew to be about 4 feet high and have these great huge fluffy ends. There are several of them and they are matched by lots of little native grasses growing in the yard.



We hope to put a raingarden in the backyard someday, but recently I was noticing how much water pools in the sidewalk when it rains. I'm going to try to put in a bit of a raingarden in the boulevard strip. I've read this isn't always a good idea, so we'll see how it goes. Hopefully it will at least keep our sidewalk from turning into a lake every time it rains!


Before and during (not after) - I'm afraid I haven't gotten very far yet!

Graffiti thwarting

There's nothing like a freshly painted expanse of garage to invite a few taggers along. We heard (and hopefully it's not a myth!) that graffiti artists paint/tag buildings or your garage because it's a fresh, wide open space. They won't often tag a mural or something with other images on it because then their tag won't stand out. (So I've heard anyway.)

So Jeremy went and found some images he liked and freehand drew a rooster and a sun! I am really impressed. He cut these out of some big pieces of cardboard and we spray painted the images onto the side of the garage.





So far, so good...