Apron

We have been on a tear the last week or so, probably because of the gorgeous weather (which is ending today with the clouds rolling in and rain expected). But whatever the reason, I have been working like a little beaver on the spring clean up of the perennial garden while Kim has been taking apart some beds that were infested with morning glory, finding homes for all the blueberry bushes and strawberry plants that were displaced in the process, and then finding a solution for our badly managed, sprawling compost pile. And when Kim gets to work she puts on her apron.

I bought this apron for her on a driving trip around Nova Scotia about seven or eight years ago. It came from a leather worker in Cape Breton with a very quaint shop overlooking the ocean, and I knew when I saw it that it had to be Kim's. It's a sturdy thing made of orange sueded leather, and Kim says it's the most comfortable apron she's ever worn, thanks to the stretchy suspenders. It's totally adjustable, and doesn't pull on her neck or get in the way when she's working.



And maybe it's the orange colour (is it possible to be anything other than happy while wearing an orange apron?) but whenever Kim puts it on there's an extra bounce to her step and an extra glint of determination in her eye. Because if she's wearing the apron it means there's an interesting construction project in the works, one that requires her cleverness and ingenuity. And that makes for a happy Kim.

Fresh air, a visit from a mink, and getting stuck in the coop

One day a few weeks ago Kim heard a kerfluffle in Coop #1 and popped her head in to see what was going on, only to have a rat run right over her foot as it escaped out the door.

Ick.

It wasn't until later that evening, after a few hours of researching and planning how to rid the coop of its resident rat that Kim mentioned it was a strange looking rat, a rat with a furry tail.

"You mean a squirrel?" I asked.

"No, not a squirrel," said Kim indignantly. After all, we are ex-Torontonians, and should know a squirrel when we see one. A few minutes of Google image searching later and Kim had it. It was a mink.

Mink are bad news. One mink in a closed coop can kill an entire flock in one night. We tried explaining that to our city friends, but they just wanted to know how many mink we would need to make a mink coat. Or at least a stole. We didn't find that very funny...

The good news is that mink are very territorial, and their territory is quite large. So we probably just have a mink, rather than a whole population of them. The bad news is that mink are really difficult to trap. Kim set our live trap anyway, after watching some videos on youtube about proper trap placement for catching mink (which has further convinced me that you can learn anything on youtube). She even baited it with some nice smelly salmon. Something enjoyed the salmon (on three separate occasions, no less) but it managed to do so without triggering the trap. Stupid trap.

Given all this, Kim was concerned about coop security, especially at night. During the day the chickens have a chance of running away from a predator because they're free ranging, but during the night, if a mink got into the coop, they're sitting ducks. Er, chickens. Coop #1 has a sturdy wooden door, but Kim had been leaving the door of Coop #2 open at night for ventilation, using only a screen door to keep the chickens in and other critters out. So she modified the screen door with a wooden panel at the bottom and an extra layer of hardware cloth. 

But that reduced the amount of ventilation Coop #2 was getting, and too little ventilation is really bad for chickens. They need lots of fresh air to stay healthy. So Kim installed two new gable vents in Coop #2, and while she was at it, a whole row of under-the-eaves ventilation holes along the front and back of Coop #1.

That takes care of fresh air and a visit from a mink. You're just waiting to hear about someone getting stuck in the coop, aren't you? That would be Kim. While I was out of town, no less. The first I heard about it was that evening when I called home to check in and Kim told me the door to Coop #2 had been blown shut behind her when she was checking for eggs. I can only imagine the thoughts racing through her mind as she heard the door thunk shut. (And the words on her lips, but this is a PG blog so we won't go there.) Apparently she thought for a minute of two about kicking the door open like they do on TV, or shouting and shouting until someone heard her. But in the end she just set aside her dignity and crawled on her hands and knees out the chicken door.

That would be this door.

All of which lead to the last improvement to the coops: a string threaded from the latch to the inside of the coop, so nobody ever has to crawl through the chicken door again.

Water, inside and out

It seems like only yesterday I was complaining about how dry the garden was, and already we're getting tired of the rain. Drizzles, deluges, steady soaking downpours. But compared with everyone in Sandy's path it's nothing, so maybe I will merely say it has been raining every day. We're a little soggy, the chickens are a little muddy, but the garden is happy. That's the outside part of this post.



Which leaves the inside part. That story began on Tuesday evening when I came home and realized there was water dripping from a light fixture in the family room. Within minutes a long line of damp began to materialize along a seam in the drywall ceiling.

We turned off the water to the house, turned off the power to the family room, moved anything in danger of being dripped on to safer locations, and then began to search for the cause of the leak. Three days later, we still have no idea.

The insurance adjuster has come, the restoration company appraiser has come, the ceiling has been opened, water has been run and pipes inspected, and we are still clueless. So we're going to live with holes in the ceiling over the weekend, using water in the house as we normally would, and (strangely) hope for another leak to tell us what the problem is.



In other words, first there was water, then too much water, then no water, then water, and now we're hoping for too much water again.

It was interesting living without water for a couple of days. That's overstating it, because we could still get water from a tap at the pump house. We used our big emergency water supply jugs and a wheelbarrow to schlep enough water into the house to let us flush an occasional toilet, wash our hands and faces, and perform basic cooking in the kitchen. So it was an emergency preparedness test-run-with-training-wheels kind of experience, but even so, it was enough to convince me that we need to increase the volume we put aside for real emergencies.

It's also interesting living in a construction zone again. It made me think of my wise friend Jean, who, when I was crowing about painting The Last Wall, commented "The thing about painting is that you aren't EVER finished!

Oh, Jean, I wish I had paid more attention.

The Great Divide

There's a new sight as you walk the road from the house to the back half of the property: double gates, attached to a fence that stretches from one side of our property to the other. Gates and a fence that mark the beginning of a new, peaceful entente between Miriam the Gardener and The Flock of Destroyer Chickens.

You might remember that way back in December Kim and I began construction on this fence. At that time I optimistically expected it would take a week or two to finish. I should know better by now - none of our construction projects, with the exception of the time we jacked up the chicken coop, ever goes according to schedule. Life intervenes: bad weather that makes it punishment to work outside, colds that lay us up for a while, other jobs with higher priority. Sometimes it's frustrating that it seems to take so long to get things done, but other times it's perfectly lovely to opt for a morning snuggled up reading a book instead. Balance, it's all about balance.

In any event, the last gates got hung this week. They were a bit of a challenge for Kim to build - they needed to be so big that she was worried they would eventually sag. One trip to the hardware store was all it took - it turns out they sell anti-sag kits just for that purpose. Which further convinces me, if I needed further convincing, that most problems in the world can be solved by a knowledgable hardware store employee.

So now the property is properly divided. There is a smaller gate at one end of the meandering fence line, and the larger double gates at the other.

Half of the property for me, half for the chickens. Sounds good to me.

Line in the sand

Well, not sand exactly. More like dirt. And the line goes clear from one side of our long, skinny property to the other, cutting it in half. A half for me. And a half for the chickens.

The problem is that Gump and his flock of teenage pullets have been making themselves at home in the front half of the property, where the house and all the perennial gardens are, and they are making a mess. There's the issue of poop everywhere, which is bad enough, but the thing that is making me tear out my hair is the damage the chickens are doing to all my perennial beds.

I have a love/hate relationship with those beds. Actually, forget the love part of that equation: it's more like a lukewarm regard. We inherited them from the previous owners, and there are a few problems with them. There is way too much square footage. The beds are infested with mint and creeping bellflower. And practically everything in the beds that's supposed to be there is of the grow-in-the-spring-cut-down-in-the-fall variety - in other words, a perennial. There are very few shrubs or trees, which means the beds are splendiferous in the spring and summer, and a desolate wasteland in the winter.

But the biggest problem is they don't feel like mine. Unlike the vegetable garden and greenhouse, they aren't a source of joy - they're a place where I feel the pinch of my perfectionism most acutely, where I feel smothered in responsibility. These beds were someone else's dream - I didn't design the beds, or choose the plants. I'm just responsible for making sure they aren't overtaken completely. So I was floored when my friend Elisabeth, a passionate gardener herself, asked if I got pleasure from that part of my garden. All I could do was gape at her like an idiot while my brain tried furiously to compute some sense from that statement. Pleasure? Seriously?

I'm working on it. I've converted small portions back to what we like to call lawn (which really means an easy-to-care-for mix of grass, moss and mow-able weeds). Kim and I bought out the fall sale at our local garden centre and planted a small army of shrubs this year to try to lend some structure to the beds. I've been making liberal use of heavy-duty landscaping cloth in the areas most hopelessly infested with creeping bellflower. The current prohibition on gardening while my sore shoulder heals is teaching me how much effort I can save by sitting back and letting nature handle some of the yearly decay, instead of jumping in to clean up at the first sign of autumn.

I'm overstating this a bit (I've inherited a tiny tendency to exaggerate from my mom). There are times of satisfaction, moments when the primeval urge of all those plants to grow, to leaf out, to flower, to reproduce just amazes me, when I feel like I'm surrounded by living things working like mad to create a gorgeous panorama solely for my viewing pleasure, when the layers and layers of life, from the wind swaying the upper branches of the evergreens and the birds flying overhead right down to the worm I unearthed and the bug crawling across my hand all make my heart burst with joy and gratitude for this Mucky Boots time of my life. Those are moments to treasure.

But mostly the perennial gardens are a place full of my sweat and labour, my battles with myself and the weeds - a place where I feel the weight of obligation to be a caretaker and custodian of someone else's vision.



All that is bad enough. But try putting a stampeding, rampaging flock of chickens into the mix. They dig. They scratch. They demolish. They are masters at flicking the mulch I so carefully pitchforked, wheelbarrowed, dumped and spread on the beds all over the grass outside the beds. Yes, they are cultivating and aerating and fertilizing at the same time, but I had had enough.

Enter the new fence.



We are lucky that the previous owners had the same commitment to pasturing their chickens as we do, and the same wish to preserve the property around the house. Shortly before they put the house on the market they did the thankless work of sinking all the required fenceposts for a straight run of fencing from one side of the property to the other, delineating a house-half and a farming-half. All we would have to do was string the fencing material and build a couple of gates. Easy, right?

I should know by now that no construction project is as easy as you think it's going to be. Sure enough, when the third post we reached cracked and fell over when we tried to hammer in some staples, we knew we had a problem. It turns out a couple of the posts had already rotted below ground. So today we dug holes, invented ways to keep the posts vertical in the empty holes, mixed concrete, and got the new poles done. This week, if the weather holds, we'll finish attaching the fencing material and string a couple of extra lines of wire to raise the height. Next week, if all goes according to plan, Kim will build the two gates we'll need. And then the line in the sand will be well and truly drawn.

Get used to it, chickie-chickies!

Moving day

The six Red Rock Cross pullets, now about 2 months old, have made the move to Big Chicken Land, otherwise known as Chicken Coop #2. We finished leveling the building and stabilizing the foundation as much as we were prepared to (it's just a chicken coop, after all), Kim laid a new plywood floor inside and made a chicken door into the chicken yard, and we joined the fencing of the yard to the walls of the coop, to make it secure for the new residents.

Then we introduced the teenage pullets to their new home - how exciting!

At least we thought so. The pullets themselves weren't sure what to make of it all. To a chicken everything new is something to be cautious about, and it took them some convincing that the chicken door wasn't a gateway to somewhere horrible.

There is still work to be done: Kim wants to build a new gate into the pullets' part of the chicken yard, a new human-sized door for the coop with a window that opens, and some additional ventilation holes. And the coop itself is a blank slate inside - the pullets are making do with a movable roost, and Kim wants proper roosting and nest box space, plus a separate enclosure to increase chicken arrangement flexibility.

When I made my first tentative gardening steps and wondered how much work it would take until the garden was done, a more experienced gardener friend laughed (a bit hysterically) and assured me no garden was ever done. I'm thinking the same must be true for chickens. . .

Jack

I've had some interesting experiences since we moved to Mucky Boots, and I've done some things I never would have thought I'd do. Like picking rocks at a quarry, or making medicinal salve, or installing a toilet, or putting new roofs on outbuildings. Or looking more closely than I ever would have imagined at a chicken's butt. But yesterday - yesterday takes the cake.

Yesterday I jacked up a building.

Okay, a tool shed. But still, aren't you impressed?

We all knew this was coming: as soon as we had transferred the contents of our tool shed into the new improved wood shed, Kim's eyes fell on the emptied building and its transformation into Chicken Coop #2 began. But we also all know that nothing is too good for Kim's chickens, and so the sloping floor of the shed simply would not do. Part of the foundation had rotted and sunk, and Kim was insistent that we jack up the building and put in some cement blocks to make it secure and level. Nothing easier, she claimed.

I needed convincing. The words "jack up a building" conjured a vision of a collapsed shed with Kim underneath like the Wicked Witch of the West, and me frantically reading an instruction manual to figure out how to operate a jack so I could rescue her.

Turns out it really was easy. We used the jacks from the car and the truck, went really slowly, and were very careful to not leave any appendages lingering underneath parts that might fall down. The whole operation was much easier, and went much faster than either of us had anticipated. How many home improvement projects can you say that about?

It all made for an afternoon of entertainment for the chickens. It seems like Chicken TV works both ways...

Tonight I am thankful to be safe under a good roof and calm skies. I hope that wherever you are, you are, too.

Tool shed

The very first blog post I wrote, in October 2009, was about putting a new roof on the woodshed. Boy, were we proud of ourselves. Kim took this picture of me sitting on the roof. I had knee pads and callouses: I was a handywoman!

We've been working on the woodshed again this week. It's a very practical building, with our wood storage on one side and a catch-all of garbage cans, recycling bins and assorted junk on the other. It's a solid little structure, but not the most attractive sight when you first drive up to the house. So we decided to enclose the catch-all half and turn it into a proper tool shed to replace the existing one that is too small and too dark.

One new post, a few cross beams and lots of cedar boards and battens later, we have two new walls.

You may be wondering about the photo of the shovels. They go with the 3 tons of screening that are waiting to be raked in for the floor. Yes, you read that right: 3 tons. We calculated the volume we needed (really, really carefully, given the dirt pile that still adorns our front lawn) and the gravel people said it would work out to 2 tons. So weren't we surprised when they showed up with 3. Turns out they're about as bad at estimating as we were. No matter - we only had to pay for what we ordered, and the rest will be put to good use on paths.

Once the screening has been raked and settled in with a few soakings of water, Kim will build some doors to match her whimsical gates. But that might have to wait a bit: she's got her eye on the soon-to-be-vacated Tool Shed #1. She thinks it would make a great Chicken Coop #2. . .