We hate wallpaper

After living here for nine months, we've finally started doing some painting around the house. Every room with painted walls was a shade of white or beige, and we were starved for color, so dining room, nursery-in-progress, and bathroom (as seen a couple posts ago) all got face-lifts over the past month.

One gallon and three coats of paint later, the dining room has one bright red wall.

I had intended a darker, grayer shade of blue for the nursery, but this will do.

Encouraged by all the improvements, we decided to remove the wallpaper in our kitchen. Our kitchen is cramped, with a low ceiling, bad lighting, and cheap cabinets and counters, so it needs all the help it can get. And the checkered blue and white wallpaper that was peeling up at all the seams was one bad feature of the room that we felt confident that we could tackle without much trouble or expense.

Our claustrophobia-inducing kitchen.

If you're going to put up wallpaper, might as well do it badly.

According to people on the Internet who know about such things, you're always advised to remove a layer of wallpaper before putting up new stuff. But apparently the people who lived here before us didn't bother with trifling things like that, because we've found evidence of at least four other types of wallpaper underneath the top layer. Scraping it all off was a serious job until we discovered how to get hold of the bottom layer and peel everything up at once. Our favorite of the wallpapers is definitely the bottom one, shown below, which has various scenes of wagons, boats, and houses on it. The kitchen must have looked magnificent when it was completely covered in tiny brown drawings.

Two of the other four types of wallpaper we found under the top layer.

Halfway through the wallpaper stripping, it just looked like the kitchen had caught fire. What's with the wood patch in the wall above the stove? We don't want to know.

And yet another unfortunate surprise was that we don't even have normal drywall or plaster walls in our kitchen. Underneath all that wallpaper is hardboard, which is the composite wood stuff that pegboard is made from. In same places it's been cut and wrapped around the edges of the cabinets, and in other places it goes behind them. And the seams between the pieces of hardboard are some kind of plastic strips that are impossible to remove or to strip the wallpaper from. Sigh.

The exposed hardboard and plastic seams underneath all that wallpaper.

We talk a big game about one day redoing the whole kitchen, enlarging it and getting all new cabinets and counters. When that day comes, I can't wait to get rid of the hardboard and put up some nice, normal drywall. But for now, all we can do is sand out all the weird irregularities, clean up the plastic strips as best we can, and give the room a few coats of paint. It's still going to look a whole lot better at the end than when we started, but we definitely bit off more than we were expecting.

Adding some fowl, subtracting a rooster, and multiplying eggs

We have eggs!

Our first egg

Some are brown and some are white (the color depends on the breed of chicken). We know that at least three of the hens are laying, and it might be all four. We're getting about two eggs a day, sometimes three. So far they're all small, probably smaller than medium eggs you'd get at the grocery. As the chickens get everything figured out, they'll become more normal sized. But we've done some testing, and even though they're small, they're perfect on the inside.

Cooking up our first homegrown breakfast

I'm also very happy to report that our annoying rooster, Charlie Murphy, is no longer our problem. On Sunday morning Mike cornered him in the chicken coop, wrapped him in a towel, and stuffed him into our cat carrier for transport to his new home: Mike's parents' house. They were in need of a new rooster, and we were happy to make it happen. They live in a more isolated area than we do and are used to hearing crowing (at one time I think they had three roosters), so the change suits all the people involved just fine. They also have a bigger flock of hens and more area for the birds to roam, so we're confident that Charlie will be very happy at his new home. 

But we didn't leave our hens lonely: The same day, we finally brought home two guinea fowl to add to our flock. Mike's mom raised a bunch of guineas from eggs earlier this year, and they've grown up at her house with the chickens. Unfortunately, our chickens have never seen guineas before, and since they're terrified of everything that moves, they've been in a state of alarm for the past day. When the guineas walk near them, they flee, sometimes attempting to crash through the chain link. And the guineas are afraid of me and Mike and aren't used to being penned up, so they've also had their share of panic. Hopefully everyone will calm down and get used to the new situation in a few days.

Our two guinea fowl. This is the best picture I could get, because they never stop running. 

Eventually we want to be able to let the guineas out to free range so they can eat ticks (reported to be their favorite snack), but the logistics are tricky. They're safer outside than the hens, because they can fly up high in trees. But if they sleep outside, they're still vulnerable to raccoons and owls, so we need to train them to take shelter at night. The coop is the obvious choice, but I don't know how to let the guineas in and out while keeping the chickens inside. The barn might work, but then we'd have to deal with guinea poop all over the barn, and some predators could still get at them. I have no idea how we're going to settle this.

She wants to be friends with the chickens, but they're strongly opposed to the idea.

Shower remodel

Although most of our posts have been about outside projects, we do work on the inside of the house here and there. My approach to home improvement is to dwell on something I dislike for 6 months or so, stewing about how ugly it is and how much better it could be, until one day I finally get motivated and tackle the project in a whirlwind. And a feature of this house that I've been stewing about since the day we moved in has been the shower doors.

The shower as it was. Not hideous, but not good.

I think shower doors can be fine, but the ones in our master bathroom were really gross along the edges and impossible to clean. They were also too low, so I had to duck or smash my head every time I got in and out of the shower and water sprayed over the top. I also kept imagining how annoying it was going to be to bathe a baby while leaning over the sharp edge at the bottom and having access to only half the tub at a time.

Grossness at the bottom -- and this only a few months after we'd already stripped and replaced the caulking.

I finally got motivated this week to remove the doors, and then I felt ridiculous for having procrastinated so long when the entire project only took an hour.

I started by taking off the doors and spraying all the caulk on the frame with Goo Gone Caulk Remover. Then after I took out the screws holding the frame to the edges of the shower, the four metal sides of the frame were pretty easy to pry off. What was left on the two sides of the shower was pretty scuzzy, but what was underneath the bottom piece was downright frightening.

The horror!

Miraculously, by using a scraping tool equipped with a razor blade and a bit more Goo Gone, it only took a little elbow grease to clean up all that old caulk and gunk. I scrubbed all the surfaces with a bleach solution and steel wool for good measure, and then they looked shiny and new!

The perfectly smooth, clean surfaces revealed after a bit of scrubbing.

The only remaining task is to fill the screw holes, visible in the picture above, with dabs of caulk. They'll still be noticeable, but the shower curtain will hide them most of the time.

In my humble opinion, a vast improvement.

I feel much better about the whole bathroom now. I always felt icky having something so dirty and uncleanable so close to where we wash ourselves. Now the bathroom is perfect . . . except for the rusty light fixture, the flimsy door, the ugly doorknob, the missing towel rod, and the mismatched light switches. One thing at a time, I guess.

Grown-up chickens

I thought I'd give an update on the chickens now that they're nearly grown up and their situation has settled down. Our final count after coyote attacks is five birds. Our rooster, Charlie Murphy, is turning into a very handsome fellow. He's noticeably bigger than the hens and has a nice greenish sheen to his feathers. He tends to favor the two hens of his own breed, Henrietta and Helena Bonham Carter. Henrietta was the one who hurt her foot a couple months back, but she seems healthy and happy now. Then we have small, spry Junebug, who's too nervous to hold still for a photo, and plump Marjorie Stuart Baxter. We check regularly for eggs, because the hens are now 5 months old and should start laying any day now, but so far no luck.

Charlie Murphy, crowing proudly -- much to our annoyance

The more unpleasant development that comes with chicken maturity is that Charlie has turned into a serious crower. What was at first charming has become incredibly annoying, because he starts every day with 20 minutes or more of repeated crowing. Usually that starts around 6:30 or 7, but he's clocked in before 6 a.m. a couple times. Then any time he hears people outside or we come near, he crows 10 or 15 times. And he can be counted on to give another half dozen crows at random throughout the day. The noise is really loud (and obnoxious), and our neighbors might be starting to hate us. I don't have any friendly feelings myself when I'm hoping to sleep til 8 on Saturday morning and he wakes me up before dawn.

Marjorie the hen

The crowing isn't the only strike against Charlie Murphy. He's proved himself worthless at keeping squirrels out of the pen and coop (they squeeze right through the chain link), so we've had a parade of rodents chowing down on chicken feed. He's starting to show signs of being aggressive towards people when we go in their enclosure, which is unwelcome now but will become dangerous when his spurs grow in. And we don't need him to protect the hens anymore since they aren't really free-range now and are well protected by their pen. The only purpose he serves for us at this point will be fertilizing eggs in case we want to hatch more chicks next spring. But Mike's mom has offered us a nice gentle rooster who never crows who could serve the same purpose, so Charlie is on thin ice with us. If he keeps up his current behavior, we'll be offering a free rooster on Craigslist to whoever wants him. Kind of funny how a month of bad behavior can totally negate all the affection I had for a bird we raised from a cute little chick.

The ongoing fight against nature

Our house is surrounded by deer trails, and when we first moved here last winter we got excited every time we saw deer. The first time we saw the house after we bought it, a deer was even standing by the front porch, and we thought it was so cool.

But after seeing 40 or 50 of them in the neighborhood, the thrill wore off, and we knew we'd have to fence in our garden eventually or lose everything to hungry deer. We were busy with other things and put off building a fence until June, when we started seeing deer prints in the garden beds and losing young green bean plants. 

On the left: a healthy young bean plant. On the right: one that the deer stripped.

The only surefire way to keep out deer is an 8-foot fence, but that wasn't in the budget this year. The next-best option is electric fence, so after much confusion and research, we bought all the equipment we needed and spent one looong day installing it.

Our garden is pretty far from any power source, so we bought a solar-powered system. We put up about 10 metal poles at outward angles, which supposedly adds more depth and discourages deer from jumping over. We installed one upright wood pole (the only nice-looking pole we had laying around the barn) to mount the solar charger. Then we ran two wires around the perimeter that would carry the charge and two uncharged wires just to provide more of a barrier. We used chicken wire at the bottom of the fence to help keep out small animals, although any really determined critter could squeeze underneath it without too much trouble.

The solar charger and the angled fence. For an extra classy touch, we included strips of plastic bags at the top to make the fence look taller.

It wasn't a difficult project, but it took a lot of time and involved unpleasant tasks like mowing down a huge area of poison ivy and securing the chicken wire with hundreds of metal twist-ties. At the end of the long day, with our extensive cases of poison ivy already showing up, Mike bravely stepped up to test the fence and make sure it actually worked. He'd been shocked many times in the past by a strong charge around a horse pasture, so he was pretty wary.

Using a blade of grass to test the electric fence

I was standing by eagerly for his reaction, but it didn't turn out to be too bad. He says it's not something you'd want to feel but not seriously painful. It's strong enough to be unpleasant to a deer, which is all we need. We've had a little damage in the garden from a small animal or two since the fence was put up, but we haven't seen any evidence of deer breaching the perimeter. 

We were in too much of a hurry to figure out how to include a gate the first time around, so we have to turn off the charger and squeeze between the wires when we want to get in, which is annoying and makes it really hard to get a mower in there. This fall when we're done harvesting everything and can take down the fence for a few days, we're planning to install a gate. While we're at it, we'll also replace the rusty metal poles with nice wood poles so it doesn't look like such a prison yard. 

Summer updates

As August rolls in, it's good to see some of the projects here coming into fruition. The garden needs very little work these days, aside from the occasional hour or two of watering, weeding, and picking Japenese beetles. I was worried that the shade would be too much, but the tomatoes are coming in strong. While most are still small and green, we've harvested a few Brandywine and Black Krim (both of which I would highly recommend). The bell peppers and jalapenos have fruited, the beets are coming along well, and the pole beans (green beans) seem to be spreading nicely, though they haven't flowered yet.

Our heavy thicket of tomatoes

One perfect bell pepper

 We finally called it quits with our cauliflower and broccoli patch, and the Brussels sprouts and cabbage are close behind. A nightly invader destroyed a ten or so leaves at a time from the plants, and during the day, the small green worms from innocent white moths devoured the insides. We were able to shoo away the rabbit or squirrel at night by spreading garlic powder around the beds occasionally, and we hand-picked as many worms as we could daily, but alas the damage had been done, and nothing came of the plants. Nonetheless, our sheepish chickens enjoyed picking over the plants and finding all of the hidden worms.

A torn up and nearly dead broccoli plant

The chicken pen is finished at last! Since our coyote problem from last month, we kept the chickens in the coop during the day while we covered the nearby dog pen with rolls of chicken wire. We had some leftover wire fencing from the garden that I used to thread the chicken wire together, creating a gap-free shelter for the little buggers while still allowing them to spend their days outside. We then dug a foot out from the base of the pen and buried chicken wire along the perimeter, foiling any attempts to dig into the pen. We removed the tiny chicken door from the back of the coop and replaced it with a small (and at first extremely frightening) tunnel that led into the pen. After some successful baiting with some cracked corn tossed into the pen, the little guys finally relented and settled into their new area. Now they can come and go as they please, and we're able to leave for a few days here and there without having to arrange for letting them in and out.

The unsightly but functional chicken pen

We recently found that a) we love chanterelle mushrooms and b) chanterelle mushrooms grow like crazy in the forests around our property. After some initial hesitation and uncertainty that these gobs of mushrooms truly were what I suspected they were (smooth chanterelles, mostly), I threw them in a pan and made one of the best tasting things I've eaten in a long time. Meanwhile our mushroom logs are still sitting quietly behind the barn without any sign of a mushroom. 

Wild chanterelles in our woods

This is the recipe we've liked for the mushrooms:

Dry saute method for chanterelles (roughly 10 ounces after trimming):

Wipe off any dirt from the mushrooms, trim off the base and any dark places, and cut them into manageable bites. (Don't wash them or they'll suck up all the water, steaming as they cook.)

Put them in a frying pan with no butter or oil over medium heat for 5-7 minutes, stirring often. (They'll sweat the little moisture they have, concentrating their flavor and opening them up for some butter. Lightly salting here would help them release the moisture a bit better, though I've heard early salting also leads to less flavor, so pick your poison.)

Add 1 Tbsp butter and saute for 2-3 minutes. A dash of pepper, a dash of salt, and enjoy.

The cruel life of free-range chickens [Updated!]

I've been meaning to post for weeks now with updates on the garden and our efforts to keep the deer, caterpillars, and rabbits from eating everything before we do, but time has been flying by again lately. And now the garden doesn't seem as important, because our flock of chickens has taken some tragic hits lately.

One evening about two weeks ago Mike headed out to count the chickens and close up the coop, as we do every night. But one rooster was missing. It was fully dark outside and we were in the middle of a thunderstorm, but we both grabbed flashlights and rain jackets and searched everywhere we could think of. No sign of him. I remembered hearing some commotion from the yard earlier in the day, and we've had hawks in the area, so we concluded that a hawk had probably swooped down and grabbed him. He was the friendlier of the two roosters and was looking like he would turn out to be the dominant one, so we are very sad to have lost him. But at least we had a "spare" rooster, so the remaining one could now reign in peace.

Today I was working in my office when I heard another chicken-related commotion. Now much more concerned about the sounds of alarm, I jumped up and saw a coyote standing in the middle of the yard, with chickens fleeing for their lives in every direction. Mike and I raced outside just in time to hear a chicken scream from the woods. (Who knew they could scream? It was awful.) But by the time we got out there, the coyote and all the birds were gone or hiding. We commenced an hour-long search through the woods to find the survivors. The poor hen who screamed is alive, but her leg or foot is hurt. We also recovered four traumatized but unharmed hens. Mike found a pile of brown feathers, which is a sad sign that one of our fat, friendly Buff Orpingtons met her end. And as for our remaining rooster, we've seen no sign of him. He may be lost in the woods, or he may have been eaten too.

We don't know if the hurt hen will recover or not. Per the instructions of Chicken Health For Dummies, which I'm very glad I have on hand, we've made a little chicken hospital out of her childhood nursery, the red bin. She was able to walk a little, so we're optimistic that nothing is broken (which would probably mean euthanization). I think all we can really do is keep her comfortable and wait to see if she heals.

We had worried about the stray dogs that roam through our property sometimes, but I never thought coyotes would be a daytime problem. Even a really defensive, mean rooster isn't a match for coyotes; the best you can hope for is that he alerts the hens to danger in time for them to hide. Maybe our two roosters were martyrs, sacrificing themselves so most of the ladies could get away. But we're pretty sad that our flock of 8 cute little chicks is now down to 5.

Update 7/9/13: The rooster returned! When Mike went out to check on the chickens again, hours after my first post, he was back among the hens where he belongs. We don't know where he was hiding or whether he was chasing the coyote away (ha), but he seems fine and we are very glad to have him back. I was never happier to hear him give his strangled-sounding adolescent crow than this morning.

New beeginnings*

Things are getting nerdier around here. We're beekeepers now.

Mike's family started beekeeping last summer with great success, and their bees multiplied enough that they were able to divide their hive into three or four hives this spring, one of which they gifted to us. I have no idea how one actually separates one or two thousand bees from the colony and sets them up in a new hive, since my in-laws were kind enough to handle that part for us. On Sunday evening at the Horns' place, all that remained to do was to wait until after dark to seal up the hive box with duct tape and take it with us.

It was past midnight by the time we got home, and the bees had been bounced around in the bed of our truck for a good hour or more, which I don't imagine they liked very much. We put the sealed hive box in its permanent site out in the garden. Then in one of his more dramatic scenes to date, Mike suited up in protective gear, went back out to the hive in the dark -- in an approaching storm, no less -- ripped the duct tape off all the openings of the hive, and sprinted back to the house. Parker had given the comforting warning, "You can't outrun them," so really Mike's only hope was that he could high-tail it out of there before the bees figured out that they now had a target for their irritation. Seeing no reason for two of us to do a job that one could handle, I stayed at the house and crossed my fingers that he wouldn't get stung. (It worked.)

After letting the bees chill out and get used to their new home for a day, we added a second hive box to the setup. Each box is filled with ten frames that the bees build the honeycomb onto and then fill with honey and eggs. I forgot to take a picture of the open hive box, but you can see what frames look like in the picture below.

Placing another hive box on top of the original box means taking off the lid, exposing the many, many bees within, and this time two people would make the job go quicker. To keep them calm, we gave the hive a few puffs from a smoker filled with burning pine needles. The smoke supposedly interferes with their communication and makes them think the hive is on fire, which prompts them to concentrate on eating as much honey as possible before fleeing. Meaning they're too busy eating to care that we're opening up the hive and poking around. (When the smoke fades, the bees put the honey back and go about their day.)

But even after using smoke, there were still a couple dozen bees swarming around us, so I was pretty nervous about taking off the lid. I haven't been stung by a bee in more than a decade, but I still remember how much it hurt. And as you can see in the pictures, we don't have full beekeeper suits, just items that protect our most sensitive/vulnerable parts, which doesn't exactly make me feel confident. In my nervousness, I was in too much of a hurry to take any pictures with the lid of the hive off, so that will have to wait until I'm more comfortable with the routine. But just as we hoped, the bees didn't pay much attention to us, and we pulled off our task without a hitch.

These two boxes, called the hive bodies, are basically the bees' central home. The queen will lay eggs in there, and we'll always leave the honey in them alone so the bees have plenty to eat in winter. Later this spring or summer, we'll add one or two more boxes called supers to the top of the setup. The queen can't get into the supers (she's too big), so they won't get eggs laid in them, and we'll harvest all the honey from them once or possibly twice a year. But we don't need to add supers yet, because the bees have to fill all the space in the hive bodies before they'll be ready to move upward to new space.

And with that, I may have shared 95% of my current beekeeping knowledge. We're learning as we go. From what I've read, beekeeping can be a very complex business, but I'm hoping we can keep things as simple as possible. Bee hive + flowers = honey. Repeat annually.

*Of all the topics that lend themselves to awful puns, beekeeping is one of the most painful. I've had the misfortune of hearing literally dozens of groaners from Mike and the male members of his family during the past few months.

Checking in with the chickens

We've started letting the chickens free range for a few hours at a time, and they seem to love pecking around in the leaves and chasing bugs. They're still cowardly enough to want to stay together in a pack most of the time. It's pretty funny when one chicken chases a bug farther than usual and then panics and sprints back when it realizes that it's 50 feet away from all its friends. They're getting friendlier toward us, though, and come over to check us out when we visit. They're very interested in my toes when I'm in sandals, which makes me pretty nervous because I'm sure they don't know the difference yet between appendages and grubs. But I haven't actually been pecked yet.

The black chicken you can see clearly in this picture is one of the roosters. Both hens and roosters grow combs, the red fleshy part on the forehead, but the roosters are developing them much more quickly. They're also getting to be a little bigger than the other birds. We're trying to make sure the roosters are comfortable with us as they grow up so that they don't become hostile and try to protect the hens from us. When I first went home with Mike back in college, his parents had a crazy old rooster that would attack people, so Mike  had to bring a foam pool noodle outside with us as a defensive weapon in case the rooster was feeling feisty. I don't want that to be necessary here.

The first few evening we let the chickens out, we worried that they didn't yet know to get back into the coop at dusk, so we had some exasperating times chasing them around and trying to herd them inside. But we figured out that if we wait until it's actually dark, they do indeed put themselves to bed where they belong. So far they seem to be ignoring the roost perches I built for them in favor of sleeping in a 1 sq ft area, piled on top of each other. But they're still growing pretty quickly, so that won't be an option much longer.

Trash and treasure

One of the first things we started in preparation for our new life out here was the creation of the "other black gold," compost. While we lived in our last apartment, we kept a couple of smallish plastic bins on the porch and threw in vegetable and fruit scraps as they accrued and mixed in the odd handful of potting soil or dirt to try and keep things covered. These two slightly smelly, drippy bins made the move with us and served as the cornerstone of our great compost heap.

Compost is quite important to our gardening efforts by adding organic material and an array of nutrients to our mostly deficient heavy clay soil that we have to work with. You need moisture, air, and a balanced blend of "greens" and "browns" to create the ideal environment for bacteria/fungi to thrive. The "greens" in the pile are things like food scraps and grass clippings, while the "browns" are straw, paper, and old leaves. Without getting into too much detail, the greens provide a relatively high portion of the nitrogen and the browns provide more of the carbon, the two main determinants of whether the micro-life is happy. With plenty of air in the mix, the pile smells nice and earthy, not bad. Without enough air, this opens the door for anaerobic composting whose byproduct is methane, causing a stink and much messier result (though I've heard some use anaerobic digestion to create gas for heating).

The particular variety of composting we're shooting for is a thermophilic process, meaning that the pile will naturally heat up to at least 160 degrees for a few days to kill off and weed seeds and diseases that might be present. I was pleased to find that after sticking a pitchfork into the compost recently, a great billow of steam rolled out, meaning that things are going well.

We keep a compost bowl in the kitchen to haul out to the pile after it gets full. It gets very little respect, as you will no doubt notice by the heavy abuse on its rim.

In addition to the compost heap, we also keep a worm bin. Worm castings (poop) are an awesome fertilizer, which is one of the reasons why it's great to see them in your garden. The bin is a very simple setup, is smell-free, and will be a source of free fertilizer for us for the foreseeable future. Our worms like old vegetable scraps, and fortunately for them, we tend to eat a lot of vegetables. They have a nice bed made of peat moss and a little sand, and they're covered in a heavy layer of leaves, which serve as their homes and food.

When we add food each week, the worms work their way away from the older stuff, leaving lots of tiny worms behind to finish it off. The juices drain through a length of rope into a jug to make a concentrate for "worm tea," yet another fertilizer that is heavily diluted before use.

Composting is a great way to divert part of the garbage from the landfill to the garden, it doesn't smell, and it's free.

The inside of the bin. Little Javier is journeying his way to the top on a dare from the worms below (not pictured).

They grow up so fast

Our chicks finally graduated today! Using a can of paint we found in the garage, left over from whenever the deck was last painted, we gave the coop a quick coat of paint before storms moved in yesterday. I'm sure paint is supposed to dry for more than 3 hours before it gets drenched, but the weather hasn't given us very many options. Today we furnished the inside with bedding and moved the chickens out of their very cramped quarters in the red bin. They were reluctant to jump out (for once), so Mike had to give them a lift, but then they seemed happy to have 24 whole square feet to explore.

They can all finally get a bite to eat without standing on each other or tipping over the feeder. And we won't have to stand it up and refill it twice a day anymore!

Since they're defenseless still and we don't want them to wander off and get lost, we'll keep them enclosed in the coop for about the next week so they can grow up more and learn that the coop is a safe home. Then we'll start letting them outside for short periods of time when we can watch over them and make sure they don't go too far. Chickens want to roost in a safe place when it gets dark, so they'll willingly go back to the coop and settle in around dusk. Eventually all we'll have to do is open the coop door in the morning to let them out to free range, top off their food and water every couple days, collect eggs, and go back out in the evening to close the door behind them. Overall, they should be pretty low-maintenance contributors to the farm. 

And of course we'll have to clean out the coop occasionally and maintain it so that the hard work we've done on it can last as long as possible. Just in the past couple days, some gaps had widened between boards that let in rain. So after we got the chickens situated, I sealed everything up. I think after one more coat of paint, we'll finally be able to call it finished.

This is what happens when Mike tells me to look cheerful while I work.

Catching up on a month of work

I didn't intend to take a month break from the blog, but as things have picked up speed this spring, I've been a little overwhelmed. We have our hands in a lot of ongoing projects, so this catch-all post covers a lot of ground.

First off: The chicks are doing great. They're pretty ugly now, and quite terrified of us despite us seeing to all their needs for their whole lives, but they're healthy and growing fast.

I set up a pen in the yard one day so they could explore bugs and leaves, but mostly they just cowered along the wall.

They've grown about 7 inches in one month, and their bin is getting pretty crowded. They tip over their food dish and drink (or spill) all the water about twice a day. Good thing their permanent home will be ready soon! The chicken coop is basically done except for a couple coats of paint, and we have to wait on a few dry days before we can take care of that chore. The window shutters and nest boxes came together over the past few weeks and we really like how they look. And best of all, the hasn't been leaking anywhere, despite plenty of rain.

The closed window shutter and storage bin on one side of the coop.

Opening the shutter to show the screen underneath. We'll prop it open in nice weather.

Instead of a storage area, the other side of the coop has nest boxes. The inside of the coop also features lovely linoleum and a small chicken door.

Next weekend we'll be expanding our menagerie to include honey bees. Mike's family had a lot of success with their new hive last year, and they're splitting it and giving us a swarm. We've started building the hives and getting the equipment we need to bee-keep, but it all still needs to be assembled. I've been reading a book on bee-keeping, but mostly we're relying on the Horns' expertise to guide us. With luck, about the same time we start getting eggs from the chickens, we'll also be able to harvest quite a bit of honey.

Our seedlings continue to progress. The brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and brussels sprouts) that we've transplanted to raised beds are doing very well and haven't been bothered by deer yet. Lettuce, spinach, and kale that we seeded outside are all growing fast, too. The transplanted tomato and onion seedlings are struggling to take off, though. We have bell peppers, jalapenos, cucumber, cantaloupe, and herbs started indoors.

Other projects: In addition to what we're putting in the garden, this year we've planted 75 strawberry plants, 9 raspberry bushes, 3 apple trees, 1 cherry tree, 2 pawpaw trees, 3 hazelnut bushes, 1 gooseberry bush, and about a dozen flowering trees and shrubs including dogwoods, redbuds, and forsythia. Mike did way more of the work than me, though. I hate planting trees. Everywhere you dig around here, you have to chop up tons of roots. It's exhausting. I was dreading the boxes of saplings that kept showing up at the house needing to be planted. But I know I'll be happy to have fruit and flowers for the next couple decades.

Mike also set up mushroom logs. He soaked the logs, drilled holes all over them, and then inserted mushroom spore plugs that we bought from a garden center. He melted wax to seal over the plugs, and then made sure the logs were secure in a shady spot behind the barn where they can stay cool and damp. Now all we have to do is wait about 18 months while the spores slowly grow and take over the logs, and then we'll be able to harvest oyster mushrooms and maitake mushrooms. We've never tried maitakes (also called hen-of-the-woods), but they're supposed to be tasty.

I think that summarizes the bulk of our spring. We'll continue digging raised beds and planting seeds, but I'm optimistic that the hardest work is behind us for the year.