Chicken coop progress

Well dear reader(s), we're not moving as fast as I thought we would on the hen house, but my husband/builder likes to build things to last.  That's a good thing.   

The coop site

The boards on the ground are recycled plastic/sawdust lumber that won't rot like wood.

It's built away from the fence so we can walk all the way around it and also so that we can put hardware cloth along the ground to keep the coons and possums out.

Just starting to lay out the actual coop (on the left) which is built separately from the run in case we need to move it.  The wire will link them together, as will the roof.

The support posts of the coop are made from a donated 4x6 cedar ceiling beam.

The coop is off the ground so that the nesting boxes will be at a convenient height for us to open the hinged door and reach in from the back to collect eggs.  We'll also be able to slide the floor out and hose it off!

The back wall is in; we'll cut the door in later and add windows for light and ventilation.

Side walls are up.  The next step will be the metal roof, insulation, and coop ceiling.  The roof won't extend all the way over the run, so that the hens can have some direct sunlight in the winter.  

We do plan to let the chickens out in the yard when we're home and can watch them, but our fence doesn't enclose the side yards, so chickens could wander around to the unfenced front yard.   We want our hens to be happy, but we don't want them to wreck our front garden!  

these long summer days

begin with early mornings in the garden followed by cereal, seasonal fruit, and English muffin breakfasts, and progress to tall glasses of strong iced tea, while the heat and the cats that sleep for hours on end inspire me to not much more than reading, resting, and ruminating, so it's good that I start a new class tonight: artistic embroidery.  I've been wanting to learn embroidery for a long time.  I learned a few stitches as a child, but it's been years since I've tried my hand at anything more than a few deliberately crude stitches to embellish a collage.    


It's been in the 90s for weeks now.  I can't complain because it hasn't reached 100 yet, but it does slow me down and keep me indoors more than I would like.  As I've gotten older, I've become more sensitive to the heat, so I tend to go out early in the morning and again at dusk.  
There's plenty to do indoors so that's fine, but I'm still spending more time on the computer than I'd like, so I'm going to try using a timer to keep my indulgences in web crawling brief. 
We'll see how that goes.  


Off to do some cooking now.   

New camera, new pictures

For my birthday this year, Morgan surprised me with a Canon digital SLR camera.   Do I love it?  It's amazing.  I can get so close to things.

That caterpillar devoured half of one of our volunteer tomatoes in what seemed like one day. 

I've been playing with my new camera, keeping plants hydrated, and repairing/painting found birdhouses (gotta' love bulky garbage pick up) and bird feeders.  I hung a couple in the dead tree in our front yard and have just about decided that I want to turn the dead tree into some kind of "art tree."  I think it's going to be full of bird houses and bird feeders, a long-term project.  

The garden is thriving.

I've made two batches of pesto in the last couple of weeks.  I love pesto: pesto on pasta, pesto pizza, pesto on crostini, topped with a homegrown Sweet 100 tomato slice!   Basil and melon are two of my favorite summer crops.   And this is the happiest basil I've had in a few years.  I think the drip water system Morgan installed has made all the difference, and we've actually gotten a decent amount of rain this spring.  Keep your fingers crossed for more of that all summer long!

  

The volunteer cantaloup.  That's what comes of using compost made from your kitchen scraps!   There are about 7 more on the vine right now.  I just picked this one a couple of days ago.  We may sample it tonight.  

It's about time for me to head outside to work on the chicken coop.  I'll post some pictures of its progress tonight or tomorrow.  So far this has been a fantastic June.  

With summer comes basil and with basil comes pesto!

I finally got around to making pesto this afternoon.  It's so delicious, I could eat it every day! We had it with pasta and salad tonight.  You might consider having some soon.

And if you topped it with a few of these, it would be even better:

Oh, and maybe you could have a glass of this hibiscus, ginger-lemon green tea with a sprig of mint.  I'm pretty sure you would like it:

my new favorite summer beverage

Two posts in one day! Holy crap!

This is where I've been hanging out lately.  It's the best place to read.

There's been a lot happening in the garden.  We've just about reached the end of the yummy lettuce.  Much of it's now too bitter.  Lettuce just doesn't like temperatures above 90 degrees.  I'm with you on that, lettuce.  Our tomatoes are doing well.  We're already harvesting the cherry tomatoes and it  looks like it won't be long before the big boys are ready.

See the little cherry tomatoes on the left?  Now look at the big green ones on the right.  That plant is loaded! 

The chard is still doing really well and it's quite a bounty this year.

Good for us that we love chard!

The little grapefruit/tangerine hybrid that Suzanne and Melinda gave me has now produced little fruit.

  

Here's our volunteer squash plant that's growing along the edge of the garden.

I planted things in the concrete blocks that surround the garden.  Here's one of my

favorites: Loebelia.  The blue is really that intense.  Next to that is baby thyme. 

Just wanted to show you a picture of the beautiful big

Talavera pot I found on one of my bulky pick-up day

outings.  

I also found this big metal grid that works perfectly as a plant table.  I'll soon be repotting more succulents and this is where they'll live.

We're still designing our chicken coop.   I thought we'd be building by now, but such are the woes of urban farming.  I guess I'll be happy if the chickens are safe, comfortable, and productive.  

I'm a bad blogger!

Seems like I've been meaning to post for weeks, but I never seem to get around to it!  Just finished my Surface Design class at the Stitch Lab.  We dyed, stamped, silkscreened, did bleach and wax resists and whatever else you can imagine doing to fabric!  Here are a few pictures:

This is canvas, fan folded, and then folded again and dyed cerulean blue.

I'd like to overdye this piece.  It was dyed golden yellow and washed, the leaves were silkscreened, then a texture was applied and turquoise dye rolled over that.  

This is cotton, folded and then rubber banded, died blue and washed; then the spirals were applied with a stamp dipped in a bleach formula, rinsed, then overdyed with green.

This is my favorite piece: dyed Chinese red, washed, placed on top of a lace-patterned plastic placemat, and bleach applied with a roller over that.  

This is cotton that was folded over and over again, clamped between plexiglass, then dyed a chocolate brown,  and washed.  I used one of Kat's stamps coated with a bleach formula to make the leaves.

These were all just experiments to find out how the fabric would react to different dyes and surface treatments.  Now I'd like to make a couple of screens specifically for using with dyes on fabric and order some dye colors I'd like to work with.  I'm already thinking of all the white shirts in my closet!  One thing I will not do is is rainbow colored tie dye.  That you can be sure of!  

One great thing about these Procion dyes is that they are so stable.  The jet black is truly black and the colors are rich and saturated.  Even if you just want to dye some fabric a solid color, this is absolutely the best dye to use.  It's available at Dharma Trading Company in many yummy colors.  

It's for the birds!

It's been awhile since I posted.  We went to Big Bend for a week.  In spite of being rained on, we had a lovely time.  April is a nice month to visit the desert.  The ocotillos were blooming, as were the prickly pear.  We just missed the yucca's extravagant display, but did see a few still in full, luscious bloom.

We had a few nights of rain.  I hate getting up in the middle of the night to go pee anyway, but getting up when it's muddy and rainy sort of sucks.  Our tent kept us mostly dry--if we didn't roll too close to the edge of the air mattress, where the bedding was sopping wet.   But  being in this beautiful, unspoiled region of Texas always feels like a gift.  You can drive 50 miles in any direction without seeing a power line or a billboard, or any other evidence of man, except of course the road you're on.   I love the harshness of the desert.  All the plants and animals who live there have to be extra tough.  I admire the tenacity of desert creatures.  

So this week we acquired a truck:

And started making a birdbath:

observing and contemplating birdbath

We still have many more bottle caps to apply.  I think we'll probably finish this little project tomorrow evening.  It may not be beautiful, but if it gives the birds a place to splash around and drink, then it's serving its purpose.  We joke that it's wabi sabi--imperfect, rather odd, and using materials we had at hand.