Free Rangin' It

What a gorgeous weekend! Since it was nice and warm out, we were able to bring our chicks outside to play:


They spent several hours Saturday and Sunday roaming the back yard. They like to stick together for the most part, but they got more adventurous their second day out. Favorite spots are underneath the kids' slide and along the workshop — especially under the peonies:


They sampled lots of weeds and insects, and Martha also learned to take a dust bath (something chickens do to help keep their feathers free of mites). She scratched out a little wallow right up against the workshop and rolled around in it, getting all nice and dirty before she shook it all off later. 

It was such a treat to watch them waddle and hop and prance around the yard, getting to be regular old chickens. They don't have a coop or a run just yet, so we could only have them out while we were there to supervise (on the weekends this can be for several hours at a time). We'll try to give them a little time each day now that they have most of their feathers. This will let them get used to being in cooler temps than they get in the brooder, and it gives them some much needed variety, both in diet and exercise.

Some cute photos from this weekend:


This is Dolley hiding under the peony bush by the workshop.


Here are Sally and Martha scratching and pecking by the workshop. Sally is stepping over a beta fish gravestone, by the way.

Tiegan and Jonas were in charge of rounding up the chicks when it was time to take them inside — no easy task! We spent a lot of time running in circles before we could get them cornered near a fence or outbuilding and scoop them up. This was pretty funny ... for everyone except the chickens, that is. Still, they are docile and sweet once you have them in hand. Good birds!

Comments

  1. SprauMay 14, 2012 at 11:10 PM

    So much fun (and so funny looking at this age!). Loving the posts. :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w...
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin...
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel...
Read more