Sunday morning chores
(Blogging the little things to help inspire meh-me to doing both the little and big things!)
I’ve felt the same start of autumn/winter’s a-coming feeling that many of my favourite bloggers have touched on recently.
After the great red mite infestation of 2011, our chickens spent most of the summer sleeping outside – they clearly slept in the coop occasionally when it was raining or whatever but they got a taste for outdoor (presumably cooler) snoozing and since they were safe in the run, I got over my initial panic about it. I’ve been keeping an eye on the coop (for red mites and to make sure nothing else was afoot) but not had to clean it out as much. Now it’s getting darker/chillier/wetter though, they’ve moved back inside which means a return to Sunday morning poop-scooping for me. (With a good layer of wood shavings on the floor, it only needs cleaning out once a week at the moment but will need a mid-week freshener in the winter, when the nights are longer and they’re in the coop more than out.)
The chickens do like seeing what I’m doing to their house:
Except for Blue and the ever cheeky Lime who knew they could escape through the open nest box door to play out in the garden. Blue has been on a bit of a mission of late – whenever I leave open the chicken chest, she jumps onto the rim to look around. I think she knows the motherlode – the open 20kg bag of treat seed – is in there but can’t work out how to get down into it.
(Btw, the chicken chest – an old metal chest, about 3ft high by 3ft wide and about 1.5ft deep, has been one of my best purchases for the garden. It was £10 secondhand on eBay, picked up from just the other side of Bradford and it holds our bale of wood shavings, our nest box straw, the treat seed and sometimes a spare bag of layers pellets – all water-tight and pest-free. It looks rusty – one day I’ll paint it – but is very solid. The metal also gets pleasantly warm (but not hot) in the sun so the cats like sunbathing on the top of it. Win for everyone.)
Last winter, after my poop-scooping, my next job was always to fill up the kindling baskets in the living room & office so I did that today as well – we’ve used the stoves in both rooms over the last few weeks and used up the last dregs of last year’s supplies.
I also started to replenish the dustbin of kindling-size bits in the woodstore (it’s now a third full) so we’ve got some surplus if needed – if it’s too cold to work out there or if future Louisa can’t be bothered. I would have cut some logs as well if there hadn’t been an old sauna bench on the sawhorse (a lame excuse I know but an original one, yes?).
As chore-like as poop-scooping and kindling cutting are, I do quite enjoy them – fresh air, fun chickens and axes, what’s not to like? ;)
Other posts you might like:
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I'm Louisa and I live a Really Good Life. I grow, I craft, I cook and I make the most of what I've got instead of forever craving more.
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our neighbour (whose chickens are very much pets) covers the coop floor in newspaper *every night* and disposes (compost, i think) of paper & poo *every morning*.
do you compost the poo & spent bedding/chippings or have a poo-heap for it?
Thank God for the chook tractor. I couldn’t be bothered cleaning up after chooks. I want their poop as fertiliser so they can drop it where I need it, thanks chookies. Mine are currently engaged in some weeding -they enjoy it much more than me!
Great chicken photo’s :) It sounds like a pleasant Sunday morning. I get the kindling job too :)
I think my mojo has gone AWOL too…trying to feel motivated, but not altogether successfully.
I can’t remember how you resolved your red mite issue (off to work and hurrying!) but my chicken house had the start of another red mite infestation a couple of weeks ago, and I have found DE (diatomaceous (?sp) earth) has worked wonders. Much better than the red mite powder or washing liquid stuff I was using before. I washed out the coop, and sprinkled DE over the floor and in any corners where they were likely to be hiding and also put some in their dust bath and in their food. Seems to have done the trick, the only ones I’ve seen since then (where the perches slot in and corners of the door) have been dead. Hooray!
One job I’m successfully putting off is scraping off the compost-y layer of their run to put in my new raised bed. Eventually…
strowger: as I mentioned to you when you were here the other week, I think I’d change newspaper everyday since it’s not that absorbent – the wood shavings are very good at soaking up everything.
Re: whether I compost them. I have a couple of dedicated (old feed) bags full of shavings/poo to use as fertiliser this year but aside from that, everything just gets dumped on the normal compost heap. It’s a pretty good nitrogen/carbon mix so doesn’t upset the balance too much.
Linda: the only cleaning up after them I do is the coop – poop in their run just composts down in the wood chippings in there. When they’re completely free ranging in the garden, I’m happy for them to poop wherever they are – I just wish it wasn’t on the paved paths quite so often!
Mo: I find it really pleasing how the little axe slices off thin slivers of wood – doesn’t feel half as dangerous as actually splitting logs :)
Hazel: I used a chemical spray to get rid of the mites at the start of summer – harsh but got the job done and it was SCARY to see how many dead mites appeared on the floor overnight. I don’t want to get into the habit of using that though so on the advice of Kate from Living the Frugal Life (I think it was Kate anyway), I use DE now.
I’m putting off a similar job – the coop could use another half-tonne or so of wood chippings before Christmas. It’s either going to mean making a lot of chippings here (which will take a long time) or lugging it all down from the road. Unfun either way.