We're still here, I promise!!!

Wow, two months since the last update - apologies, apologies!!  Yes, we are still busy, keeping up with the changing seasons.  Here's what we've done in the last two months:

Chickens
On November 3rd, we harvested 6 of the cockerels.  We worked through the first one together, and it took us about 45 minutes.  Then we split into an assembly-line - Jordan got stage one (kill and pluck) and I got stage two (gut and clean).  We worked very well together, and I'd definitely call the day a success.  on the 10th, I started prepping a stall in the barn for them to move inside for the winter - first I blocked it off from the brooder stall, then I built a roost, followed by the Cadillac of nest boxes.  The wall on the aisle-side of the stall was only 4' high, with 3' of open space above it, so I put up some chain-link fence to keep the chickens in and the larger predators out (although it would be difficult for anything bigger than a small cat or an ermine to get in that side of the barn anyway).  The chickens moved in around November 17th, and we harvested 5 hens on the 23rd.  We sold another 5 live hens to Matt and Tessa to keep their new Buff Orpington rooster company, so that left us with 2 roosters and 8 hens, and they started laying on December 5th.  We are currently averaging 4 eggs a day, which is pretty darn good considering they are getting waaaaay less than their preferred 14 hours of light a day.  1 roo (YO) and 3 hens will be off on a road trip soon, and we'll keep the remaining rooster (YR, now named Foghorn) and 5 hens to keep us in eggs and hopefully hatch some chicks in the spring.

Clockwise from top left: The new roost; the new awesome nest boxes;the first egg; and, one of the delicious cockerels (Dad named him Crispy).

House
As I mentioned forever ago, we got a new roof this summer.  So far it has been holding up very well.  My only complaint is that the snow keeps sliding off the roof, partly due to our wacky weather (more on that later), and it keeps bending the flashing around the chimney.  It has already been fixed once, and we had more snow slide yesterday, so it may be due to be fixed again after New Year's.  However, that should get sorted out in January, as we just need to get a few snow stoppers installed.  So far, there has not been any water in the house (except for a tiny, tiny bit coming down the outside of the chimney, which is likely related to the aforementioned bent flashing).  Aside from the chimney issue, the sliding snow has been both a blessing and a curse: the weight doesn't stay up on the roof (yay!) but we have to be super diligent about shovelling off the deck, to avoid the leaky logs issue we had last year (boo!).  Plus it's a very noisy process, and it shakes the whole house and wakes me up when it slides at 4 am.

Clockwise again: Jordan and Dad working on the roof; the whole crew out, with Dad and Bob on the roof, Jordan rocking the barbeque, Larysa weatherproofing plywood, and Mom had run to town for supplies; closeup of the new roof; and, the back of the house.

Weather
The snow has been sliding because we got a HUGE amount of snow over the course of 8 days (we had two snowfall warnings, the first dumping 47 cm, and the second depositing just over 15cm.  These values, however, are what the airport got - I'm 100% positive we received waaaaaay more - the first snow left enough that it was over my knees!) and we then got rain.  Then we got more snow, and it has rained for the last two days.  UGH!!!!  The driveway is a mess, the snowbanks are gigantic, and the deck is soaked from the rain.  It will turn to ice when it freezes again, which should be sometime in the next two days, if the Weather Office is correct.  I've heard from multiple people that we've already received 75-80% of our annual snowfall.  Nicola at the Rescue gauges snowfall by the distance from the snowbank to the bottom of the barn's eaves.  Last year, we had a lot of snow by that standard, because the snowbank was touching the eaves and the snow couldn't slide off the roof any more.  This was last March.  When I was there Monday, the snow was already touching the eaves in one spot.  So yes, we've had a lot of snow.

A beautiful sunset from last weekend; heading to work the morning of Dec 24th - it's quite beautiful with fresh snow and no one about; you know it's cold when the kittens are cuddling on top of the fireplace; and, Zim providing a reference for how much snow slid off the roof after the first huge snowstorm - this was after I had tunnelled through to the deck.

Christmas
Merry Christmas, everyone!!!!  I hope you are all healthy and happy, and that you have created some fabulous memories over the last few days.  A few days before Christmas, we bought a new truck - Happy HoHo to us!!!  Our old truck has become increasingly unreliable - Jordan was on his way to work one morning (the morning of the huge snowstorm, actually) when a brake line blew.  He was able to pull into a gas station and call me for a ride, but it set off a chain of horrible events that included the car being temporarily out of commission (popped the belt, again...) and ultimately required me spending the entire day sitting on the bench at the mechanics' and missing work entirely.  The dash lights come on when they feel like it, the steering is loose (in my opinion), and it's a good day when she starts.  Couple this with the fact that the car has almost 300,000 km on her, and we knew we needed a reliable vehicle to get us through the next few years.  Jordan found this truck online, and he'd been drooling over it for a month when we decided "well, let's go see if this is even in the realm of possibility..." and we walked out with a set of keys to a 2011 Ford F-350 gas-fueled 1 ton, crew cab, long box, gigantic truck.  I am happy to report that I drove it and both my nerves and the truck came out unscathed, and that involved backing it out of a driveway in a cul-de-sac, and backing it in to our driveway, missing the concrete lion, the carport, AND the car.  Win!!!  I'm a pretty good driver (one non-fault accident in over 10 years of driving - and the other driver had a suspended license) but I will admit that knowing where my corners are has always been a weak point, so I was tremendously proud of myself to get it in and out of both driveways without touching anything else.

Zim and I had Christmas dinner with David, Kim and her family (and Pongo and Doodle, of course), and it was great food, great people, and a great time all around!  Jordan and I had a fancy dinner last night consisting of homemade vegetable-stuffed cannelloni with After 8s for dessert (which I think is our only Christmas tradition).

NEW TRUCK!!!! :D

Other Odds-n-Ends
I've been crocheting dishcloths like a madwoman - it keeps my mind off the snow.  Today I pulled out the sewing machine and the serger and fixed up some items for Kim, and I'm going to try making a pair of slippers out of an old sweater as soon as I'm done here.  With winter now truly here (we didn't get snow until late November) all I want to do is create cozy things (via crochet and sewing) and bake.  I've managed some baking, making my famous oatmeal cookies for the cookie swap at work and contributing mini eggnog cheesecakes to Christmas dinner.  I'm confident that there's still at least 2 or 3 months of winter, so I have lots of time yet.  A coworker picked me up a pair of snowshoes, but I've barely had time to use them as I've spent some time every day clearing snow (I'm so, so, so sick of snow).  I had hoped to get out last weekend and cut a few boughs to make a wreath like I was taught last year, but the snow clearing got in the way of that plan.  Zim loves it, of course, and continues to jump and "catch" the snow as we shovel.  I've started clicker training Zim in anticipation of an obedience/agility class in January (thanks Kim!!!!!) and for the first few days Zim was terrified of the clicker.  I would click, and he'd get all sad and run away.  I tried to balance introducing him to a new situation without scaring the wits out of him constantly by clicking once, handing him a piece of food, and letting him eat the rest of his meal once he had that first piece.  It's been successful, and in the course of a week we've gone from cowering and running away, to looking at the clicker with interest and responding to requests with minimal nervousness.  Gentle persistence has won :)  I had previously clicker trained Molly, which worked great until she decided she wasn't food motivated any more.  Mander, of course, is incredibly motivated by food, so I started training him this morning.  Luckily, I have two different styles of clicker and they make a slightly different sound, so I can train Zim and Mander independently without getting the other confused.

That's about it.  It's safe to assume that the Year in Review and Goals for Next Year posts will both be slightly late, but I promise to have them up by the end of January.

"Good morning!"

One of our cockerels recently started crowing.  Then another decided to give it a try.  It's been an amusing few weeks of strangled squawks in the morning as I walk to the coop, but they would be very shy as soon as I pulled out my phone to get a video.  However, last week, I was victorious!

And this morning, he finally emitted a complete crow, with both notes at the end!  Good job, chicken!  I'll try to get that on video this weekend.

Of course, that also means that we have to hurry up and harvest the cockerels that we won't be keeping.  They're getting progressively aggressive with each other, and once they reach full maturity their meat gets tough and takes on a different flavour.  We'll give it a try this weekend, once we assemble all the supplies.

And sadly, this fellow is destined for the freezer.  However, I'm confident that YR and YO (the two we will be keeping; one for us, and one for Hal and Cathy) will soon pick up this morning greeting.  They are named based on the legbands they were assigned; I weighed each cockerel a few weeks ago and gave them all a yellow band as I went.  There were three over 5 lbs, who each got an extra band: YB (Yellow Blue) just squeaked over the 5 lb mark by less than an ounce, and YR (Yellow Red) and YO (Yellow Orange) were both over 5 lbs 3 oz.  Going back to my "large chickens make more large chickens" theory, those are the keepers.

This past weekend I also picked up a load of hay for chicken bedding over the winter.  I had hoped to get straw, but as there aren't many grains grown around here, I couldn't find any.  Luckily, Nicola (from the Rescue) has some hay that has too much clover for horses, so she's selling it at the low, low price of $1 per square bale.  There's two reasons this is awesome: 1. That's the cheapest price I've found; and 2. The money goes to the Rescue!  So I took the truck down to where they're being stored, and managed to stack 20 bales in the truck.  I've never stacked hay before, so I studied some stacking schematics the night before.  However, as I loaded the first bale, I noticed a problem: the diagrams were for long-box pickups, and ours is a standard box.  Hmmmm.......  Some quick refiguring and I was picking, tossing, and stacking again.  In the end, 20 bales is a fairly respectable number (I could have fit two more bales if I'd had longer straps!) and I made it home without any of my load shifting, loosening, or falling.  SUCCESS!!!!  To anyone who does this regularly, I'm sure you're thinking "Look, it's an ignorant city girl trying to hack it, how cute!" but I'm mighty proud of myself.

And Zim enjoyed the opportunity to jump and climb and sniff all the bales:

And of course, he had to inspect my work when it was done:

Apologies for the terrible lighting in our barn!

Now, for a bit of back-story:  Two years ago, we lived just down the road from the Rescue.  One fall day I got a text from Nicola, asking if I was able to come help stack bales.  At the time, I was having problems with my wrists (an old work-related injury) so I knew I wouldn't be any help.  However, it gave me a goal: get enough strength so I could help with haying.  This year, I have been thrice successful in meeting that goal: we helped Matt and Tessa get their hay in, then I spent an evening helping Nicola, and now I've loaded and unloaded a stack of bales for us.  So while it seems like such a trivial thing ("So you stacked some bales, so what?  I stacked 3000 this year.") it's a milestone for me, and one of the reasons I'm so darn proud of myself.

In other news: still working on the soffits/fascia, but we installed some pot lights (did I tell you this already...?) and they look amazing.  We noticed that our front window is no longer sealed, so we bought some thermal curtains to get us through the winter, with plans to replace it next summer.  We still haven't tilled in the garden, and we are supposed to be reaching lows around -8 this week, with snow at some point (I've stopped paying attention to the forecast - it's always wrong anyway).  I've plugged in the light in the pumphouse on a timer, as we woke up one morning to discover that it was +0.5 degrees in there.  Yikes!  The last thing we need right now it to have something go sideways with our water.  This morning it was a toasty +18 in there - about as warm as the house.  Awesome :)

Now, in order to encourage you to make this a two-way conversation (instead of just me, rambling into the wind): What is on your to-do list to get ready for winter (or summer, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere)?

Just a quick update!

Just a super-quick, text-only update, as it's been over a month (oops!!  Sorry everyone!!!!!).  It's been a busy month (when was our last NON-busy month......???) but we're enjoying our last few days of a 12-day vacation, so I am puttering, and jumping from task to task, and spending more time relaxing than has become the sad norm lately.

So, what has happened in the past month?

Chickens

Our birds are doing well.  Their last weigh-in was almost three weeks ago, and they averaged just over two pounds.  Two weeks ago, one of the cockerels started attempting to crow, which was quite amusing.  I tried to get a video but of course, he got a little camera shy and kept quiet as I peered out the pop-hole (chicken door) of the coop willing him to try again.  They continue to grow well, and are friendly and really enjoying the scraps from the garden harvest.

Garden

We've only got one thing left in the veggie garden: a shallot from Kim that I hope will give us some seeds before dying.  We got our first frost on Sept 16th, and what I believe was our first freeze on the night of the 25th (which was the night we got back from our travelling... more on that later).  Before we left, I harvested the potatoes and the turnips.  The potatoes were great (except the Cariboos) but the turnips should have been harvested much earlier, and were thus very large and wormy.  We had already eaten the few carrots that came up, and two harvests of peas (with lots left for seed).  On the 18th, I built a frame for the corn and draped a frost cover over top.  I covered the last of the peas (for seed), the three cabbages, and the lone, tall shallot (which involved pounding a long piece of steel into the ground to hold up the covering, providing the perfect opportunity to use the post-pounder my brother built for me - it works great!  If ever you need a post pounder welded up, Bob's your guy!).  When we got home, the corn was still half covered and the post and the tallest shallot spear had poked through their covering, but the peas and the cabbages were still snug under their frost cloth.  I harvested everything but the shallot: the peas were picked and laid on a pie plate to finish drying; the cabbages were chopped, blanched, and frozen for later; and the tiny ears of corn are in the fridge waiting for me to try to "make" baby corn out of them.

Roof

Our huge, ginormous project this summer was the roof.  I won't get in to too much detail, but we ended up doing more work than we anticipated (as we had hoped that the roofing company would do whatever work needed to be done).  However, this encouraged my whole immediate family to come up for a visit, so we had 6 of us here some nights, which was absolutely great, especially because I finally got to meet my brother's girlfriend, and I adore her.  Dad, Jordan and Bob did most of the work, with Mom, Larysa and I passing supplies, running to town, and doing odd jobs from the comfort and relative safety of the ground.  This roof has been a huge source of stress since it started leaking in January, and it is still not 100% done (as we still have soffits and fascia to install).  But the structure has been checked out (by three men congregating on the "falling" corner of the roof, and it didn't move an inch!), the insulation redone (and we are already noticing a huge difference!!!), the strapping and sheeting completed and the new roof tiles were installed on Thursday.  Yay!!!!  Once the last bit of work is completed, there will be many sighs of relief all around, and we anticipate not having to worry about it again while we live here (as the roofing tiles come with a lifetime warranty).

Vacation

As I mentioned, we are just back from a vacation to Ye Olde Stomping Grounds to visit with our families and take a break from the stress of the house.  The main focus of the trip was to attend Jordan's Dad's wedding, and it wasn't a dissapointment: the wedding was intimate and beautiful, and the reception was lively.  It was absolutely wonderful to visit everyone, as it had been over a year since our last visit.  And we got to visit Ikea!!!  We came home with an island for the kitchen (which we had been planning since our last trip), an entertainment unit (which we started planning two days before buying it), and an under-cupboard light for above the sink (which I have wanted since we moved in).  I also planned a dinner to get together with my friends, and it was a success, with friends from high school and one of my previous jobs coming to say hello and catch up.

I'd also like to send out a huge THANK YOU! to Tessa, Matt, Ellie and Caleb, who kept an eye on the chickens while we were away - they have chickens as well, so I didn't worry one bit about our birds while we were gone.  Sure enough, they did a fabulous job!

That's the majority of our news.  I'm sure I will discover more when I start sorting through the pictures, so watch for another post in the near future (hopefully not a month from now!).

Proper update

Okay, time for a proper update.  Sorry for the delay, guys - it's definitely project season, and we got a big one crossed off our list a week ago.  That's right, the chicken coop/run is finished!

This year we are focusing on fixing up the house, so there's been a lot of "make do" when it comes to other projects.  When we decided to do chickens, we knew we could set up a brooder in the barn, and that's what we did.  But we knew we couldn't keep them in there forever, so shortly after we got them, we had to come up with a coop and/or run.  I searched the internet (wonderful tool that it is) for something sturdy, affordable, simple to build, and big enough for about 25 chickens.  That's a tall order as far as chicken runs are concerned - most of the projects online are great for 8-12 chickens.  However, I was able to find one, made out of conduit tubing.  (We made a few changes: it would be 3 feet tall instead of two, and we'd use the chain link fencing I picked up at an auction instead of the landscaping wire and chicken wire.)  It looked easy enough to build, and we easily found the parts we needed at Home Depot.  Once I started building it, things started going sideways.  The chuck fell off the drill press as I was setting it up to use it for the second set of holes.  The cordless drill ran out of juice after drilling two holes.  The heavy-duty corded drill Dad gave us could easily drill the holes, but I needed to start them with the cordless drill because I couldn't hold the big drill in one spot long enough to keep it from wandering off the side of the pipe.  We went through three drill bits trying to drill the holes, and by the end of it, we couldn't get the chuck of the big drill to hold the bit to drill all the way through the pipes, because the drill bit was tiny (we just needed to pre-drill the holes for the self-tapping screws... which will easily self-tap through sheet metal, but are a little harder to get through electrical conduit).  When we got enough holes drilled to start putting it together, the conduit elbow plates weren't strong enough to hold it square, so there were saw horses and scrap wood and wire and a few blue words involved.  By that point, I was realizing that this design just wasn't going to work for us.  So, plan B: we'll follow the same plans, but use 2x4s instead of conduit.  This added a few days needed to stain all the pieces, but once everything was ready, we were able to get the run together in a day.  It's not perfect, but we know what to do differently next time (for example, use plate brackets instead of mending plates to build the frames for each side of the run).

We also picked a pre-existing structure to modify instead of building a new one.  After surveying what we had available, we picked one of the old grain buildings.  It still has the feed tag stapled inside: Coop Poultry Premix (oh, the irony - from chicken feed to chickens for feed).  This also gave us a chance to practice framing, without a whole structure depending on our skills.  We sorted out the modifications we needed to make, measured everything three times, cut all the materials, stained what needed it, and started piecing it all together.  We ran in to a few snags (of course), but a quick change of plans and a few more pieces of 2x4 and we got it put together.  This took about a day.  All told, we had  the pre-cut and stained pieces together in a weekend.

So, we started with about a dozen 2x4s, three sheets of plywood, some chain link fencing, screws, fence staples, a salvaged window, some screening, and a few assorted hinges and latches.  Oh, and this building, which is about 70 square feet:

Sorry for the terrible picture - I didn't bother to take a photo of the building before we started, so this is a still shot from a video.

And after a few days of measuring, cutting, staining, hammering, and screwing, we had this:

We added a tarp for a few days because it was +30 in the afternoons, and that side faces west, right into the sun.

The waterers and feeders inside the coop.

The chicken door on the bottom, and the window on the top.  The window has screening, and I'll add chicken wire too. I can also add a ramp for the chickens, but they're enjoying hopping over the sill. 

"Sup?"

Of course, the chickens LOVE it.

Zim likes it too :)

As you can see, the chickens continue to do great.  They are averaging a pound and a half, and they love to be outside - to the point that we have to pick up each one and put them in the coop each evening.  Mind you, it's not that dark out when it's my bedtime, so maybe if it was darker, they wouldn't be so reluctant to head in?  Either way, they've been stuck in the coop for the last few days, due to a bear in the area and a few days of thunderstorms.  Hopefully this will also impress on them that the coop is home, not just the run.

In other news, the gardens are doing good.  Strawberry season ended last month, but the raspberries are still going strong - I've harvested at least 8 pounds of raspberries this year from the pre-existing canes.  The veggie garden is starting to produce well too: the corn is flowering, we've already had a side of peas with dinner, the turnips are ready to come out (judging by Tessa's), the cabbages are starting to form heads, the few carrots that sprouted are getting tall, and the potato plants are huge.  I planted eight lettuce seeds and none of them sprouted for weeks, then suddenly *tada* one lettuce popped up in a row.  And Kim gave me a shallot that she found sprouting in her cupboard, so I'm hoping to get seeds - it's huge!  (And yes, I'm practicing "lazy gardener's cover cropping" - it's working well!  Clover actually makes a good ground cover between rows, and we can just till it under when Fall comes, where it will compost directly into the soil to energize it for next year.  At least, that's what I'm telling myself!)

Click to make it bigger :)

We've had two days of 'severe thunderstorms' - on Sunday, it hailed for 10 minutes, and it was good-sized hail too.  Most of it was pea-sized, but some pieces were the size of a nickel in diameter.

Sunday

Sunday.  10 minutes after I took this, the sun was out.  Go figure.

Our poor cabbage!

Other than that, there's not much new here.  The Exhibition came through town last weekend, and Jordan and I met up with Kim and David on Sunday to watch the first three-abreast draft horse pull in Western Canada.  The teams were beautiful and powerful, and the two best-behaved teams were the final two in the running, with the winners pulling 14,500 lbs.  I spent the whole time swooning over one team, made up of Percherons - they made it up to 13,000 before the teamster pulled them from the competition.  And they were so well behaved!!  After the pull, we caught the pig and duck races and the dog agility show (and they invited kids to run the course as well at one point, it was awesome).  Jordan picked up a '77 Caprice to restore, he's been enjoying tearing it down.  Almost all of the interior is out (including the carpet), and Kim found us an engine stand at a garage sale that we picked up for $30.  We just need a hoist and then he can start taking the guts of the car out.

We are hosting a BBQ for my coworkers this coming weekend, and then my parents are up for a bit (hopefully they are bringing my brother too).  We are working on sorting out a problem with our roof - you'll hear about it when it's all sorted out and taken care of.  And, hopefully, we find some time to relax in the coming weeks.