Prepping for the spring

Yet another weekend has gone by where I didn’t get into my tidying journey quite like I wanted to. I spent most of the weekend outdoors, getting ready for the spring season.

At the end of last week, I started working on a new and improved chicken run. Over the weekend, I mostly tightened up insecure areas and added posts to better hold things in place. In the following video, you can see most of the chickens scratching away.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ctdSh7-xFho

Ideally, they could be completely free range during the day, but they’d be more likely to fall prey to a hawk. The run is situated under a thick canopy of tree limbs, which makes it harder for predators to see them from above or swoop down.

Gardening season is upon us now as well, so they can’t be roaming about. Right now, they’re working through all the bugs and worms in all the fall/winter leaves that we gathered. These will eventually get put into the garden and used for fertilizer and to condition the soil. They also get daily greens (weeds thrown in to supplement their feed), which makes for some super orange yolks. They’ll get more greens as the season continues to warm.

Panther, one of my cats, walking the border of the garden bed.

The other big project this weekend was putting together a small garden bed close to the house, which will hold carrots and/or onions.

I just bordered the bed with some old wood and logs. Inside, I added eight buckets of litter from the chicken coop and about a bucket of ash from a recent fire where we burned off some old wood. The toughest part of the job was clearing out all the weeds that had taken over.

Pink flowers blooming on a peach tree.

In other news, one of my peach trees is nearly in full bloom. I’m hoping we don’t get a late frost and lose the few hundred flours. I want little more than to taste fresh peaches from my own trees this year.