Saturday Doings - October 19, 2019 @goldenoakfarm

Saturday I got an early start on windows. I cleared all the plants and furniture from in front of the 3 huge south windows and took out the grilles and washed them. I also worked on the hanging plants taking off dead stuff. Poor plants haven’t been touched all summer, and seldom watered. I’d made a big mess on the floor by the time my window lady got here.

We worked until 1PM and got all but 1 window of the 11 in this room done. The edges of the room were much cleaner as she putters dusting and polishing things in the immediate area of each window while I am washing them.

She’d brought me boxes of videos from her mother’s estate to go through, to see if there were any I wanted. I got about a dozen of them. Then I cleaned up the kitchen to grind chicken, but we were just too tired to do it. The plan is to get up early and do it before my window lady returns at 8:30 Sunday morning.

We had to catch each of the new layers, cut the band off their leg, and put them in our giant cardboard box to move them to their “new” coop. My husband wanted to try catching them in the pasture coop, so he “put them all to bed”. We’d not had good luck doing this in the past, but I gave it a try.

I was able to catch the first 9 of the 18 birds fairly easily, as they weren’t alarmed or upset. We brought them into the new coop and watched the expected reaction. They had been on grass floors all summer, and the coop is bedded in shavings and looks and smells quite nice.

They have shavings in the nest boxes in the pasture coop, but I guess it’s not the same thing as having a whole floor of them. Anyways, they all immediately tried to get up on the ramp, the top of the nest boxes and the roosts to get away from the “white stuff”.

The last 9 were not going to let me catch them, so I got the net and that was that. But they were far more worked up and alarmed than the first 9 had been.

Once they were in the coop, we collected their feeders, etc. and hung them in the coop. We also put wide 2” x 10” blocks in each corner to prevent egg laying on the floor. Hopefully by Sunday, they will have become accustomed to the coop, and perhaps found the nest boxes.

I hope so, as we got 11 eggs from them on Saturday and it will be a lot easier to collect clean eggs from the nestboxes…

Repairing the chicken wire pasture pen

I’ve added several more chores to my October list:

• Take down the rope fencing around the pasture pen
• Take down the netting fencing around the pasture pen
• Take down the chicken wire fencing around the pasture pen
• Take down the circus tent
• Move the pasture coop to its winter place
• Remove the tarp from the pasture coop
• Remove all remaining equipment from the pasture coop
• Breakdown the circus tent and store it
• Repair each section of the chicken wire fence and store them
• Repair the 3 fences of netting and store them

I can’t start this list until the garlic is planted next week…