Spring is here & chicken stuff

  So I bought a few Buff Orpington chicks a week ago and today was their first time in the outdoors. Since they’re so young, they're still brought inside for the night. Eventually they’ll be moved to a more permanent area kept beneath a shade tree and beside a barn. The portable coop will continue to be kept in service though.

I’ve spent some time with a wood chipper attempting to make a bed of litter for the chicken run area, but it was slow work. The shoot would frequently clog up with sticks that wouldn’t pass through by clinging to the sides, and the machine would quickly guzzle its gas. I was able to produce four bag fulls (weighting about 50 lbs) before I gave up since it was taking so much work for such little output. I had to cut down small limbs from a wood pile located on one side of the property into smaller pieces since they would catch in the shoot, then haul them to the chipper. It would take a few hours just to produce a single bags worth, so I figured that I would just buy some from the store.

I also needed to buy some gates and posts so that I could fence off my garden from the goats, and on my way out I just so happened to see a crew chipping tree branches off the side of the road! After hauling back the gates and posts, I drove back out to the wood chip piles and collected a tailbeds worth. It’s not exactly mulch worthy, but it’ll do well mixed in with some straw and layers of chicken poop. I haven’t yet finished the chicken run area, but I’ll upload a picture of it soon. I’ve been having trouble with keeping the wire straight, which is because I wanted to try out building it with t-posts between the wood post corners. In hindsight, I think sticking to a wood panel fence would have been better for attaching poultry wire, but mine should hold up well enough.

Here are a few extra photos

Seeing the world for their first time, the chicks weren’t as lively as I thought they would have been. Never the less, they seemed to enjoy it.

Redbud is in bloom all around Texas right now. It's a beautiful tree.