Chickens

From left to right: Oreo, Goldie and (drum roll) Chicken

Chickens.

Three of them.

They've stolen my weekend and won't give it back.

And it was a three day weekend too!

I'm not complaining, not really. (Okay, I am complaining, but only a little.)

Val and I had talked about keeping chickens on several occasions. I always figured it'd be a carefully planned adventure. Friday I came home from work with my own plans of making sourdough starter, and sourdough bread and documenting the process for a blog post I'm working on, and having time for some other fun stuff over the long weekend. Then Valerie told me some neighbors were moving and had offered us their chickens. She had accepted them and wanted to get them on Saturday.

That makes it sound like a straightforward effort. It wasn't. It included getting the wagon running, loading about 120 sq ft of pavers on the trailer, unloading them, building a temporary chicken coop, something about grapes and an arbor and... oh, helping the new guy move into the place our friends had just left. Oh, and some "really good dirt!"

That's the dirt, on the trailer, under the tarps, with the remains of the old hen coop holding the tarps in place. Those are the grape vines, and parts of the trelles toward the front of the trailer.

The dirt is excellent.

Sunday morning Val checked on the chickens and:

Chicken laid an egg! Apparently the other two lay brown eggs, this is how we know this egg is from Chicken. I won't be surprised if it's a week or more before we get any more eggs. As a kid I used to care for a friend's chickens when their family went on vacation, the disruption of having someone different feed them always put them off laying for about a week, as long as the vacation lasted. They'd return home just in time for the hens to start laying again. I expect moving to a new coop will be at least as disruptive as having someone new feed them. So, I expect a wait for more eggs. Plus, it's COLD out there and that'll slow them down laying too.

Here they are in their temporary coop: