The coop's home stretch

The coop is nearly ready for the girls, and not a moment too soon. We passed the 6-week deadline last Wednesday. When I began reading up on coops after we had the girls installed in the brooder, several sources emphasized having the coop built before getting the chicks. I was concerned, but thought certainly we could get it built with plenty of time once I was done with classes. Terry was retired, after all. Well. Terry’s inclination to build everything in the best possible way combined with Hilda’s virtually unlimited budget has given us not a chicken coop, but a Chicken Coop. Chateau des Poulets. If the chickens don’t work out, we can use it as a guest house.

No room for Sara! Only nine chickens will fit on the annex perches. Odd that they sorted themselves by color.

Terry put in a door for the chickens, insulated the chicken part of the coop, and covered the insulation with plywood on June 11. The next day, he built an internal wall dividing the chicken space from the storage space. He put a human door and a door to the nest boxes in the wall. He’ll build the nest boxes later, since the chickens won’t need them until fall, and one doesn’t want them to get into the habit of roosting in the nest boxes.

The chicken door

Insulation covered with plywood (left of chicken door) and uncovered (right)

The human door between the coop
and storage area

Next to the human door is an
access door to the nest boxes

Frames for the nest boxes in the coop side

On Wednesday, Hilda and I put a coat of primer on the chicken walls. Terry and I put a perch across the coop so we could paint it while we were doing the walls later in the day.

Perch (left) and painted walls

We had thought and thought about ways to cover the floor to facilitate power washing. Terry came up with the idea of using a liquid rubber coating. (The bucket said something like “foundation sealant.”)While I helped Hilda with the morning chicken chores on Thursday, he went around the coop filling in the larger gaps. He and I put the first coat down. It was slow going. He thought the goop was going to be the consistency of frosting; it turned out to be more like ganache. Thus, it ran down cracks that Terry expected it to fill. “If we did this every week,” I said, “we’d know exactly what to do.”

Terry spreads goop on the floor

So I slopped the stuff on the floor, filling the holes and cracks as best I could, and Terry got busy stuffing filler into the cracks he skipped the first time through. We had only one brush, but there wasn’t room for two people. We traded off when our knees couldn’t stand it anymore. At the end of the job, however, we weren’t satisfied with the coverage. So we put on a second coat today. That coat went lickety split and looked great. Nothing but the hardware left. The books recommend airing the coop for two days after painting. We are on schedule for a Sunday installation of the birds.

It’s hot and dry again. The gardens are irrigated by a system of drip lines and are doing fine. The only hard part about that is remembering to switch the water from one set of lines to the next. Terry has to water his trees with a hose, if it can reach, or with watering cans, which is loads up into the back of the Gator and takes to where he needs them, splashing water all the way. I am experimenting with a few native plants in the wetland and on the bank of the creek. It seemed like a good idea when I didn’t know we’d have a drought. Every other day, I carry two full watering cans to my cardinal flowers, spiderwort, downy foxglove, and turtlehead plants at the edge of the wetland. Then I take the empty cans to the creek, fill them as best I can, and water the lupines, ginger, cardinal flowers, and jack-in-the-pulpits back there. I trudge back to the house through the grasses and clover that somehow continue to grow in soil so dry it is riddled with deep cracks. I rinse out the mud and dead leaves from the creek water and return the watering cans to Terry’s collection by the rain barrel. The whole process takes an hour. I try to get it done before the day gets beastly hot.

While I was trimming the flowers off the asparagus this morning (to keep the stored energy in the roots for next year instead of having it diverted to fruit—Terry’s idea), incessant chirping drew my attention to one of the lower branches on a nearby oak tree. There was Mrs. Oriole feeding her chicks in a pendulant nest. I’m delighted that they are nesting on our property. They certainly eat a good deal of our grape jelly!

The rest of my morning was spent weeding. Weeding is a task that requires intense concentration (so as not to pull the plants you want to keep) while being at the same time mind-numbingly dull. It’s a bad combination. The beans were the easiest, being generally larger than the weeds. I thinned them as I went down the row and was pleased to see the development of numerous root nodules, a sign that nitrogen-fixing bacteria have established that happy relationship in which the bacteria get sugar from the plant and the plant gets nitrogen fertilizer from the bacteria.

Root nodules on a green bean seedling

The beets were the hardest because at this point they are pretty much the same size as the grass and smaller than the amaranth. It is hard not to catch a beet leaf along with the grass leaves and pull everyone out of the ground. I thinned and weeded the cabbages too and gave the culled cabbage sprouts to the girls.

We also gave the chickens worms for the first time today, dropping them into the annex where they wouldn’t get lost in the pine chips. As with any new food, they didn’t quite get it at first. Nigella, presumably by chance, got a worm in the right orientation on an early try. Once she’d eaten that one, she was quite enthusiastic. While her sisters were still tentatively pecking and puzzling, Nigella grabbed a worm, ran to the farthest corner of the cardboard box to dine in peace, then ran back to the annex to get another. Chickens are a hoot!