Fiacré's spade: Moving day

I took some pictures last Friday, June 7 to show how the chicks are growing. They are getting feathers now. Jackie, with black-edged white feathers, will be beautiful. The broilers, not so much. They are getting quite homely. They are nearly naked under their wings and on their backside. The breast meat is disproportionately large (through selective breeding) and looks kind of like a tumor. Their rear ends (the buttzles, as Terry calls them) protrude nearly to the point of dragging on the ground. Also, they stink. Frankly, I’m looking forward to having them in the freezer.

Jackie with grown-up feathers coming in

Jackie's fuzzy head

A homely broiler

Hanging around the water cooler in the brooder box. Isn't Jackie's tail cute?

Gardening. First, you put the plants you want in. Then you take the plants you don’t want out. I got the potatoes weeded and put on as much straw as we had. Hilda finished the mulching after Terry got two more straw bales. It looks very nice now.

Straw mulch on the potatoes in front of the tomatoes in their cages

On June 7, the four robins under the deck barely fit in the nest. The next day they were gone.

Four robins (count the beaks) the day before fledging

I had big plans for my birthday yesterday. The last major task in the garden set up was the drip irrigation on the south garden. It’s a pain in the buttzle, but it saves tons of time and water later on. Even though it was something I loathed, I knew I would feel better if I just did it, and my birthday happened to be the day on which it fell. Terry and I put the drippers on the pumpkins and corn as soon as the dew dried.

And then it was time to move the mobile chicken coop down to its position by the orchard where we will pasture the broilers until that fateful day when they go to the butcher. According to the literature, most mobile coops, a.k.a. chicken tractors, are rather flimsy affairs that are easily carted from place to place as the chickens eat the available grass and have to be moved, as it were, to greener pastures. They have a screen on the bottom so the poop goes right into the grass and clean up is not an issue. I was not able to effectively communicate this to Terry, who was excessively worried about the coop blowing over. He grew up in North Dakota. He has a penchant for solid construction. He wants to use the coop for winter storage. Our chicken tractor is built on a solid platform and weighs, by Terry’s estimation, 350 pounds. Lord.

It has wheels on one side and towing eyelets on the other. His plan was to pull it around to the backyard with the John Deere tractor. We putzed around with various combinations of straps, chains, and giant carabiners for quite some time and got it from where he painted it to the edge of the driveway, where we were stymied. How could we get the coop up onto the cement without knocking off a corner? Terry walked around the John Deere, scratched his head, and mumbled, “What am I doing wrong?”

The coop is too heavy, I thought to myself, rather bitterly. But I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like we could make it lighter now. I finally suggested that we tie a rope to the eyelets and pull it across the driveway ourselves. We were having much more success with the John Deere when we were on the grass. The driveway was smooth and pulling the coop by hand wasn’t too bad. That done, we hooked the John Deere to the rope with a chain.

We were pretty okay to move in a straight line. The trouble with the whole process was the turns. When Terry drove the tractor to the right, I would have to push with all my might on the right side of the coop to get it to pivot on the right wheel and change direction. To go the other way, I had to run around the back of the coop to throw all my weight in front of the left side. It was exhausting.

And it was a hot and humid day. When the coop was finally in position, I went into the house with my clothes soaking wet to have lunch and two glasses of water. And the drip irrigation still wasn’t done.

After lunch, I weeded the corn and started on the bean drip lines. Normally, I would have set up the irrigation before putting up the row cover, but this year I had put up the row cover while I waited for more drip lines to be shipped. So I had to take off the row cover before putting down the lines, which was even more irritating. As long as the beans were uncovered, Hilda weeded the rows and thinned the beans, making those agonizing life and death decisions. Who shall live and who shall die? Which bean seems likely to grow up to be big and strong? Which will never amount to a hill of beans (ha!).

When we were done in the garden, Hilda and I set up the electric fence around the mobile coop. Terry declared that it would be called “Coop 2” and posted a number on the outside. We set a smaller fence inside the electric fence because Hilda fears that Jackie will be able to go right through the electric fence. We’ll test that hypothesis in a few days. If it comes to that, we’ll have to put up chicken wire. I can’t imagine what Murray McMurray was thinking when they included a bonus rare breed chick with a batch of broilers. The size difference is a real problem.

We were ready to move the chicks at 5:00. Like last year, we’d put the cat kennel up in the garage to act as the annex when the chicks outgrew their brooder box. Jackie escaped once, so I put cardboard around the bottom to be sure he/she stayed in. It helped with the wood chip containment also. We shooed the chicks into the cage, shut the door, and lifted it into the back of the Gator. When we arrived at Coop 2, no one wanted to get out of the cage. I had to get on my knees, lean into the cage, grab the chicks one by one, and toss them into the coop. And they were not excited about this process. There was a lot of flapping and clawing. I was covered with poop dust and wood chips by the time it was over.

Leaving the garage in the back of the Gator

Where are we? Arriving at Coop 2

We put the food outside to encourage the chicks to explore their new space. Initially, they just huddled on the floor of the coop. Meanwhile, Terry and I went up to the deck to have a much deserved beer. From there we could watch the chicks’ progress. By 5:38 the first brave souls had ventured out. By 8:12, most of them had come out at least once. At sunset, they didn't want to go in. I once again had to grab and toss. They don’t seem to have as many instinctive behaviors as the laying hens.