Farmin'

Things are coming together at ye royal homestead.

First, the Queen won this book from one of her favorite bloggers - Empress of Dirt!

I loved James Wong's Grow Your Own Drugs series on tv so I was really excited to win his book on gardening for flavor. He is a really interesting read and I'll be trying out some of his techniques, especially on my tomatoes... mmm... tomatoes!

The royal neighbor stopped by this afternoon and tilled up a spot in front of the chicken coop. It's about 32 feet long by 20 feet wide... ish... I think he's going to come back with some disc blades and shape it into rows... I hope...

All I know is that a tractor is a powerful thing, because we struggle to make small diameter two foot holes with a post hole digger, and in less than 10 minutes with a tractor, the ground looked like this:

Pretty impressive.

As you can see, the coop and run are still a work in progress but are coming along nicely.

This weekend we were able to get netting strung on the top of one side and the wire is in place for most of the rest of it. Dig guards are attached to the fence in front and along most of one side now. We need to finish the dig guards and the netting, build the front wall and door to the coop, and put in a gate. That's most of the structure done.

I got a large feeder and waterer today from Tractor Supply. We probably need two, but they're pretty big so we'll see. I could have gotten the plastic for a third of the price, but these should last forever.

And just to let you know - the Queen deserves high praise: I resisted the temptation to purchase more chicks... there were actually a couple of varieties (plus ducks, always ducks) still in the tubs but we already have 25 potential chickens in the incubator. So I left the store, chick-less. Yea me.

Speaking of which... Five days until lockdown. I'm hoping lockdown #2 is waaaaaaaaay less stressful and the incubator holds a steady temperature this time. It would be nice to hatch more eggs out of this batch, especially the Americaunas and Australorps. Unfortunately, this Sebright egg was a dud too... I really wanted to hatch one. But hey, I kinda think they're all adorable.

The fluffy butts are no longer fluffy butts, and the babies are tweens now. I'm pretty sure this is going to be a Golden something or other. Could be a Sebright but more likely a Wyandotte. It's very pretty, also very skittish.

Howard and Sweet Lucy are feathering out. Howard... is white.

And still full of shit. 

They, in their own way, get excited to see me because they know I am the bringer of food and water. If I have food in my hands I can touch them now, it's more true of Howard than Lucy. Maybe once they're free to waddle they'll get more friendly. I feel bad that they're stuck in a small rabbit cage, but it's the best I can do at the moment and as soon as the weather stays warm enough (and the coop is far enough along) they can go out...