The chicks learned how to roost from their mother last night! Here they are when I opened the coop door this morning:

And here they are tonight around sundown, after a long day of free ranging:

Well, at least half of them absorbed the lesson…the other three are still bedding down by the door!

Last weekend I cleaned out the chicken coop, a fairly onerous task that involves a tractor, snow shovel, air compressor, dust mask and goggles. Combine all those in your head with copious amounts of airborne chicken shit dust and pine shavings and you don’t need to see any photos.

The only reward for this task, other than the agrarian nerd pleasure I take in making a hefty deposit at the compost bank, is that once the coop has aired out for a day I get to fill it will two bales of clean pine shavings, scrub out the nest box, and return the bleached feeder and waterer to their chains, full of food, and well, water. It gives me no end of pleasure to make a beautiful, clean, and healthy home for all the creatures in my care. It’s something I remember from being a kid and having all sorts of pets that needed tending. It sure wasn’t pleasant to muck out the mouse cage, or the bird cage, or the fish tank. But once it was done the joy of seeing my animals in a fresh, clean home made all that dabbling in feces and urine pretty much worth it.

And today, I feel the same way. So I cleaned out the coop, and while I was at it I decided I was tired of the growing mess that was the broody coop in the garage. The six chicks were now chickens, and they made enough mess that the tray under their coop needed emptying every three days. And, in typical messy, wasteful chicken fashion, they’d spill their food out of the feeder, and it would fall under the screen only to incubate maggots. One day when I changed the pan it was so hot I couldn’t hold my hand to it—fermentation in action! Gross, right? So while the chicks were out ranging I broke down their coop and dragged it to the driveway, where I scrubbed it with hot water and bleach. And then I cleaned out my garage, vacuuming out feather dust and sweeping away spilled food and feathers.

These ready-made coops were some of the best purchases I’ve ever made. They were picked up by my dad, out of desperation, for $99 each on sale at Tractor Supply, on the day the guinea babies hatched and started running out of the dog crate in which they’d been born. It seemed like an awful amount of money at the time, but they’ve paid for themselves in the use I’ve gotten out of them. I’ve used these small coops for injured birds, to separate fighting hens, for broody coops, and to raise chicks. The materials and construction are pretty cheap, and I can’t imagine them as full-time homes for any animals, but they are great for the short periods in which I tend to use them. The design is good, and I really recommend them.

Once the broody coop was drying in the sun, I set up the “annex” of the big coop to house the chicks. This is the area you first enter when you open the coop, and where I normally store the chicken food and various supplies. It has only one window, so it gets much hotter in the summer than the larger part of the coop, which has two big windows for good airflow. But now that the temperature has dropped it would be fine for the chicks.

I spread pine shavings on the floor, nailed in a few roosts, and nailed up some chains to hold the feeder and waterer. Then it was all ready for the babies. Here you can see how the annex relates to the main coop. I figure it can’t hurt to have the older chickens getting used to the sounds of the chicks before I try to house them all together. It may stave off another bloody battle.

In their new home, the chicks were pretty unsure the first night. They kept trying to go back in the garage, where they’d been born. But I scooped them up and dumped them in their new home. Now, a few days later, they’ve figured out where the food is and are returning to the coop on their own in the evening. But there’s one problem: They don’t know how to roost.

I figure that because there wasn’t a roost in their broody coop, where they lived with their mother, they never got this important chicken lesson. For the last few nights I’ve checked on them in the night, and they’re sleeping like a pile of puppies, on the ground wedged in a corner. It’s kind of adorable except that it’s really not in a chicken’s nature to sleep in a pile past the young weeks of chickdom.

So just for an experiment, tonight I caught Dahlia and put her in with her babies. That’s her above, looking at her kids like, WTF, who are you? Then, like a proper chicken she jumped on the roost to sleep. I am hoping that she will have a talk with her children and teach them how to roost. I am not super concerned—after all, chicks that aren’t raised with broody hens eventually figure out how to roost. I am more curious than anything to see if Dahlia’s behavior can influence her chicks at such a late stage in their development.

Speaking of development, this morning I awoke to Calabrese crowing, followed by his young son Griz crowing in response. This went on for a while, back and forth. I am sure my neighbors love me!

This is what the backside of the coop has looked like since late winter.

I’d thrown some netting up there when I decided to start free-ranging the chickens, and I wanted them to get used to being outside and coming and going through their chicken door before I let them totally loose. It worked, but since then this deer-netting and t-post pen has been used only to help capture the chickens to put them in the coop. Because the deer netting is plastic, I couldn’t weed-whack around it without destroying the netting, so the grass had grown up and through and sealed the net to the ground. Throw in a few tractor implements that I couldn’t move because the tractor was at my dad’s farm, and I had a real redneck mess and an eyesore that bothered me every time I looked at it.

But on Friday the tractor came back, so I could finally move the forks and buckets and get to work cleaning up this mess. I removed the t-posts and then started pulling up the netting. It was so grown in that I had to use my scissors to cut the grass away from the bottom edge of the net. Not really a fun job. But I got it all up and then mowed the area.

I couldn’t get my weed wacker started, so I had to cut the grass along the coop with scissors too. All this grass made for a nice tractor-bucket full of greens to juice the compost pile.

Then I  had a clean slate to start setting up the dog kennel that’s leaning against the garage in the pictures above. I played around with a few configurations. Unfortunately I had two 10′ panels, and two panels that were only about 3.5′ wide. So a nice square pen wasn’t an option. Although the configuration I came up with bothers my sense of aesthetic order, the panels were free so I worked with what I had.

This was another one of the infinite jobs around here that would have taken two people about 20 minutes to do. But working alone I was at it for more than an hour, having to use shims and all sorts of other tricks to maneuver the panels upright and level so I could screw them together. And I totally torqued the tip of my thumb, trapping it between two panels while lifting them in to place.

But, injuries and annoyance aside, I got the pen up. I am living with it to see how I like it for a while, and if I decide it will stay I plan to dig some wire around the bottom so that I can have the chickens confined in there without worrying that they will be attacked. It’s not the most exciting or beautiful upgrade, but it’s an improvement that cost nothing but a few hour’s work and all sense of feeling in my left thumb.

The angle of the sun has lowered in the last couple of weeks, and each sunset spills syrupy golden light across the farm. The garden that I could barely stand to look at a month ago has been reborn in this new light, and every cloudless evening it stuns me. That’s one of the lessons I’m learning as I work this garden—if I don’t like the view, wait a few weeks for some variables to shift and it will be different. I suppose that applies to life in general as well as gardening!

The Albelia ‘Rose Creek,’ above, in front, is covered in blooms. Each year I wonder why I keep these shrubs around, especially in winter when they’re lumps of leafless sticks. And then in early fall I remember how much I like them during this time of year.

Here is is again, behind the Agastache ‘Bolero.’ The brown grass in between the two is blue fescue. I suspect that as the new perennials begin to fill in, this early fall picture will be even prettier.

My David Austin rose, ‘Pat Austin,’ has recovered from her summer slump to proffer fresh foliage and fall blooms. I guess she liked that generous heap of homemade compost I piled around her ankles last month!

More backlit albelia

And finally, another one of the many spiders that are around this time of year. Here, one makes a home in the blue atlas cedar.

In early August I was pretty sick of the house garden. Despite all the wonderful rain we’ve had this summer, which is unusual as we’re typically in a drought this time of year, the garden was looking tired. All I had going for me were some pretty garish purple phlox, which I appreciate as they bloomed for weeks and weeks.

However, with no other purple plants in the garden to play off, they looked lonely and out of place. And they were clashing with some ill-placed Crocosmia ‘Lucifer,’ above. All around town I kept eying beautifully blooming gardens, and from studying them I realized I hadn’t planted any mid-to-late-summer flowering perennials.

So off I went on a search for some of the hardiest of these standbys, including echinachea, agastache, coreopsis, monarda, and salvia, among others. It was late enough in the season that I managed to score some of these for 50% off, filling my car with ratty-looking twigs on faith that they had enough life left in them to establish in my garden.

To gain space for this minimakeover, I did some pretty major surgery on some of the existing garden plants. I dug out an entire colony of purple German bearded irises that nestled beside my blue atlas cedar. I was torn about it, as I’d rescued these as just a couple of tubers tossed in my brother’s backyard, and for the past few years they’ve bloomed beautifully each spring and grown into a sizable feature in the spring garden, playing beautifully with the Deutzia ‘Chardonnay Pearls,’ which bloomed at the same time.

April 2013

But this spring they were aflicted with iris leaf spot, and despite a couple of treatments, they weren’t able to shake it.

August 2013

Iris leaf spot won’t affect blooming until late in the game, but it makes the foliage look so ratty that I couldn’t stand it, especially in such a promintent place in the garden. And I am not interested in spraying anything in my garden to keep it looking good. So out they came.

I replaced them with some echinacheas, which won’t give me the same spring bloom but should go crazy all summer. I chose Echinachea purpurea ‘Primadonna Deep Rose,’ for its relatively compact size and gorgeous flower color (not washed out and bland as I find some echinacheas to be) and ‘Primadonna White.’ I added a pot of Siberian iris (Iris sibirica ‘Ceasar’s Brother’). I know it’s a gamble to plant an iris back in the same soil afflicted with a soil-borne disease, but my trusted perennial guide Tracy DiSabato-Aust suggests that Siberian iris are less susceptible to iris leaf spot. I figured it was worth a gamble to return a purple-blue bloom to this place of honor. We’ll see. I also stuck another Siberian iris elsewhere, in unafflicted soil, and added a Japanese Iris (Iris ensata ‘Caprician Butterfly’) just for grins.

While I was on a tear, I also dug up another beloved bearded iris, ‘Precious Little Pink.’ This is a magical plant to me, and blooms in such a weird blue/purple/brown/pink color that’s just indescribable.

April 2013

But it too was afflicted with iris leaf spot, so out it came. When it was out of the ground I discovered it also suffered from some rot and possible iris borer issues. And while I was in the mindset to dig irises, I rectified this unfortunate situation:

The horribly clashing blue and yellow iris (’Edith Wolford’) was relocated to the drainage ditch along the road, where I hope it will brighten the spring commutes of passers-by.

I also dug out all six of my daylilies, shown above along with the holes left from removing the Scotch broom. I had purchased the daylilies before the house was finished, again on deep clearance in the fall, and randomly plopped them in the ground to fill space. This year I finally realized that for the week or so that they bloomed, they took up too much space and looked boring. Plus, I am not a fan of bright orange and schoolbus-yellow blooms in this garden. So the daylilies had to go.

Looking better already! I added a few small evergreen shrubs to replace the Scotch broom. New additions are Nandina ‘Obsession,’ for red fall/winter color (near the porch corner) a relocated Deutzia ‘Chardonnay Pearls’, and a new plant to me, Distylium ‘Blue Cascade.’ (up front next to the elephant ears leaf). I’d been sold on the distylium’s virtues (uncommon deer, drought, clay and insect-resistant evergreen with small red winter flowers) while talking to a plantsman at our local fancy nursery, but he wanted $90 a bush. A few weeks later I found them at the local big-box hardware store for $25. Smaller plants, but that’s okay with me. I am curious to see how it does—it’s being marketed as a new foundation plant. Then I filled in around the new shrubs with a few perennials, including that purple spiky plant, Agastache ‘Bolero.’ It’s just gorgeous–with bronzy foliage and purple-blue blooms. The hummingbirds go nuts for it too. This an the new echinacheas help carry the purple phlox color across the garden.

I’ve still got all the removed iris and daylily tubers resting in the garage, and I plan to plant them back along the woodline. There they can bloom in the spring if they want and I won’t have to be worried about their disease-afflicted foliage later in the season.

It seems as though everything I planted got well-established. I realize things are planted pretty tight, but as you can see I am quite happy to thin and divide if the gardening gods bless me with successful growth. I can’t wait to see what the garden will look like as these flowering perennials begin to fill in and I find out if I was successful at addressing the issues I set out to fix.

High summer’s butterflies, of which there appeared to be more than normal this year, have been superseded by spiders. Spiders, and spiderwebs, everywhere. Their aerial architecture has stopped me short several times this past week, shaking my head in disbelief. Just yesterday I looked out my second-floor window and saw, at eye-level, a strand of web that ran from the silver maple in the front yard to the red maple at the corner of the house—a distance of more than 50 feet. It looked like an electrical wire strung across my front yard, glinting as it twisted in the sunrise. Baffling and amazing.

There’s a giant Argiope aurantia that’s taken up residence in the front garden, and she is doing her part cleaning up the last of the dying butterflies. Common names for this common spider are “black and yellow garden spider,” “yellow garden orb weaver,” and most interestingly to me, the “writing spider.”

According to this page from the University of Michigan, the purpose of the thicker, white, zig-zag portion of the web, called stabilimenta, is controversial:

At least 78 species of spiders add these structures to their webs, originally named “stabilimenta” because they were thought to provide structural stability. One study of Argiope spiders supports the idea that these bright white structures attract flying insects (Tso 1998). Contrary to this “prey attraction hypothesis,” hungry spiders build fewer or smaller stabilimenta, and webs with stabilimenta capture fewer prey (Blackledge 1998, Blackledge and Wenzel 1999). A competing hypothesis is that the highly visible threads prevent birds from flying through and destroying the webs.

I like that last theory the best.

When I was a kid and we found these spiders around the house, my dad used to catch bugs and toss them into the webs to feed these wild and temporary pets. It was country entertainment to watch the the spider jolt as something hit her snare, and then quick as an arrow she flew to the bug and wrapped it end over end in silk. Sometimes the bugs were too large to catch in the web, and they’d tear big gashes in the delicate structures that were always, magically, repaired by morning. Some bugs would feed the spider for days, until we’d come outside and the desiccated carcass of the unfortunate grasshopper or whatever would have been cut out of the web and left to drop on the deck. And then it was time for us to go hunting again.

Well the day I was anticipating arrived. Free ranging chickens in fox country means accepting, and living with, the risk that they’ll not come home one night. I’m surprised it took this long, actually. Just yesterday I was saying I hadn’t seen a fox in so long…

All the chickens were out all day today, roaming around. I left for only a short while this afternoon to go to the grocery. The dog was in the house while I was gone. I got back and saw some chickens in the yard, and all six babies were fine by the bushes. I didn’t count the chickens because they often break up into little groups that hang out in different places.

Tonight I put the babies to bed in the garage, and then noticed that only a few of the big chickens were hanging around the coop. I didn’t think much of it, as I figured the others were elsewhere. But at dusk I went to close the coop and there were only five chickens in there: Calabrese the rooster, Cora, Oregano, and the two Black Copper Marans hens, one of which is Dahlia. It’s never a good sign when the chickens don’t come home to roost.

So I got a flashlight and poked around all their favorite hidey holes before steeling myself for a trip into the woods. I knew what I would find, in some state or another. The chickens had taken to raiding the compost pile, which is set just into the woods, which is technically fox territory. I tried to keep it hidden from the birds, but once they discovered the delicious worms and solider fly larvae and food scraps, it became a place they visited several times a day.

Along the path into the woods, right where the snake appeared Monday, I found my first clump of black feathers. Then many, many more all the way to the compost pile. So that’s either Lilac or Iris, or both. The two Lavender Orpingtons are missing as well, but I didn’t find any of their feathers yet. I called for them, hoping they’d be hiding or injured and I could get them home and patch them up. It was getting dark and I didn’t really feel like hunting for more feather piles after finding the first. I just can’t understand that if it was a fox, how did it get four birds at once? I don’t know if foxes hunt in packs—I didn’t think so but I could be wrong. I would have expected them to grab one bird while the others ran for cover. And were was my rooster in the fray? I have seen him run across the entire pasture in response to a hen squawk. Maybe he was too far away?

Like I said, I knew this was coming. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to raise up some babies this summer, as replacements for the inevitable casualties. And part of me is glad to be rid of the Lavender Orpingtons, mean as it sounds. One didn’t lay reliably, and the other always lay on the floor of the coop (which meant the dog got those eggs) and both of these hens always looked dirty and scraggly (despite baths, the last of which I just gave two nights ago). So no big loss there. But my egg production machine took a big hit with this loss of 2-4 eggs a day. Now I have only the Black Copper Marans as steady layers, as Cora never lays and Oregano does only when the mood strikes her. And it will be next spring until the new hens start laying, provided they don’t get eaten too.

I am a bit sad about Lilac and Iris. They were my first hens and really steady layers of distinctive eggs. They always looked clean and healthy. At their last molt their facial feathers had grown in white, which gave them a cute elderly look. They were in their second year of lay, which means they weren’t spring chickens but they were keeping up with the younger birds. Iris raised a flock of guineas as her own. Lilac’s chick is one of the six babies. And they had good personalities, steady and friendly, and were always the first to come running for treats. They ate copious numbers of bugs and fertilized the gardens, all while getting to live in the fresh air and sun and do whatever they wanted during the day while being protected at night. They had a rooster who loved them. I guess they had pretty wonderful lives.

Here they are when I first got them. They were about the age of the baby chicks I have now. And here’s Lilac just two evenings ago, right up front, looking for handouts.

They were good chickens, but now they’re just stories and photos on the pages of this blog.

Goodbye, girls.

What happened to those damp little fuzzballs? Nothing remains of the chicks but their little peeping noises, which they still make when they aren’t busy practicing being grown-ups, crowing, and mating their siblings.

The chicks are now eight weeks old, and they are miniature chickens in most regards. This week I’ve let them find their own way out of their brooder coop and out of the garage into the wild world. They stick close to the bushes, dust bathing for hours in mulch, but each day they venture a bit further from their comfort zone. It’s wonderful to watch.

It looks like I have two cockerels: Griz, Oregano’s baby, and a Black Copper Marans/Wheaten Ameraucana mix. One thing I’ve really noticed is how much more flighty the chicks with the Black Copper Marans blood are. Makes sense, as their parent hens are the least docile of all my birds. Here’s the BCM/Wheaten Ameraucana cockerel, in front, with Griz behind, then the pretty black pullet hatched from Lilac’s egg, and finally a BCM/Wheaten Ameraucana pullet in back.

The homegrown birds all, except for Griz, have the cute facial feather tufting that comes along with their Wheaten Ameraucana blood. Interestingly, even though Griz’s father is a Wheaten Ameraucaua, he does not exhibit this feathering. Instead he looks like a straight-up Cuckoo Marans, which is blood that came from his mother’s line. So interesting to see genetics in action. Meanwhile, Griz learns just how palatable slippers are.

The white Coronation Sussex chick is, I believe, a pullet. Thank goodness. She is the sweetest of all six babies, always the first out of the coop and very amenable to being handled. Her lavender feathers are growing in around her head and tail, and I think she’s just so pretty. I have named her Calla.

None of the other birds are named yet. I will have to see what comes to me. I also have to get Griz and the other young cockerel up on CraigsList soon. Hard to do because the birds are so cute right now—just perfect little mini chickens. But mini chickens will soon be full-blown roosters, and three on this farm is two too many.

The big chickens have met and mingled with the chicks. It’s gone okay, with the expected bullying as the older birds show the younger birds their place. Here’s Cora landing a squawk-inducing peck on a chick, while the other babies bunch up for safety and Griz tries to decide whether to be a man.

As of last night, Dahlia has rejoined her flock. It seems to be going okay for her. I bet she’s glad to be rid of these increasingly active babies in a small brooder coop.

Fifteen birds running around here is a lot, but I kind of love it. If chickens weren’t so messy, and their food so expensive, and if we didn’t have to go through winter when free-ranging isn’t as easy or safe, I would have zillions of chickens.

This morning, on the way to the compost pile, I came across this snake stretched across the path into the woods. By the time I ran for my camera it was fast disappearing into the poison ivy.

At first glance I suspected a copperhead, based upon the coloration, but a quick look at its head told me it was no viper.

Had to go to my snake book for an i.d. I think it’s a mole kingsnake. I’ve never identified this particular snake around here, so it’s one for the life list. Apparently they live mostly underground and are often unearthed by farmers’ plows. They are superb burrowers, which fit this snake’s habit as it disappeared into the duff within seconds of taking its photo.

Happy birthday to me.

Live at the foot of the mountain and you’ll never get bored of your view.