Construction

It's mid-November and the weather has finally turned a sharp corner here in Massachusetts and barely got out of the 30s today.
Of course this all happens the week we decide to break ground on our house expansion plans. We had it coming though... it's taken weeks to get the financing in order and work out the budget with the contractor. All that was going on when the weather was a balmy 60 F all day long and barely in the 40s at night.

The diggers came in and really tore things up the past two days. It's really amazing how powerful these machines are.





Here's a video of stones being moved:


We tried to save stones and trees and anything that would add to the finished design and make it look like part of the surrounding structure and landscape. We had to cut one large dogwood but we moved a second dogwood with some bumps and bruises:



This weekend I'll prune it back pretty hard and tie it up so the wind doesn't knock it over through the winter months. Not sure if it'll make it but it's worth a try!

Chickens...

We have a small flock of laying chickens that my wife got from a local elementary school. A friend that she occasionally rides horses with is a school teacher and had purchased fertile eggs and hatched them for her classroom. Since we had chickens 3 summers ago, she asked if we would like to take some of the chicks and we decided now would be a great time to start the flock again.


Back in 2005 I decided I wanted to take control of where at least a small amount of my food came from. I started small vegetable garden and we bought 7 hens that we housed in a chicken tractor setup that I built from an old shipping crate, PVC piping and lots of chicken wire. It turned out to be a lot of work to move the setup around the yard about every other day. I liked doing the work, but all of the excitement and attention that it generated in the neighborhood exhausted my social batteries and made me feel a bit out of place. The neighboring children couldn't get enough when the tractor was on our front lawn, but the parents and older people thought we were weird people.

I kept it going for the first year and then parked the birds in the backyard for the winter which is where they ended up staying in the summer of 2006.
I wanted to keep them on pasture but encountered a few problems that made it easier to keep them in one spot. First, the PVC pen broke under the weight of snow and I didn't want to spend more $$$ buying the specialized fittings. Next, the tractor's tires had deflated and I had a hard time getting them to inflate again. And finally, the neighbors wouldn't stop with the commentary, which got my wife looking at me sideways.


You can see the coop jacked up for some tire repair in the picture.

The summer of 2006 is when the predators started their attacks. First, a hawk killed two birds while I was at work on separate occasions. I had no idea what killed the first bird when I got home from work. There was just a dead chicken with bits missing here and there. I thought it got sick and the other cannibalized it. I've read about this happening. It wasn't until our neighbor saw the second chicken attacked and killed by the hawk that I figured out what happened to the first one.
Next came the fox. That happened because I began free ranging the birds and would close them in around sundown. Well a few times I wouldn't get to their coop until dark and that's when foxes hunt! We lost another two that way.
And the final predator was the fisher cat. There was no stopping that thing! It climbed the fence, ripped a whole in the netting and grabbed the birds one at a time. All this happened at night over the course of several nights. I didn't know this was going on until I noticed I was down to 3 birds from 6!
At this same time my daughter was being born in the hospital and I gave up on chickens until now!

Here are two short videos of the current chickens:

For real this time...

Okay. This time I'm going to stick to the blog thing.

I have friends and coworkers that are so good at keeping regular blog postings. Not me…

Work in progress.

The latest:

• Wife's preggers with #2. She's getting really uncomfortable at this point (due 12-25-08) and I feel for her.
  
• The house will very soon be under construction. We've decided against moving because the market is crap, and there's crap on the market, so plan B was to make our house easier to live in.
• We have chickens again. Got them this past June from an elementary school classroom that hatched them. Not laying yet, but still fun to have.
  
• Allie's is growing to be such a big girl! She's now 2 yrs 3 mos and fully potty trained. We're very proud of her. :)

This past weekend was fun, despite the ultra-warm fall weather we've been having. 65F and rainy on Saturday is not standard fall weather for November in New England.

In preparation for the construction about to begin at our house, I wanted to help tear down the back deck for two reasons: 1- Demo work can be fun. 2- I wanted to save some of the wood to either burn in the fireplace or to use for other projects.

I really wanted to save all the wood, but taking it apart board for board and nail by nail is really a feat for a crew of people with the right tools. Another goal was to GET IT DONE by Sunday afternoon, which meant doing some real demolition work with a saw, a sledge and a ripping bar.

Later in the day we went to Idlywild, a local fruit and veggies market that has great produce as their central theme. We found spinach from NJ on sale and bought a bag…