Backyard Chickens & Bees

Ah, last Saturday was the final CHIC gatherings for the year. This month was held at our house, and we had a near-perfect day for working outside (sunny skies, mid 60s temperature). The original CHIC date was set for last weekend, but several schedule conflicts had come up due to the long time in between the previous and current CHIC meet-ups. So we moved it along by a week to allow more of the group to get together. All told, we had ten workers and lots of chores…

1. 

   Looking north from the deck where there are no longer any camellias blocking the view.

   Chicken coop: The coop and chicken habitrail are all fully enclosed with chicken wire, and, with the exception of a small hole that the rat found, keep the rats and other varmint out. The pen, on the other hand, only had chicken wire on the sides and top, so a family of rats have found that they can easily dig under the walls and gain access to the chicken feed. Well, one of the projects that was taken on by Matt and Carol (and others at times) was to dig out the pen down about a foot, lay chicken wire and staple it to the lower edges of the walls, and then bury it so the chickens can scratch and take dust baths. That took pretty much the whole time, and seemed to go quite well! So now the entire coop, pen, and habitrail are completely enclosed. We still have to get out and close up the small breach that exists in the coop’s chicken wire, but this work should minimize the number of rat incursions for now.

2. Weeding: Harriet and Jenn worked on clearing out the weeds from the front strawberry bed and along the parking strip, where the lavender and wormwood live. Those areas look awesome now, and I don’t cringe when I walk by them.
3. Camellias: Ah, one of the larger projects was to remove the 4-5 camellias that have been growing along the north side of the deck. There are a lot of reasons for taking them out, such as
   • The flowers do not really provide good nectar for the bees (I can’t find the source for that information, but seem to recall that there is not much pollen or nectar in each flower). Ants, however, seem to love them and were always present inside the flowers. So, while they are nice looking, we can’t bring them in as cut flowers due to the number of ants that are harvesting the nectar. We tried that once and found ants everywhere…
   • My neighbor has some great berry bushes that were shaded by the camellias, and opening up that area will allow the berries to be more abundant (and accessible to us!).
   • I am hoping to put in either another raised bed in that location, since there is an abundance of sunlight there, or a semidwarf apple tree that I can use for pressing cider. The grapes are probably going to be removed (training the grapes is a real pain in the ass, and I’m not very good at it) and replaces with espaliered apple trees, again with the intent of making cider. I think that apple trees will do better in that area, without getting too tall and unwieldy.
   • Finally, like rhododendrons, I just don’t really like the camellias. They flower in the spring, and then are just ugly and pointless. But that’s me…

   So, Ben, Ben, Jim, V, and I all worked on cutting down the trees (many of them were shallow-rooted, so could be broken off at the ground quite readily after a bit of digging) and hauling them out to a drop box we had ordered for the occasion. I’m still sore from all that!

4. Bathroom: The other Jim was put in charge of painting the new trim that went up in the bathroom. We had remodeled the bathroom a year ago, reviving it from a poor 70s job and putting in 1″ hexagonal tiles and a cast-iron clawfoot tub. However, the wedding came, we got burned out on remodeling, and various other projects took over, so the final trim and finishing touches were never completed. That changed a couple of weeks ago with the purchase of a nice miter saw and the ability to put up properly-cornered pieces of wood. So we got all that up in the week prior to CHIC, had it primed and ready to go, and let Jim at it! It still needs another coat or two, and the doors (which we had dipped and stripped) need to be stained, but it’s almost a finished bathroom! So close…

No plans have been made for next year, but that’s a long way off.

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