Feeling Festive!

So I have used the molting season to my advantage!  This is the brown one, pre glitter...also made one with black and white feathers and added glitter....will add the glitter pics soon!  Plan to make more...just have to find the time to get out there and gather more feathers!

Winter for chickens

Have had lots of questions about how we're keeping the chickens warm...lots of people wanting to know if we're using a heating lamp, no we're not as they are unsafe and there's risk of fire and injury to the birds.   We are using the deep litter method this winter.

Pruning Prunes

Better late than never but here are some pictures from last weekend. We were plagued with colds but that didn't stop us from getting our fig tree and raspberries winterized.

We had to do some research in what to do for a fig tree, but in the end it seemed pretty simple so we gave it a shot, and just in the nick of time as we had our first snow this week and a nasty bit of ice rain this weekend.

Here is our fig all pruned and bustled up against the cold...

Our raspberries are in a bit of a sorry state. We don't know how old the patch is but it looked like it hadn't been pruned in years. We had to do some looking into what to do for the ever bearing variety we have but it too didn't seem too complicated.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like we have many shoots for early spring berries this year, but there should be lots come fall.

Unfortunately none of our fruit or nut trees look ready for pruning, although they too are all in desperate need for it. We might have to look into pruning them in the dead of winter. In the meantime we still have lots of leaves to take care of.

Leaves...

 More leaves...

Sick and tired daddy and daughter relaxing in front of 'Finding Nemo' after a long days work.

Thanks for stopping by :)

Poor little guy...

Found this little guy in the nesting boxes yesterday

feeling festive!

The winter season is upon us!  Got our first snow last night!  More pics to come soon of winterizing at the farm!
This weekend I was feeling festive and put together a little seasonal decor made up only of things found around the yard/garage....this included birch cuttings from the birch tree in the front yard, evergreen cuttings from a bush in the side yard (it needed a good trimming anyway, used to hit me in the face when I walked around there), dried hydrangea flower bunches from the bushes in the front yard and some nice pine cones from the thousands in the yard.  Old antique sleigh, black pot and berries were found hanging out in the garage from the last owner, so that was cool.

Fire

Fire - I has made it!

Now to get one going in the garage :)

Helping Hands!

This weeks Helping Hands winners are:

Grammie Kim - For watching Lily and giving us time to get some work done!
Pepe Mike - For the help with the roto-tiller and roto-tilling!
Aunt Sheri, Aunt Jennifer, Dora and Grampa Stew for the pumpkins. The Ladies love 'em!

A Peak Inside...and some more Outside

Last weekends activities and posts have lead to some questions that some of this weekends activities and pictures should help answer. Some people were a little confused, and rightly so, in thinking that the 'winterizing of the coop' project showed all of the 'coop'. Really, all that was shown was the run. Rest assured, the ladies aren't relegated to braving our Canadian winters or polar vortexes outside surrounded by a few bales of hay.

This week, among many other things, we took the hen house down to bare bones to give it a good cleaning before winter. We also flipped the door so it opens outwards and put in some boards that will allow us to start using what is known as the 'deep litter' method of dealing with chicken waste.

Here are some pics  to show what we've done....

Removed all the old litter and scraped down all surfaces.

Here's there little sliding drop door to the run. It's connected to a cable that can be used to raise or lower it from outside the coop. We had all the girls stay in the run for the duration of the cleaning.

A heat lamp was left by the previous owner for use with chicks. We plan to keep it around for those super cold days we see every so often.

 Added a couple of plastic nesting bins for testing purposes and started refilling with pine shavings.

Nests packed with straw, pine shavings and golf balls

We removed one feeder that just kept getting filled with poop. The ladies will have to learn how to share this one until the big remodel comes in the spring.I have some big plans for the reno so stay tuned for that!

By the time we're done adding shavings we should have 8 inches or more on the floor, hence the boards across the door. Karen or I will do a write up on the deep litter method in the future for those of you curious about chicken poop (I bet there are tons of you lol).

We also managed to get some more work done outside....

Strawberries covered with straw.

Veggie garden tilled. This one earned my dad the 'Helping Hand' award. Not only did he get a beat up old roto-tiller I found on the side of the road up and running, he dropped it off, and after showing me how to get it going he decided to do the whole thing. Guess it was more fun than it looked!

That'll be all the pics for now. Don't want to use up my whole month of bandwidth in just one day! However, please feel free to leave any questions, comments, queries or concerns!