spring bedding change

Thinking of changing the bedding/litter in the indoor chicken coop to sand in the spring.  Have been reading lots of great things about it and love how the droppings can be scooped out like cat litter.  Looking forward to trying it!

http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2012/09/chicken-coop-bedding-sand-litter.html

brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

It's a cold one again this morning....have been giving the ladies a nice warm bowl of oatmeal in the morning to warm them up after a cold night!

plans to free range!

So currently our chickens are not free range, they live within our inside and outside coop's, which are enclosed.  We have been thinking that it would be nice for the ladies to do some free ranging in the warmer months, allowing them to find all the tasty treats (seeds, bugs, etc) throughout the yard.  So we've started looking into a couple ideas to allow a few ladies at a time to free range safely from time to time.  It is not safe to allow our ladies to free range as we have a large coyote and hawk population in our area and our neighbour is quite fond of toxic chemicals on his lawn, so we don't want them consuming that.
Here are a couple photos of what we're talking about building (well Michael building anyway...not me...)  Final plans yet to be decided...

kitty?

Seems our new barn kitty may have gone AWOL...haven't seen it in a few days and there has been no decrease in food in the barn.  We have a pet door in the garage so it may have decided to go out and no come back in...oh well...back to the drawing board.  Hope it's doing ok...

Garden layout

Here's the layout of the main garden that Michael has created...pretty proud of himself!

Now we just have to figure out seed spacing and how many plants to put in each section.  

Veggies are surrounded by some flowers we will be growing to keep out pests and also that can be fed to the chickens, including marigolds and nasturtium.  Both are packed full of vitamins for the ladies and keep the yolk a nice yellow.

Also going to experiment with a few new things we've never tried before including corn (including a nice heirloom seed called butter popcorn(what!!!??? can't wait), quinoa, ground cherries, etc.)

As a note we will likely be selling our extra stuff that we can't can, freeze or eat...so let us know if you're interested in a supply of anything during the summer, I'm sure we can accomodate.

Name the barn cat!

So we just acquired a grey barn cat with white markings from another barn struggling to feed all the strays around...I have no photos as it has yet to be seen since its release in the garage on Sunday.  Kind of looks like this...

we also have no idea if it's male or female, although that really doesn't matter to us in terms of a name.
"It" will be sleeping in the warm garage with its fire burning stove and keeping away the mice/rats/etc., so that we can keep our hens healthy and vermin free!
So anyway, it needs a name and we need help to come up with one...please post suggestions in comments!