Small Shifts and Poultry Progress

I make up words for things in my brain...or use words in unconventional contexts. Ivy does the same thing. If she's sitting by the fire, she doesn't feel the "warmth"...she feels the "heatness". One word that comes up in my mind this time of year is "shift"...as in "The Shift". To me, The Shift is that time when Winter is finally transitioning out, the ground is starting to thaw, patches of new green start to appear, the ice on the pond has melted and you catch a glimpse of an occasional ripple as a fish makes a quick turn near the surface. Normally, around here, Winter is a VERY long season. As that temperature drops in November...you start to batten down the hatches; put the lawn furniture away, pull the boats up out of the water, tune up the snow blower. Then it's almost 5 full months of very cold and very snowy. We like to be outside quite a bit in the Winter but with little ones, it sometimes gets tough...you know the drill...spend 45 minutes layering them up with warm clothes only to get 10 minutes outside before a face plant or tumble sends snow where it shouldn't be. I dig Winter...but I LOVE the shift...that means, boating, fishing, gardening, outdoor living is right around the corner.
This year's "shift" was hardly one at all. We experienced the 4th mildest Winter on record here and got to spend a great deal of time outside all season. It is still nice to think about Spring and all the outdoor stuff that goes with it. It's been in the upper 60's this week and we've been talking full advantage of this gorgeous weather. I'll show you...but first....

Chicken Update!
The girls have just about tripled in size since we got them. They are two weeks old now and all of them have their wing feathers and most of their tail feathers in:


They are still cute...but it won't be long until they hit that gawky, feather-ruffled, necks-a-little-too-long-for-their-tiny-head stage...the "teenage" phase as it's known in chicken raising. I'm still anticipating one or two of them to be a rooster..we'll see.
Well...being that the ground is thawed, work began on their coop:


My pops (Pa, as he's known to his grand kids) has been designing and mainly working on this baby. We're thinking it's gonna look pretty cool as it comes together.

So today, after work, I got changed and in about 2 minutes was outside with the fam working in the yard. There's some work that needs doing on our gardens so we started on that. We had dinner...then right back outside. I took the kids for a sunset ride in the boat:


with snacks:


and swans:


We even managed to do the thing that spawned this blog's name:


We found the Blue Heron (this was the best shot I could manage as I fumbled in my pocket for the camera while it was flying away from me.

After we docked, we had 15-20 more minutes of daylight. Gavin decided to "reward the day with a little fishin'" as we've been known to say around here:


While Ivy and I played catch with her new junky frisbee-thing:


Ivy insisted on bringing the frisbee back in her mouth. It wasn't until 5 or 6 tosses in that I realized that what I was doing wasn't playing "catch"...

I was playing "fetch".

Which sort of works...cuz I've never had a dog.

Not a bad Tuesday.


Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the third day. - Genesis 1:11-13

I love that part.

What are you, Chicken?

So...beyond Gavin learning to ride a two-wheeler and Ivy learning to cruise on the Strider bike, Some other cool progressions have been shaping up around here. I've started playing music in a "band" again, actually it's more like a quartet (and and occasionally a sextet)....My friend Andy, his wife, Maureen, Chrissy, and I have established this little bluegrass collective that we call The Grape Pickers. Gavin will sometimes break out his collection of harmonicas and rip a few notes while Ivy goes crazy with a shaker or tambourine (that's the sextet). We have 1 legit gig so far, in late August. More to come on that as it gets closer. In other news...this year, we will be drip irrigating our gardens from collected rainwater, something we've been talking about for a few seasons. Additionally, garden-wise, we are expanding our gardens a bit and starting an informal gardening co-op with two families and a young man from church. We've always harvested more than we use, and have given away bushels of produce to friends, family, and causes. We'll still be able to do that, while adding to it the pleasure of getting to garden along-side some our dearest friends as we work together to bring forth a harvest. This also is something that has been in my head and heart for some time, it was just never the Lord's timing for it...until now.

Now, all of that is big news (at least for us)...but the biggest (and cutest) news of all is that we are now raising chickens!! We got ourselves a nice little collection of Rhode Island Red hens who will be giving us delicious, home-grown, eggs by late Summer. We are so excited about this. Right now they are 1 week old chicks living in a brooder in our home school room.

A quick story about that:

I knew the chicks would be arriving soon, so last week, I picked up all the equipment that I would need: pine shavings, feed and feeder, water fount, heat lamp, thermometer...all I had left to buy was the actual container for the brooder. Now...people use all kinds of home made contraptions as a brooder: kiddie pools, cardboard boxes, Rubbermaid totes...I guess that would be pretty cost effective but...I wanted something that looked kind of slick and "farmy"...I decided to use a galvanized stock tank...the setup looked like this:



Notice at the feeder is Gavin's wind up toy chick....hey, we wanted a visual here...just until the real peepers arrived. 2 days later, our girls were home and now our brooder looked like this:





Pretty much the cutest things in the universe, right?



We got to naming a few of them: Chatty Baby, Little Jerry, Pickle, Marilyn 1, Marilyn 2...i think that's as far as we got. We spent the first few days down there just about all the time. Gavin got really good at handling them. I've read that if your chicks are consistently and lovingly handled early on that they will be more docile as they grow up. Not sure if that's true but...we'll find out, I guess. So after 2 days, we noticed some things. First, baby chicks grow FAST. I mean, these things nearly doubled in size in 48 hours. Second, their wing feathers were starting to come in:



It's unreal watching them grow. It's like watching your kids grow up, only 10 times as fast. Our friends, the Corbett's, came over that night and my buddy Andy says "So, how long before they can hop out of the tank, a week?"

nope.

6 days.

Well..in all honesty, one didn't jump out of the tank but, as I was sitting there watching them scamper around, a few of them COULD have jumped out if they timed their jumps right. That's just about the last thing on earth that I need....I pictured Chrissy calling me at work, kids SCREAMING crying in sorrow in the background, as she tells me that 3 chicks were missing. No way, man.

Well, that night, the brooder looked like this:



After harvesting the screens from the basement windows and laying them across the top of the brooder, I knew that I had made a rookie mistake...I bought a tank that was too shallow. Now, I figured that I could bungee cord some flexible fencing or chicken wire around the thing to build up the sides...but then it would look all ghetto...I knew what I had to do. I took back the 44 gallon stock tank and exchanged it for the 169 gallon stock tank! Tonight...the brooder looks like this:



Now we're talkin'. a full foot deeper, 4 more square feet of running room...I'm able to suspend the feeder (although I did settle on a home-made, ghetto-looking bar made of scrap wood, drywall screws, and some random brackets). I must say...I'm much happier (and so are the girls).

The coop will be ready in a few weeks and by late April, the hens will be ready to move outside. If they keep growing at the rate they are, they ought to be about 75 lbs. each by then. here's some random chick pics:


Ivy learning some "mothering" skills


Gavin learning some "Don't always be a complete spaz" skills (kidding...LOVE this kid).

Nose to beak

oh yeah...

...they also have tail-feathers, now.
*sniff*...they grow up so fast....*sniff*