The Chicken Coop

If you follow me at all on Facebook, you know that I have spent a good portion of the spring and early summer building a chicken coop. It has been a long journey, but finally, the coop is complete!

This project has been more than just a utilitarian effort to house our new chicks. In fact, in my minds eye, it wasn’t even a 12’ x 4’ chicken coop that I was building, but a 12’ x 24’ post and beam barn with workshops and storage. You see, that is what I really wanted to build. I have always loved old barns. I’ve spent countless hours exploring old barns, at places like Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, Fort Number 4 in Charlestown, NH, The Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, NY, and privately during my surveying career and as a kid growing up. I have spent hours, since I was kid, browsing through books by Eric Sloane about life in the 1800’s, and about old tools and old buildings.

A couple years ago, I bought this book on timber frame construction; my “Bible” on how to build my own post and beam barn. I have always wanted my own barn; a place to house a few animals, to store firewood, to have a woodshop, and a small blacksmith shop… a place to work on artistic endeavors, and a place to keep all my gardening tools and outdoor stuff dry.

Finally, a couple years ago, I decided to build a small shed from scratch, in post and beam fashion, using only hand tools. A first shot model for my future barn. I cut down trees for posts and hewed logs for cross supports, beams, and floor joists. I cut mortise and tenon joints and fastened them together with wooden pegs. By the time I got to the roof, I was a little tired hewing, to be honest, making strapping seemed like areal chore and required so many trees, and my attempt at making pine shingles proved VERY labor intensive and required a lot of practice and a lot of dry wood without knots… so… I opted out and bought rough cut lumber and cedar shingles. I also bought the 12” planks for the floor.

The shed…it’s nice, but it was my first attempt, and I used a lot of round, crooked, & various size woods, without a square angle or edge in the bunch. I still need to put the 12” pine board vertical siding up. Still, it looks very rustic and like an early 1830’s shed. Mission accomplished!

This year, once we started talking about chickens, I decided that we needed a new coop. Our old one was too small, and as I had built it 8 years ago with plywood and 2x4’s without paint or anything… it was beginning to have issues. I could have gone the easy route and bought a coop plan on-line and did the plywood thing again, but instead, I decided to build my barn - in miniature.

I bought rough-cut 4”x4” beams and 12” pine boards from this fantastic local saw mill run by 2 sisters. I based the design on the small barn design in my “Barn Bible”. I decided not to go with wood pegs, but nails. I also went with the cedar shingle roof. Cedar smells sooo good!

Originally, the coop was going to have wooden wheels at the base of the posts, so it could be mobile, with a trap door in the floor and a ramp so the chickens could access the area under the coop, which would be fenced in. As the chickens scratched and ran out of plants, worms and bugs to eat, I would move the pen. Well…I can still move it, even without the wheels, but damn, this coop is heavy, so decided to keep it where it is for now. I’m going to cut a door off the back, once the chicks get older, and fence in an outside pen for them along the bank between the coop and the shed.

 

The chicken wire panels in the front come off for easy cleaning of the coop and for replacement with plexi-glass windows in the winter. There is a main access door at one end and a nest access door to the 3 egg nests on the other end.

This was such a fun project and one I am really proud of. I enjoyed building it and it adds a nice aesthetic to the back yard.

Of course now, I want to tear down my rustic shed and build the full sized barn project from my book. I’m sure there are a few other priorities to attend to before that plan comes to fruition.

And so it begins…

Well… on Monday the chicks finally arrived; 25 tiny, multi-colored, peeping balls of fuzz. We ordered chicks from McMurray Hatchery back in February. We picked all kinds… chickens with fluffy feet, some with fluffy heads, a few rare Spanish chickens, some weird dinosaur looking ones, some half-wild ones, and each kid ordered a little bantam for their own. The kids were out of their minds with excitement. Jeremiah was too young to remember the last batch and Grace was just a baby, so this is going to be a life memory for those two.

They have been waiting for the chicks to arrive with as much anticipation as Santa on Christmas.  Well, Ok…not that much… but they were very excited. I have to admit…me too. Chickens are more interesting to watch that one would imagine, and they each provide an egg every day. What more can you ask? And what are we going to do with 2 dozen eggs a day? Who knows… I told Grace if she cared for them, she could have 4-5 dozen a week of her own to sell. She is such a little entrepreneur!

Within the first hour, we experienced two chicken milestones. The first? Grace named one of the chicks “Steve”; the second? Steve’s health started to go down hill and Grace was in tears. I tried to explain to her that it is normal to lose a few chicks the first day. In fact, when I was a kid, our chick batches of 25 would arrive and by the end of the day there would be only 12. Maybe we shouldn’t name them yet, I suggested. Of course…that didn’t help.  But luck was on our side and Steve pulled through. The rest of the day was chick-mania. We went to Blue Seal feeds and picked up chick supplies, and came home and set up a nice little pen for them. Within a couple hours, all 25 had names. (not that I can tell who is who, or remember any names)

Grace is adamant that her little bantam chick is going to be trainable and learn to do tricks and sleep in her bedroom. I’m just smiling right now… I’ll break the news about chicken hygiene and intelligence another day. 

Jeremiah also had his own trauma. His bantam, Milo, immediately became the lowest on the pecking order and the others pecked its face until it was bleeding. We had to separate it from the others until it healed up a bit. Jeremiah was sure his chicken would die… it’s always his thing that dies or disappears. But again…things worked out, and after the chicks ate and drank, they all relaxed and left each other alone. So now the chicks live in a hamster cage on our window sill. As soon as they are big enough, they get to move outside into the new chicken coop that I’ve built. If you follow me on Facebook, you'll know that for the last month, I’ve been building a post and beam style chicken coop. 

 

More on my chicken coop project another time…

Class trip

Every year, Jeremiah’s class at the Monadnock Waldorf  school goes on a class trip. In fact, every class, third through eighth grade, has a class trip. Next year, Grace’s trips will start. Each year the trip lasts a little longer and the group travels a little further afield.

In the 3rd grade, it was the Farm trip sleepover. In 4th grade, they went to the White Mountains in NH for a couple days.

Last year, Jeremiah’s fifth grade class went to Cape Cod for four days. They slept in cabin’s, roughing it, and they cooked their own food. During the day they went on various daytrips studying the biology and geography of the area. Some days they hiked, others they did bike trips. Tracy went with them last year as one of the four parent chaperons.  I made a short entry with a class photo here… She had a blast!

This year, his class is heading in the opposite direction; westward to New York State. After a little prodding from Tracy, I volunteered to be one of the adult chaperons this year. I’ve gone with the class as a chaperon for the hike we do every year up Mount Monadnock, but never for a four  day trip. It should be pretty fun!

We are going to do a day at Howe Caverns,  a day at the Herkimer Diamond Mines, a day in Cooperstown visiting the Farmer’s Museum and Fenimore Art Museum, and a day exploring the Heidelberg Escarpment (a limestone region of 100 foot limestone cliffs and underground rivers). This all ties in with the geography and geology the kids studied this year.  We will be living in rustic cabins again, and enjoying campfires, music and stories at night.

We leave early on May 24th and return at night on May27th. I’ll be sure to fill you in.

2010 Garden Journey ~ They’re up!

A few weeks ago, I told you that the first seeds had sprouted in my green manure project/experiment. So far, it has been a great success. The garden is covered with a carpet of green, which on closer inspection, is the result of thousand of little plants growing.

 

On the windowsill, all of my Kale and heirloom Italian paste tomatoes have sprouted too. I planted Poblano, Jalapeño, Serrano, Cayenne, and sweet green pepper in another flat as well as these pumpkins from France that are really cool colored and funky shaped. Nothing in that tray has sprouted yet, but it’s early. The cat hasn’t laid all over the seed trays, yet, either, which is a plus.

I’ve also done some improvements to the garden area. I took down the old wattle compost bin, which was falling apart anyway and really just a buffet for the neighborhood dogs, and built a new bin with boards and added a mesh fence on the inside and two sliding access doors. I put all the old compost in the further bin from the garden, and it was already too hot to touch in the center of the pile by this weekend. To me, this stuff is so cool. Its all well proven ideas and ancient technology, but I’ve never really tried composting and the fact that it does generate extreme amounts of heat and turns plant matter into a black potting soil type of stuff is amazing to me.

You may also have heard that we had chickens. Well..our last “lady” Carmela, after surviving the winter alone in her pen, disappeared after only a week of having free reign of the yard again this spring. A little surprising, she was one of the better flyers and lived way up in a hemlock tree. On the bright side…her coop, a 4 x 6 x 7’ tall structure makes a perfect tool shed for the garden. Yesterday, I nailed some wheels onto the supports on the bottom and did a combination of push, drag, left and shuffle to move it to the back of my garden. All good…except for a small mishap. I had lifted the whole thing up about navel high to slide a log underneath. A s I went to lower it, the wood I had hold of broke and the coop came slamming down on my left thigh and knee.  It hurt like a mutha-f… But in true Huntley fashion, I walked it off and kept working for hours till all my little projects for the day were done. Later it hurt more and when I took my work pants off to take a shower, I discovered a big red and purple bruise and dent in my leg. I had to laugh, as I always seem to hurt myself in the name of outdoor projects. Tracy didn’t think it was that funny.

Now I have a garden shed to keep all my garden tools and supplies in right in the corner of the garden. I’m thinking of painting it and adding some left over cedar shakes I have to the roof for aesthetics. No doubt you’ll soon hear that I broke something falling off the roof or have been blinded by paint.

But honestly, hurts and all…I never feel better than when I spend the day “playing” outside.

Another corner turned

Many months later, as he stood before the expectant faces of his esteemed colleagues, Russ Huntley remembered that distant afternoon when his friend Dave convinced him that being a presenter at the seminar would be nice.

Yes…a famous quote, borrowed and modified from one of my favorite authors. And maybe it should have remained firing squad, for leading up to the presentation, that’s how I felt….a condemned man standing before the firing squad.

It all started about six months ago. I am the Director of Education for the New Hampshire Land Surveyors Association, NHLSA, and one of my charges is to coordinate and set up educational seminars. We usually try to have them coincide with a quarterly meeting of the Association, so that the members can take advantage of a travel day and obtain both some continuing education credits and hopefully, learn something new.

I had an idea, a theme to build on, from the previous Spring seminar, and so I set about to pull together the players and then step away and let it happen. Wrong. I had contacted a couple of fantastic presenters and things seemed to be going on track until the details started to emerge. One of my presenters, a prominent local author, had a program that probably wouldn’t fit with the time of year we were presenting, due to cold weather and snow. I spoke to my friend Dave, the other presenter and a very well respected and prominent surveyor. He suggested a couple of other guys to ask and some ideas of how we could set up the program, with little cost to the Association, as well. In this conversation, he quietly slipped in “..and you could do an hour or two on wetlands.”  Sure, I blurted without thinking of what that meant.

The months pressed on, and pretty soon, it was two weeks before the presentation. As the team began to touch base and coordinate, I began to sweat. I love people, I really do, I like seeing people, watching people, getting to know people, just not necessarily talking, being the focus of attention… especially presenting to a group who are there for the express purpose of listening to me. I decided that it wasn’t a big deal, I present to groups all the time for my job, and I started to pull together something. I made an outline of what I wanted to talk about, and started on a PowerPoint presentation, as that seems to be the modus operandi of the presenters at our meetings. So far so good…or so I thought. Everyone else around me…those who know me anyway…could see the change in personality…the fear building inside me. While I was actually engaged in preparing the presentation, I was fine… even excited and enthusiastic about my topic. The rest of the time, I began to feel like a condemned man.

The worries and fears began to mount. Of course, I had selected the after lunch time slot…the power point kiss-of-death. The other presenters were talking about things related to boundary surveying, research and physical evidence, while I was talking about wetlands, something none of them are licensed to practice (unless they are also Wetland Scientists). I’m dead! What if I can’t talk…or what if, God forbid, all my work comes out in about a 20 minute talk and I’m left standing listening to crickets for the next 30-45 minutes. What if the computer doesn’t work and I’m left with paper in my hand and nothing to focus on except the crowd….the firing squad.

Of course I had the support and help of friends and family. My wife, Tracy, more than anyone, understood my suffering and tried to allay my fears and calm my nerves. A few friends at work, and scattered around the world offered encouraging words and support. I focused on their words and good vibes.

The day came…the presentation loomed. I sat through Brian’s presentation, then Dennis’s, then it was lunch. I wasn’t hungry, but I managed to stuff down a few pieces of chicken to stop the shakes and the rumbling in my stomach. I left the lunch early and went back to our room to set up. I plugged in my memory chip into Brian’s laptop, only to find that it had an older version of PowerPoint and wouldn’t play mine….aaaagh. My head started to dance and the heat seemed to rise to 110 deg in the room. I took a deep breath and went and grabbed my laptop, and after fumbling with the wires and software, got everything to work….whew!!!

Brian, Dave and Ed came up, and each offered their own words of encouragement. They sat scattered around the room. Deep Breath…I didn’t even hear Ed introduce me. I then welcomed everyone back and a few friends in the front row joked around with me…we laughed about the fact that it was after lunch and it didn’t matter if my presentation was interesting…they would be sleeping anyway.

Then, something happened. A couple things anyway. A gentleman in the audience, Randy O. asked me some questions and provided some comments. a few others began asking questions and I started answering. I knew my subject. I kept presenting and pushing onward, and I noticed people writing things down. Wow!…I said something that someone wants to remember?!?  There were a few nodders in the group (it was after a lunch of heavy carbs and cheese…I would have been dead), but even they woke occasionally to participate. All of a sudden, Brian was smiling at me and pointing to his watch…and I was on the last couple of slides. A half dozen questions answered later and I was done…with my talk running 10 minutes over and a group of interested people to boot.

I went up stairs for a drink of water and to sit down, let my adrenaline burn off. A number of people went by and told me they enjoyed the presentation, and a few approached me with more questions. I was shaking, a bit numb, and yet feeling a little euphoric at the same time. I called Tracy immediately to tell her I was done and alive.  The rest of the day…and in fact the rest of the weekend went by, so slow and tranquilly. I felt a huge weight lifted and yet something else too. I conquered another fear…  I did something new and exciting, something that I’ve always admired others for doing and being able to do… I was one of the presenters… a teacher… a somebody… I turned another corner.

Many days later, as he sat in his office, contemplating another blog, Russ Huntley remembered those blurry minutes after his wetlands presentation when he promised his friend Dave that giving another presentation would be nice.

Brian Burford, Dennis McKenney, Dave Mann, and Me…all smiles…all done!

2010 Garden Journey ~ The first sprouts

My garden journey has begun again this year. The first sprouts are up!

Last weekend, in a spurt of pent up energy, waiting for the growing season to commence, I did the un-thinkable here in chilly New New Hampshire…I tilled the garden and planted. For most people, and for most things that you are planting in the garden, Memorial Day, at the END of May, is the traditional garden planting date. True, the snow was gone and weather had been in the 60’s for a week or so, but we often get snowstorms and sub freezing weather all the way into mid-April. Maybe I pushed it a little.

I have always enjoyed gardening, as a hobby, as a means of artistic expression, and even as kind of a moving meditation. Part of the joy is to do everything organic, no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, very little or minimized carbon footprint (except for maybe the roto-tiller.) So, ever since I was a kid growing up in Westmoreland, reading organic gardening magazines, making garden plans and planting my gardens, I had learned about and wanted to try something called a green manure. It’s an organic gardening concept, where you plant certain things in the fall or early spring, plants that have some beneficial properties for your garden, and then just before planting time, you till them into the soil.

Some plants draw and free up potassium and phosphorous from the soil, some add nitrogen, some have deep, penetrating roots that break up the subsoil. Some just grow very fast and add a thick leafy matter to the soils to help build up its organic content. One of the plants I chose, Mustard, has an oil that is toxic to fungi and nematodes, both of which can make a beautiful garden go to crap in short order.

So… last week I tilled the soil and planted a mix of buckwheat, field peas, spring oats, vetch and mustard. Of course, that was the end of the the two week warm spell of 60 degree weather and it turned cold and rainy. Oh well, I thought. I’ll have to buy more seeds and try again. But yesterday… all my little seeds have sprouts and are starting to grow.

If it works out well, I’ll do it again next year, as well as hit the garden with the new manure source of 25 chickens that we will be getting in May. Maybe I’ll be able to grow pumpkins the size of a VW.

 

Next time on Life as Russ ~ How I survived the NHLSA Spring Quarterly

The Human touch

I was thinking about something this morning… What!  He thinks? You ask yourself.  Yes..on occasion.

I was thinking about sitting on the couch with Tracy, Molly, Chris, Kevin, Jacqui, Dan…maybe all not on the same couch, but two small couches and one coffee table. Maybe a Monday night, a hot summer night, a few glasses of wine or beers, it’s dark outside, it’s dark in the room except for the glow of the TV, we’re sleepily watching a movie. Nobody is really talking, but everyone is relaxed, leaning on each other, legs piled on the coffee table. My Tribe. No personal space…just a big pile of friends.

Then back in time…Fiske Hall…Me, Jeremy, Jason, Brian, Mace, Donna Lee, Katie-O so many others…watchin Letterman, again, piled onto couches and chairs…eating Ramen. Late night conversations.

From there, I went back further, perhaps because I’ve reunited lately with family and friends who are now spread out across the country. I remember so many family gatherings and reunions; or just summer get-togethers; at Nana & Bup’s or at Grandma’s. I was one of the youngest cousins. I remember games of tag, wiffle ball, lots of food, hanging out on the porches and back steps. In love all with mis primas and wanting to emulate all my cool primos. Ice cream! Quicksand! Swing on the Big Elm. More wiffle ball in the back yard. My aunt’s swimming pool. Sleep-overs. Kids piled in blankets on beds, sleeping bags, couches.

I don’t have much to say, really…just reminiscing… looking at memories from a distance. We are all spread out now. A few phone calls, maybe; a visit now and then; or now, the internet, brings family and old friends back together. Little snipets of conversations and some nice pictures. Pictures speak 1000 words….it’s true. Amazing…the internet.

Now I’ve met and started some great correspondences with new people, because of the internet. Even made a couple of friends, I’d say. The internet allows us to talk to people all of the world…from close by like New York, to far away places like China, Italy and Australia. Different lives and experiences in different places. Different ways of speaking…even different languages.

The common thread here…not what you might think. It’s dinner. It’s shaking hands and hugs. Its sitting on the couch. It’s blankets….. It’s actually none of these, because whether its family, old friends, or new friends…the internet allows us to talk and visit like never before, but it leaves a big gap. One that, for me, feels like a hole that never seems to be filled. There’s no human touch.