There’s nothing quite like a summer cold to disrupt your schedule. Thankfully, this one seems to be winding down, as yesterday, I started feeling better, although, I feel badly as I seem to have passed it to George. Fortunately, his immune system is stronger than my own, and so it seems that he’s fought it off faster. Huzzah!
By yesterday evening, we were both feeling pretty stir crazy – so many things had to be put off due to feeling crappy over the preceding days, and it weighed heavily on both our minds. So, we went to work on the permanent nest boxes for our chicken coop. We’ve been using some temporary ones that we had quickly put together, but there were only three of those, and that’s not going to be enough once all of the hens are laying. So, using some OSB (oriented strand board), our table saw, and air nail gun, we put the new boxes together. We started by constructing the single rows:
Once we had six of these single rows, we mounted three of them together into one unit, and installed front guards so that the eggs don’t get knocked out of the nests.
We installed these in the coop last night, stacking the two units, and anchoring them to the wall. It remains to be seen how the chickens feel about the new egg-laying condos, but hopefully they will like them. I’ll find out later today when I do my egg check.
We’re hoping that the girls are feeling pretty generous after the treats they received yesterday. We had to clean out our freezer to get rid of some long-forgotten veggies from last year’s garden. (I am already devising a plan for a freezer inventory system to prevent this from happening in the future.) But the chickens were thrilled with lots of yummy zucchini, summer squash, cabbage, and they even got one small bag of strawberries (a favorite of theirs!)
Knowing that the chickens are benefiting from the freezer cast-offs eases the conscience a bit – at least it didn’t all go to waste! There’s an additional benefit to us, as well – one of our favorite things to watch is chickens absconding with a treat. They’ll grab a piece of whatever we’ve provided, and suddenly run off in an evasive manner, trying to avoid being intercepted by a flockmate. The fact there is a huge pile of the treat that will provide enough for everyone is irrelevant to them; playing keep-away seems to be just as important as eating the treat.
Here’s hoping for more eggs, and lots of things checked off of my to-do list today!
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