Long day...tired and weary. (Is that redundant?)

I didn't sleep very well last night. For some reason the chicks wouldn't calm down and the peeped long into the night. No more critters in the live trap, but it was a noisy night. I'll probably go to bed at 9pm, after Ghost Hunters is over! I love that show!!!

It's been so warm and windy today. I love it!! It's finally starting to seem like we may just be able to work in the garden this weekend. I'd love to get some work done. I have a bazillion roses to prune, leaves to rake up, last years weeds to get out of the beds (I was a bad rose-mom last year) and mulch and Preen to put down. I'm only using Preen in the outer beds this year, in case the chickens get to be loose in the rose gardens. I'm not sure if I'm going to do that yet or not, but I don't want them poisoned!!

Most likely the chickens will spend their outdoor time in a contraption called a Chicken Tractor or a Chicken Ark. They are a small pen that you can put the chickens in so they can spend time out in the sunshine and on the grass or dirt. Usually the bottom has no floor so it sits right on the ground and that way they can scratch and dig and eat grass and worms...and hopefully Japanese beetles. It can be moved around and put in different areas everyday or made almost permanent if need be. I am going to remove roses from one of the beds and clear out some old worn out tulips from another bed so we'll have two places to put it. I don't think Andy wants it on the grass, but for a little while couldn't hurt. I guess it depends on how many chickens we put out in it at once. Probably only 3 or 4 at a time.

Here are a couple examples of tractors/arks. I'm not quite sure which type we'll build, but I like the looks of these first two. These pictures are from Katy's "The City Chicken".





This picture is just exactly like the one we had back when my DH and I had chickens in the 90's. Altho at that time, I thought I had invented this idea and had no idea they were called a chicken tractor! I had never seen one before.



We are going to put in a little raised veggie garden in where some roses are (and where some used to be). I'm so discouraged by all the rampant rose rosette disease (aka RRD) in this area. Some farm group, in it's infinite wisdom, introduced the virus to get rid of the multiflora roses that grow wild in all the woods and fields around here, so the land could be used as pasture. The trouble is, they didn't think about the fact that it kills good roses too. Of course, this happened many many years ago and I doubt back then that ornamental roses meant as much as cattle pasture. Anyway, I've lost so many roses to it, that I'm just going to get rid of a few roses and put in veggies instead! I'm not totally throwing my hands in the air and giving up on roses, but I'm definitely going to downsize! I have one area where the RRD seems to be the worst, so those are the roses that are going to go. I hope I don't lose a lot more roses to RRD this year. It just seems to get worse and worse. I still love to show a rose or two at the fairs and rose society shows around the area.

I put the bigger chicks and the littler chicks all together in the coop corral today. I watched them for quite a while and there was a bit of pecking order squabbling at first, but nothing major. We had divided the corral with chicken wire so the chicks could all see each other for a few days but not pick on one another. I was worried that the littlest ones would get hurt by some of my big bullies. It seemed to have worked. I will check on them a time or two more tonight before I go to bed, and hopefully they will have figured out the pecking order and be peaceful with each other.

Well, supper is almost ready so I have to go get it on the table. We're having a salad, roasted veggies (cauliflower and sweet potatoes tonight) and heated up left over pork roast. I just love oven-roasted veggies. We do cauliflower, rutabagas, parsnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and I did baby zucchini once...I love them all! And my meat&potatoes sailorman loves it all! Freaks me out to see him eating cauliflower and going back for seconds! I'm glad he's so open-minded.