After we tie wrapped all the plastic tie wrapped on and got the frame stable Dave and I carried it out into the backyard. Dave attached it to the coop and now the chickens have extra space through the rest of the winter! The sun rooms have worked really great over the years. Dave also deep cleaned the coop so the chickens are ready for a nice cold winter. It's been interesting the price change on bales of pine shavings . We use the deep litter method and pine shavings are great. A bale is currently about $20 which is more than double in about the last 6 months!!! Not sure if this is due to fuel prices or more the popularity of coops in the area or both? I'm glad I did stock up on a couple of extra bags of feed a few months back. Otherwise they are all cozy! Shot from last year-
I also found some really cute Ikea Christmas tree ornaments, candles and a really cute little tray. Tree ornaments $15, very much like Mercury glass! I did splurge on these, even prettier in real life!!!
Our garden did really well this year, but it took a while to get established due to the extreme high heat we had. We had quite a few weeks of a 100 degree weather and that stunted a lot of the growth. Once the weather moderated a bit we had a bumper crop of apples, pears, peaches, peppers, tomatoes-
We had such a bumper crop we decided to invest in a second, smaller freezer that we have in my home office. That's worked out really well especially with doing more food storage for preparedness-
I also used my dehydrator and vacuum bag sealer a lot this year, preserved a lot of different fruits and vegetables. Did lots of fermenting, more food production/preservation/storage in general. In the Spring I felt a real need to be more prepared and work on the pantry. Sadly what I feared came true with higher food prices, availability, supply chain issues, etc. No down side to being prepared!
After years of being really frustrated with a job that I could not transfer out of I decided to quit my job. Bye Bye SLHS. My current job almost tripled my vacation, has amazing benefits and it's basically a nice group of people to work with. While it can be pretty boring I am looking at retirement at sometime hopefully in the not-too-distant future. I'm still doing research on that and time will tell. I plan on working part time, hopefully back in education, we'll see.
We were gifted with our third grandchild, a girl, in August. I know a lot of people post a lot of photos, but I think that it's good to have some kind of privacy from social media. Her name is Ripley, named after Ripley from the Aliens movie franchise. She's very happy baby, a real sweetheart and was born with lots of red hair! It's kind of fun having a granddaughter after having two grandsons. The grandsons are doing well and five years old. We're really lucky that we can see our grandchildren living in the area.
Chickens are doing really well, had a real bumper crop of eggs and so I froze a lot of them. We had a bee swarm, nicely relocated! We did a partial re-do on the coop Coop Update and Garden Fencing We had wanted to build a new one and relocate it, but lumber prices were just way way too high. Since we had some free scrap lumber Dave I suggested that he rebuild part of the floor, which he did. He also used some leftover bricks that we had to brick the floor where the dirt floor had been. There are two levels in the coop. The chickens were almost digging under the edge of the walls on the bottom level making it unstable. I suggested a new design on the sunroom for the winter. We were able to ditch the really heavy glass shower doors and use some flexible plastic tubing. It's a lot easier to set up and less weight and does a good job! We also added a used metal storm door, the old one was really warped-
Major landscaping re-do was in the backyard and we had some duck visitors! Garden Rehab I was really tired of having a ugly view from the kitchen/ dining room of the rotting cold frames. We had opened up another part of the garden for those veggies and I had seen a design that I really liked Garden Re-hab Begins. We were able to use the dirt, mound it, curve it, and plant mixed sun/ shade plants and shrubs. Wood was rotted so we composted it. We also dug out the two ugly shrubs that were along the fence line and replaced them with Arborvitaes. We will have privacy from the backyard rental house and it really softens the fence. We did it on a budget and everything has grown in really, really well. We moved the huge bamboo on the left from another area. Only thing I forgot about was to plant spring bulbs, but will plant some other little flowers in the spring. It's grown in really well and we absolutely love it! We will have a tree pruner come in at some point and trim back our huge maple tree for more sun on the veggie garden.
Our veggie garden fence was falling apart, so we bought new metal fence panels, quick install and should last a long time! Garden Rehab Phase 4
The city/county is going to be putting sidewalks through our street since we don't have them all the way. Basically they purchased three to four feet of our frontage on our lot. Construction will start this month. Will basically rip up our street/re-pave, widen the street and create curbs all the way. Good news- they will also fix part of our broken concrete driveway. Glad they are doing this, will be safer for the neighborhood. We decided to use this as an opportunity to re-do part of the front yard. Dave dug up the perennials we felt that we could salvage and planted them in another area of the yard. He also removed part of the picket fence, since they will tear it out. There's only a few plants left and they will go (sick or stunted). Then once it's completed in the spring we'll put the fence back, some of the perennials and add some new things. We're trying to really naturalize the front yard more. May add some edibles too.
Went to Hood River, Oregon in the spring for Dave's brother's belated funeral. We stayed at the Columbia Gorge Hotel, great off season rates and gorgeous gardens in the spring-
