For reasons I’ll talk about later, today was basically the last full day I will be able to till until August. So I did. And also I raked.

…yes, and I spent time watching and cuddling with the chickens. Of course.

These are a couple of “before” images, to show what the yard looked like before I cranked up the tiller. Dutch went out this morning before me (I dropped off Shadawyn at a friend’s house at 11:30, so I didn’t get started until almost noon) with a weed-whacker and took down a lot of plants, which makes tilling much easier. So this is during his break from weed-whacking and right before I started tilling.

Before I started tilling I did some raking to get as many vines and other detritus out of my way. The girls were allowed to run free while I raked, but when I got ready to till, they needed to head to their tractor. Here is a picture I took after I went looking for them to get them in their tractor. They were excited to see me (“Treats?”), as you can see.

Anyway, eventually I did start to till. I took a break about an hour after I started, let the girls out, and raked a bit. Here is a picture after I paused but before I raked.

When I let the girls out that time, they made their way first to the outdoor table and then post-haste to the area under the cedar.

But also by the north fence…

…under the chicken tree…

…which was apparently a great place for a nap.

At 3, I was exhausted and hungry (not unrelated!) so I ate all the food and took a long break. Here is progress at that point.

While I was eating, I let the girls out of their tractor and lured them to me with treats. At one point, I picked up Amelia and was feeding her scratch directly on my lap. Then Lucy saw that and hopped up on my knee and…

“HI!”

At some point, I actually did get back to work.

So what are we looking at here? Well, I tilled the area that is going to be the main-bed extension, and cleared as much land as I could between the main bed and the path. You can’t see the path here because I’m basically standing on it to take this picture. You can see there are four piles of vines, roots, and other planty remains, one smaller pile of rocks and concrete, and a pile of garbage. Most of the garbage came in the form of a large, partially buried sheet of black plastic (which you can see lying on a sheet of clear plastic), and that plastic and the random bits of metal I found in and near it all came from the area where I found the huge pile of rusty metal trash back in February. (Oh! As an aside, I took off Friday from work so we could go out to work on Dutch’s house in Poulsbo; we knew we were going to the dump, so before we left I loaded up the truck with all that rusty metal trash and we finally got rid of it!)

With this picture, you can see the scope of my tilling. The curve of the path is to the left, marked in this picture by where the green starts. You can also see where I attacked the largest pile of dirt near the main bed, reducing it to a mere hump. That was a lot harder than it might seem on the surface, largely because half of the pile was sod lying on top of sticks, branches, bramble, and vines. So I had to pull those out from under the sod, which was itself under dirt, just to get the tiller to work it. Totally worth it, but not easy!

And here is a view standing at the main bed and looking down the hill (and, thus, east). Along the right edge of the image you can see the two largest piles of plant debris, and near the middle of the image you can see the two smallest (really, I should just consolidate those onto the larger two, but too late!).

Finally, remember the big stump there near the main bed? I have successfully cleared all around it with the tiller, isolating it. I also managed to rip off a chunk of it with help of the straight pry bar, so I’m hopeful tearing it out of the ground won’t be quite as hard as, say, other stumps in the yard.

Papa takes a break from tilling and the girls get to come out of their tractor for a bit. They sure love this new yard table set we got. XD

There is growing evidence that our beloved Sally…

…is a Sal-he.

Yes, I am pretty upset at the prospect of having to give up Sal (Renton code says “no boys allowed!”) but mypetchicken.com has a policy to help us find Sal a home if she is, in fact, a he. We will do everything we can to find a no-kill home for him, because even thinking about the alternative makes me choke up.

So anyway, sorry to be the bearer of bad news. :(

It is a dark time for the
Hen & Thistle. Although the vines
have been suppressed,
nature’s troops have driven the
humans’ focus from their many
plans and pursued chicks across
the yard.¹

Saturday

I got off to a slow and lazy start Saturday morning, but once I finally began to work I pushed myself as hard as I could until I was forced to stop for a social engagement. About three or so hours of my day was spent behind the handlebars of the rototiller. What I did was to till around many of the border areas between our lawn and the untamed wilds (mostly the blackberry fields).

If you go out to the chicken coop, turn left 90 degrees, and walk almost to the edge of the domesticated lawn area, and turn left about 60 degrees, this is what you would see. You can see here the freshly tilled area between the domesticated grassy lawn and the wild berry lands. At the bottom of the shallow hill, here, you can see the grassy lawn-like area of the orchard.

Said orchard, around whose edge I also tilled.

Remember my “Beauty” post? This is the area where I took it. What a different perspective make, eh? :)

The other thing I did Saturday was to prune the Chicken Tree, which my parents believe is a crab apple tree (and which we have no reason to believe otherwise!). I also pruned a holly tree near the coop and cleaned up under our two cedars, which my dad and I pruned a few weeks ago when they came up to visit.

So here are the cedars. I haven’t completely cleaned up under them, but Dutch can drive his riding lawnmower through there and I can walk through without ducking. I have a future plan for that space, but it is merely a plan. For the future!

So a couple months ago, when Shadawyn and I went down to visit my parents, my dad gave me Pruning 101 lessons. When my parents returned the favor and came up a few weeks ago, my dad and I walked around the yard looking at our trees and how I might prune them. This is the Chicken Tree (so named because it’s the tree I found Amelia hiding under during Amelia’s Big Adventure). The plan is to shape it so it doesn’t get much taller but it bushes out a little at the bottom to provide shade and (more importantly) aerial cover for the girls.

At this point, I’m just showing more pictures of the pruned Chicken Tree so my dad can see how I’ve proceeded to prune it. :3

Yeah, check out that pruning… oh yeah…

And this is the holly behind the coop (as you can see). Since the girls sometimes go derping around down in this area, I figured I’d bring up the bottom of the holly so they would have yet another place to run and hide from aerial predators.

See, this is what I mean. The girls love it down there, although when I took this picture it was the first time they had explored out to the fence-side cedar. You can see the holly on the left-hand side of the picture.

And finally… our new fig twig had died, but suddenly there is hope again as it appears that a new fig thingy is beginning to grow!

Sunday

So the title of this post comes from Sunday morning. I was mostly asleep when I heard Shadawyn cry out in alarm. I assumed she was yelling at our most-worthless cat again so I rolled back over and sorta-kinda tried to fall back asleep. That didn’t work, so about twenty minutes after I heard her yell, I finally dragged myself out of bed.

Shadawyn: “Didn’t you hear me yell?”
Me: “Yeah. Couldn’t get up. Sleepy.”
Shadawyn: “There was a raccoon at the chicken pen.”
Me: *awake*
Shadawyn: “It looked like it had an injured front paw because it was favoring it and kinda limping when I chased it.”
Me: “Well I kinda feel sorry for it, but not if it’s near my chickens.”
Shadawyn: “I felt the same way. And there it is again!!!”

Sure enough, there was a raccoon that came over from the side of the house (the side over where the blackberry bramble is) and got within a couple feet of the chicken run. I had my shoes on at that point and was opening the door. The raccoon ran for the back corner, paused when it got there, saw that I wasn’t going to stop, and scampered up and over the fence, out of the yard. We haven’t seen it since. But the very idea of that raccoon getting to our girls prompted increased security measures around them. For starters:

Here is the tractor on Sunday morning. Note the half-ass defenses around its perimeter. Also, the door is held shut with a fucking rock. A rock…

So the first thing I did was to add fencing all around the bottom. This extends about 2 feet out from the coop, preventing digging predators from getting in. Well, digging raccoons, anyway. Rats could still get in. That will be the next upgrade…

And here’s the tractor afterward, with the extra anti-digging fencing in place.

And another view, this time sans Shadawyn. We also added three latches to the door (and a heavier rock, hehe), including a screw-in carabiner in place of a lock.

So now we have many plans and new safety protocols in place to keep our chickens safe. We haven’t seen the raccoon again since I ran it out of the yard, and I’m cautiously hopeful that I scared it enough it won’t come back. Hard to know, though. I don’t want to have to kill it, but I will to protect my girls. So I hope it stays away.

So that was like 8:30 in the morning when I saw the raccoon, and by 9:30 I was done with refitting the tractor. I then turned my attention to more pruning! This time, it was one of our hawthorn trees (the big one I can currently reach).

If you look straight up from the trunk and kind of imagine a line there, you can see just to the left of that imaginary line a big open space in the tree. That used to all be ivy. Back in December or January, I tromped out to the tree and spent a couple hours ripping all the ivy off I could reach, from the ground to about six feet up in the tree. In the months since then, all the ivy that had been choking the tree died. Good riddance. Unfortunately, it all left its unsightly corpses dangling in our otherwise pretty hawthorn. So I spent a couple hours ripping out the vines.

Now let me tell you: all those movies and shows about Tarzan, where he swings from vine to vine? I always thought (1) that was make-believe and (2) vines that strong could only exist in the tropics, if at all. Wrong on both counts, Mike! Multiple times over the course of two hours, I would grab hold of some dead (DEAD!) ivy vines, pull, and eventually pull myself off the ground. Once I even started swinging around on one like Tarzan. XD The vines never broke; the only reason I didn’t get to swing longer is because they pulled free from whatever was holding them up in the tree.

I also climbed up into the tree later to pull out a piece of the trunk I had cut the weekend before. I’ll show you that picture in a moment. But the funny irony of all that tree-climbing and vine-swinging? The only time I fell was when I was on the ground and tripped over a plant, taking a tumble onto me arse. Shadawyn was there and saw me, was more concerned than amused, and warned me to be careful about falling out of the tree if I climbed back into it. I didn’t, mainly so as to not scare her. :)

Another view of the hawthorn.

Here’s a close-up of the trunk. If you look at where the Y of the tree’s trunk splits off, you can see a cut of a several-inches-thick trunk section I cut out. Cutting that off was the easy part. It was so twisted in with other boughs and branches, to say nothing of the friggin’ dead ivy, that I had to use force and a great deal of physics to get it out of there. And also some subsidiary cutting, per Shadawyn’s suggestion. (I would have continued to just fight it with brute strength, but Shadawyn’s idea not only saved me energy but also time.)

If you look up from the thickest, main trunk (the Y fork on the right) and follow its line, you’ll see a broken branch hanging down in the tree. That was cut off from the trunk piece I removed (it has a companion, which I can’t see in the image). It’s pretty well and truly stuck at the moment. I tried to pull it down but instead it just held my weight. Were I stronger in the upper body, I might have been able to climb it. As is, it’s there until I get back up into the tree. XD

So here is an image taken from a maple tree, looking north. You can see the pruned hawthorn there at the left side of the image. The tractor is in the middle, just below center. The coop is between the cedar and the house/patio. According to google, the distance from where this picture was taken to the cedar is roughly ninety feet, or about one-third a football field. Just to try to give you some perspective. :)

So remember when I said that I tilled around the edges of the yard? That also included the edge in the back along the wooden fence on the north side of the yard. When we got back home from visiting some friends on Sunday evening, we took the girls out of their tractor and let them wander. For the first time, they went up to that northern fence and became instantly interested in the freshly tilled sod we’d been piling up there for months. Here are most of them.

Astrid (left) and Sally, our top two in the pecking order.

And here they all are, looking west. The raccoon had scampered up the chain-link fence there at the corner.

And a nice photo of the girls near sunset, taken from under the Chicken Tree.

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1: I do so love the Star Wars opening crawls…

It’s been a little while since I posted about the girls, so here you go.

Here are the girls all together on the picnic bench on our patio. Whenever we let them roam free they inevitably end up on the picnic table, and in particular this bench.

They turned seven weeks old on Monday, which means this coming Monday they will hit the two-month mark. It’s hard to believe we’ve had them for only that long. Life has definitely changed since they came to live with us, and in all ways it is for the better. Anyway, from the top of the literal pecking order, here are the girls:

Sally: The Leader

Sally is boss bird. She is the chicken we need, not (necessarily) the chicken we want. She isn’t cuddly or human-oriented at all, but she keeps the other girls in line and is a good protector and leader. Sally works with us to herd the girls where we want them to go, but sometimes her “help” really isn’t. As the top bird in the pecking order, Sally gets first pick of food and sleeping positions, and as a result (I think) she is the largest of our Easter Eggers, and thus our girls. Also, Sally is ridiculously hard to photograph, because she never wants to be alone, doesn’t stop moving when she is, and isn’t too fond of being near us humans unless we are feeding her treats.

Astrid: The Beauty

You might remember Astrid the Easter Egger from when they were all teeny-tiny baby chicks and I posed her in various pictures. She was so tame and calm back then, and totally into being held and photographed. That has all changed. What hasn’t changed, though, is that Astrid is easily the prettiest of our girls. She’s our little fashion model, although Shadawyn calls her “the Princess.” She’s also the Starscream of the flock, as she is clearly second in command but schemes to be first. Astrid used to challenge Sally for the top spot, but she doesn’t really seem to as much anymore. Astrid is the chicken most likely to be hanging out with Sally when the girls split up into pairs and trios.

Lucy: The Brains

Curious, clever, and too smart for her own good, Lucy is easily our smartest pet… of any species. But what she has in intelligence she lacks in wisdom, having escaped (with no way back in) several times. I think Lucy is the middle of the pecking order, but she might actually be fourth. At any rate, she is definitely the lowest Easter Egger in the flock. Although she isn’t particularly cuddly, Lucy is really friendly and human-oriented; she likes to follow us around and is the first to approach us when we sit at the picnic table on the patio. If you can get her picked up she settles in pretty quickly and seems to like to be held; it’s just a challenge to get there because she is constantly in motion (making good photos hard as well). For a few weeks she made a distinctive “terp terp” kind of sound, which was unlike the chirps of her flockmates. She doesn’t do it as often, now, or maybe her voice has changed, but I still “talk” to her with “terp terp.”

Tallulah: The Shoujo

Look at that fauxhawk forming on her head! Tallulah is the larger of our two Silkie Bantams and seems to be right around Lucy in the pecking order. She is frequently the first to come for treats (if Lucy isn’t) and seems to be something of a little glutton. We call her “shoujo bird” because she has such large eyes in comparison to her face and the eyes of her flockmates; we call her “moe bird” (pronounced MOH-eh) because she’s kind of pitiable and occasionally falls on her face when she’s running. Tallulah loves treats, hates to be separated from her flockmates, and tends to stick with Lucy and our other Silkie Bantam. She is the first to panic if separated from the others. Although she’s pretty hard to catch, once she’s being held she tends to settle right on down for the cuddles.

Amelia: The Derp

I’ve talked quite a bit about Amelia before. She is the bottom of our pecking order, the smallest of our girls, and definitely the most pitiable of our birds. We think Amelia is… challenged… beyond just being a chicken, and she might have bad vision as well. Chickens are naturally nearsighted and so can’t see more than a few dozen feet, but Amelia can’t seem to see more than about ten feet, maximum. Her sense of direction is terrible, she gets lost and separated a lot, she’s the bottom of the pecking order, and she tends to be the one left behind when the others are running off somewhere (including, often, coming to us for treats). In other words, she is the underdog and it is hard not to root for her. And in case you hadn’t figured out by now or from my other posts, Amelia is my favorite. Just writing about all the ways life is hard for her makes me want to go wake her up and cuddle her. She is the most cuddly of our girls and the easiest to catch (those might be related), and there are few days that go by that I don’t hold her.

But speaking of cuddling Amelia, let me leave you with one more heart-meltingly cute picture…

No, not of me…

D’awwwwwwwww…