Grass Hay - Not For Sale

Just a little hay in the front yard.

You can't buy grass hay, at least not this kind. We use an electric mulching mower, and no artificial fertilizers or toxins. 

It makes the best chicken nests. It can be flipped daily for cleaning and re-fluffed, and then the hens can form new nests in it. It's not for eating, so any old soft plants, including whatever weeds or plants, can be dried along with the tall grass.

We simply leave the edges of all grass areas to grow up, and harvest it when the lawn matures and starts to dry out. We don't cut it; we wear garden gloves to rip it up, so the spreading roots of the lawn are weakened and thinned as we go.

Discovered the hay that grows in comparative dark, between the lines of stacked wood, comes up clean, weed-free, soft, fine, and tall. It tears out easily, from above the roots, handfuls at a time.

In the photo, the hay is drying to form an upper thatch before we flip it. It just went through a light rain, and it's fine. 

This is all the hay we'll need to store the potato harvest, and use as the hen nests as the year turns.

Raised Bed RAISED

FARM!

The raised bed done!  Took me two days of hard digging and organizing to build this thing.

Here's the new chicken coop -- the final one!!!! -- and the Girls. 

I have learned a construction secret:  NEVER use nails or other permanent fasteners when building semi-permanent structure.  This is all screw and pin nails.  It lets me get the pieces back out if the next step in the scrap-building process does not quite work out.

Scrap building is really hard; you have to think about everything, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.  The back of raised bed looks crappy because I didn't have enough good stuff -- the nice little cedar boards Denny Eichhorn gave me last year from another building project teardown.  

Gonna plant flowers around the edges of this thing, so it will be pretty and afford food and shelter for predatory insects.

The Next Chicken Step

Now we've got the egg production up and running -- 227 eggs as of today -- it's time for the next step.

Rebuilt the bigger cage to make it easier to access for cleaning, and got three nice new chicks (featherball stage)  from the Triple Nickel Farm on Highway 112.

The process now is:  buy new chicks when the older hens are cycling down (not yet, but will come soon enough), get a big rooster for the older hens and let 'em go on the hill behind us to have a few days/weeks/months of freedom.  Better than being slaughtered for soup or braise.  

The hill is the breeding home of eagles and other predators.  They don't hunt near their nesting area, and they keep down other predators.

I was perfectly willing to try slaughtering chickens, but when I was talking about the whole recycling process, Dan's face crinkled up in distress.  He was raised on a chicken farm, and had to kill a lot of them.  He just doesn't want to do the same with two hens he considers family pets.  So the girls will get an end-of-life vacation.

The new chicks are mixes; a black Arucana mix, and a couple of red/gray mottled things.  They cost two bucks apiece.  They're still scared, but they know where their compfy grass-lined nest is, as well as the food and water.

After a lifetime of not really eating eggs because Dan can't eat store eggs, we don't really eat a lot of eggs ourselves.  Most of them are now part of the swap system  with our neighbors, for cleaned, packaged salmon fillets and elk-burger and trout and ling-cod and halibut. Both sides of the swap think they've made out like fat rats and gotten the better end of the deal.

I'm going to check with the co-op and see if we can't just trade for milk, cheese, butter and  yogurt.  If you've got chickens, you've got a cow.