New (partial) roof for the chicken run

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 20 December 2011 in chickens | 2 comments

Since we’d offed one of their species on Saturday, I decided to do a nice thing for our chickens on Sunday – I roofed part of their run.

I’d been meaning to do it for a while and had earmarked the polycarbonate sheets that had been the roof of our porch for the project – but when we had the porch replaced in the late summer, I wasn’t fast enough and the sheets were whisked away before I could grab them. Boo. I’ve kept my eyes open for the last few months for another possible roof but as nothing else turned up and it has been getting very muddy down there, I decided to buy some plastic sheeting instead.

The whole run has always been covered in chicken-wire to keep the foxes out, which made fitting the plastic sheeting rather difficult, especially in the spot I had in mind. The run is on “reclaimed” land – levelling up a steep hill – and on either side, it’s still the original hill. I’m not going to say how I got them into place because I think it would make John & my mum cry (especially as Sunday was icy and so possibly not the best day for clambering around). I’m surprised this blog post isn’t about how I added to my bruise collection*: the really bruised life.

Anyway, my original plan had been to carefully drill holes through the plastic so it wouldn’t crack, then screw them into place. I had an elaborate idea in mind of raising one end to make sure the rain drained away from the run rather than into it but when push came to shove and I was hanging off a tree, I realised that was unrealistic. On John’s suggestion, I ended up tying them onto the chicken wire – and around support beams where appropriate – and that seems to have worked pretty well. If it snows a lot, I’ll have to get into the habit of clearing it off the roofed bit so it doesn’t get too heavy – but snow gathered on the chicken wire too so it was something I had to do last year anyway. I’m not sure how much it’ll hold up in high winds and whether or not the rain will drain in the right way by luck rather than by design but we’ll see – it’s a start. And if it is a giant failure, given the way I’ve tied them on, it’ll be reasonably easy to remove them if needs be and try again.

Between the new roof, the shelters I made last year and the raised coop, they have about 6m2 of covered space in their run now (not including inside the coop) and there is another nearly 4m2 space covered in pallets/trellis so they should have plenty of non-muddy wandering space this winter – which should hopefully keep any mud-related foot problems at bay. I just wish I’d got around to doing it before the mega rain earlier in the month!

* I bruised my knee on a stage combat course last week, then slipped on the ice on Friday, banging my bruised knee again and falling heavily on the top of my foot. I’m rather clumsy – which is another reason why I shouldn’t have been clambering around on an icy day ;)

Our second time killing & butchering a chicken

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 December 2011 in chickens | 10 comments

(WARNING: I’ve included a couple of in-progress pictures towards the end of this post and I’ve been very careful to pick ones that look little different to a bird you’d find at the supermarket. However, if you’re very sensitive, you might want to skip this article.)

We killed and dressed/butchered a chicken for the first time in 18+ months on Saturday – the first time since we had chickens of our own.

It wasn’t one of ours – our friend John B hatched some Silver Wyandotte eggs last year and they all turned out to be boys so they didn’t fit in well in his egg-laying matriarchy. They were becoming bullies so had to go. He brought one of the big fluffy boys to our house for us as his daughters have a bit of an embargo on him doing it at his house.

We killed our first chickens under his tutelage in April 2010 – just before we got our own girls. Again, they were some boys whose only crime was being boys – oh and forcibly having their way with John’s girl chickens, that was their crime too. We had already accepted that we had to be willing to kill chickens before we could keep them ourselves – for example, what if one was injured and needed putting out of its misery? or, as happened in this most recent case, if hatched eggs turned out to be boys. But as I mentioned in my blog back then, there was also the bigger picture to consider: if we only bought point-of-lay girls, then someone else was having to deal with the equal number of point of lay boys that were being born. (This great article by Throwback at Trapper Creek puts it better than I can.)

Washing in winter: ideas for reducing laundry?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 15 December 2011 in Featured, frugal | 20 comments

Hi guys, sorry for the radio silence for the last few days – I went on a drama training course on Tuesday and have only just recovered ;) It was a lot of fun and very useful but I’m farrrrr too lazy for what was essentially a five hour exercise class. My neck is sore and I’ve a huge bruise on my knee from stage combat training but on the other hand, pretending to beat up a new colleague for 2.5hrs is a really good bonding experience :)

ANYWAY, back to reality now. Lazy, lazy reality. I do like being lazy in winter because it can actually be an efficient/frugal way to do things: yesterday, John was out of the house all day so me & my aching body worked from bed until I had to go to out myself – no need for heating. And as I’ve said before when talking about linedrying laundry in winter, some things just get left until spring: throws/blankets get taken out of service, occasional wear that I won’t need for another few months can stay in the washing basket, and bedding etc gets left in the washing basket too until a nice drying-outside day, even if that’s another month (or longer) away. Lazy is good.

But I wondered what other strategies people use for reducing the amount of laundry they have to get through in winter. Aside from burst washing machine pipe incidents, the washing isn’t the hard part but the line drying is, particularly if you’re tight on space at home.

I remember looking into the issue of laundry a year or so ago and being shocked how much people wash clothes – a whole outfit in the wash every day – some people wash bedsheets & tumble dry every day. I mean, gosh! Around here, underwear gets changed every day, t-shirts every other day, jeans & jumpers not so much. They get washed when they’re dirty, which isn’t after one day for us desk jockeys. I also have different sets of clothes for different jobs – for example, my scruffs (for gardening/chicken coop cleaning/DIY) have a much higher dirtiness threshold than the nicer clothes I wear when I’m teaching.

How about you? Do you try to minimise the amount of washing you do in the winter (or all year around)? If so, what tactics do you use? If you don’t – how do you keep on top of it all in the cold days of winter?

Wet day

Posted by louisa on Thursday 8 December 2011 in chickens | 3 comments

It has been decidedly moist* here today. I realise people further north/in Scotland have it much worse than us but it’s still very wet and windy.

The beck at the bottom of our garden is usually just a pleasant trickle amongst the many rocks – 2.5m/8ft wide but no more than 15cm/6ins deep for the most part (there are some deeper pools and Lily-dog knows the location of every single one). There are enough protruding stones that we can step over it in trainers without getting our shoes wet. Not today though.

It’s fast and dirty – the run off from woodland, farmland, golf courses and roadways – and when the wind drops, we can hear it roaring from the house. We’ve seen it a foot higher than this, right to the edge of the far bank, but this is busy enough.

(As a comparison this is what it looked like this time last year, just after the first load of snow. Much calmer and clearer. A few days after that photo was taken, the top couple of inches of the whole beck froze solid enough that I could just about walk on it.)

The chickens have also been complaining loudly to me about the weather of late. I asked on Twitter earlier if anyone knew if you could get snorkels for chickens but I think actually wellies and/or waders might be more appropriate: it’s very muddy in there.

What is ‘local’ for you?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 7 December 2011 in meta | 8 comments

Yesterday on Not Dabbling In Normal, Xan wrote a post about ‘what is local?’. It’s actually something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while so I thought I’d ask you guys the same thing.

We know that it’s better to buy local food/resources and use local providers, because it means that our food, yarn or whatnot isn’t travelling halfway around the world to get to us and more money stays in our local economy rather than floating away to tax exiles overseas. But what is local to you?

Without thinking about it much, I guess I’d say local for me is things made, grown or raised in Yorkshire. It seems obvious: I live in Yorkshire and so stuff from Yorkshire is ‘local’ to me. But that’s a bit silly as there are lots of places in Lancashire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire that are nearer to me that the top reaches of North Yorkshire. I don’t think I’m the only one with that idea though – when we go to a farmers market, it’s mostly sellers from Yorkshire too. Presumably producers in Lincolnshire and Derbyshire have big cities to supply closer to home.

Perhaps a radius is a better option – according to Xan:

Joel Salation of Polyface Farm has a useful, practical definition of “local”– you can drive there and back in a day. This gives you about a 4-hour radius, or just under 300 miles.

I’m not denying that doesn’t make perfect sense for Joel and many other people but a 300 mile radius from me covers all of the UK, and the top of the Netherlands, Belgium, France and a whole lot of sea (the yellow circle on the map below). I’d put something from that 300 miles over something flown in from New Zealand or Kenya but it doesn’t feel terribly local really.

I’ve heard other people say, and particularly in British context, ‘local’ is about a 100mile radius (the green circle on the map for me). That seems closer to my idea of local and seems practical too. But if I lived on the coast in Norfolk, or up in the highlands of Scotland, a 100miles radius would include too much sea/mountainous moorland to result in a lot of produce.

I think what I’m surmising is that local means different to different people, depending on where they are – what does it mean to you?

What do you consider ‘local’? Assuming you’re unable to buy everything locally, what do you prioritise to buy locally or from local suppliers? Do you think you could survive (and enjoy it!) on just local supplies?

(Radii produced on the “Free Map Tools” website in case anyone wants to try making their own.)

(Photo by e pants)