Where have we been?  In deep with the chickens!  Man, it’s been intense…

We’ve had the chickens for three weeks.  All 16 are still here with us.  Two days ago we took the four Australorps and four Buckeyes out to the coop, and we let the Black Barred Rocks and Buff Orpingtons stay in the new, improved brooder until they’re bigger.

We’ve had a lot of angst, but we’re into a better rhythm all around now that the chicks are in two groups.  Everyone seems happy.  I have new gray hairs, but who’s counting at this point?

What we really need now are a few sunny days so that everyone can range outside together.  Even the little ones are good at catching worms, and we want them to have that freedom to explore. 

The digging?  Do you really want to know?  What a sad situation… the weather has been impossible.   I need a day-and-a-half of sunshine or two days of cloudy/no rain weather in order to dig without ruining the soil.  I also need to have my child happy outdoors with me or occupied with someone else in order to dig.  The stars haven’t aligned.  I am woefully behind.

In theory, I am still digging the 5th bed on the east side of the garden.  I have no idea when the weather and life-circumstances will allow me to return to this adventure.  In the meantime, it’s *April*, and I now have only 1.5 beds free for planting now.  I’ve planted 2.5 beds to capacity with early season veggies.

So…  after lots of discussion (fun!), I agreed with David that we will use the rototiller (ack!) to help blend in new ammendments into the west side of the garden.  I’ll raise and shape these beds, but I won’t double-dig them until next year (if we discover that the double-dug beds produce well).

Timing on the rototilling is everything.  I also want to get the 5th eastern bed double-dug.  I keep looking at the weather forecast and wish we had some sort of helpful farm report here on the local news…

I think it’s going to be another week before I can begin either project.

I still want to talk about the digging, even though I’m not doing it.

I realize how obsessed I have become about the digging.  All of my issues play out while I’m digging.  I rarely get time to do it so I have to put every bit of my energy into the work.  It’s concentrated, deep, and hard.

With the endless rain, I realized I was sinking into despair about the digging I wasn’t doing so I had a therapy session with myself:

Is there really nothing you can do out there besides digging?

Well, no, there’s a hundred things to do out there that I can do in the gruesome rain.

Well, can you do some of those things?

Do you mean I’m being a baby about the digging?  Well, I can see that…  I’ll get busy…

So I have gotten busy about the other things.

I moved two compost piles into a new space, integrating them in a strategic way.  I moved a bunch of landscape timbers.  I unwound and uncreased a lot of fencing and rolled it up.  I arranged some drainage pipe in a visually-okay way (give me an A+ for this, please) and wound up some irrigation tubing in the best way possible.  I not only emptied the old, useless compost container with just a shovel, I broke down the old, useless compost container and stacked its parts neatly in the center of the drainage pipe. 

And I am now in the process of moving David’s family’s heirloom rocks that have been moved and moved and moved again.  They’re beautiful and precious to us, but right now they’re in the way of us building a run for the chickens so I’m moving the rocks to a place near the house.  They’ll be protected there, and we’ll be able to use them in landscaping projects.  Beautiful obsidian, quartz, petrified wood…  we love these rocks, but we’ve been moving them from here to there for a long time, and I’m sure the rocks would like to just relax for awhile.

We are alive!  16 chicks and 3 people!  Happy Easter to you!

David and Ellie brought home our chickens last night.  We have 16 chicks: 4 buckeyes, 4 buff orpingtons, 4 black barred rocks, and 4 australorps (who are 2 weeks older than the rest of the chicks).

My heart feels tired and happy from watching them and learning how to care for them.  I had never held a bird before last night.  It took awhile to figure out how to trust myself to do that.

I’ll tell you more about the birds later.  Tomorrow we might take the four Australorps outside for a walk in the grass because they are older than the other chicks. 

Eloise has been great with the birds.  We’ve been trying to handle them during focused periods and then giving them lots of time without extra stimulation.  So far, everyone is playing well together.

They’ve already grown.  It’s crazy.  They are way bigger now than the picture above.  How could they do that in one day?

David has set up a chicken cam so that we can watch the chickens in their brooder without disturbing them by going into the garage.  This is wonderful — yet another reason why I love David.

Our terms of service with our service provider won’t let us post a live chicken cam feed, but we’ll figure something out.

Last weekend, our friends S and JL came over to help us put the roof on the chicken coop.  We couldn’t have done it without them. 

S used the power tools and seemed very calm about it all. 

JL was able to provide David with sound engineering advice and seemed very calm about how it all was unfolding. 

I was a nervous wreck and actually said stupid things like, “But we’re girls!  We can’t do that!”  (Really…  I think there’s a good chunk of my brain that should be removed or something.)

Here is roofed coop.  We are grateful for the help and companionship.  I especially appreciate S and JL’s calmness.  I also appreciate my husband’s calmness and his ability to climb ladders and hoist awkward sheets of plywood in ergonomically-unfriendly ways.