A New Home

The chicken coop and pen are nearly done. The first couple of pictures above are self-explanatory; the third shows a number of fishing lines that we strung up over top the pen area to psychologically thwart raptors from eating chicken for dinner.

I began installing interior and perimeter fencing yesterday. The perimeter will be 2 courses of 4' stucco wire for 8' total height. It's cheaper than official 7.5' high tensile deer barrier and a lot easier to work with. Unlike my experience with polyethylene, deer won't push through underneath. To keep the chickens from entering the row crop area, I redeployed some of the 7.5' poly fencing that I previously bought. I'm also using it to break the chicken area into 2 or 3 large pens, to enable rotational grazing. Chickens will go underneath this fencing, too, unless a foot or so of it is bent 90 degrees at the bottom along the ground and weight placed upon it. This apparently will work for deer as well especially after grass has grown through the holes. Stucco wire and plastic end up being the same price per foot but the plastic fence will be a lot shorter since it starts out being 6" narrower and it loses a foot at the bottom, leaving only 6.5' of height which I feel is too tempting for a deer.

My head threatens to explode when I think about all the possible permutations of fence configurations that might be nice to have next summer. But they all entail visualizing where human, chicken and vehicle movement will be and how many and how wide gates have to be. Right now we have a grand total of one 5' gate. I plan to install another gate that width right next to it to allow the passage of a truck. Of course, that will mean more dual gates like that if the truck is to pass to other sections of the farm such as the portion way down below where the greenhouses will be going.

For now, I'll concentrate on only the portions that need to be done to contain the chickens and to exclude the deer from the veggies. After our winter vacation, I'll begin building our first greenhouse. Then I'll complete the required perimeter fencing before reconsidering other interior chicken pen configurations. In this calculus, we'll have to determine where our wash area will be. We might be able to fit it into the garage with some careful space management or, for the price, it might be wise to erect another of those garages since the first one hasn't blown away even though we've have some substantial winds.

But, for tomorrow, I might have a fairly large order of salad greens to harvest since, apparently, we're the only ones on the island who have any.

On building codes

First, the weather. We got another dump of snow yesterday which I was able to remove around noon. More snow came later yesterday but not enough to cause a problem. And, at 8C, we're in full natural melt mode now so we'll be ok for at least a week.

And now to the regularly scheduled rant.

It seems to be a popular past time in every place I've lived to build or re-build stuff with no government oversight ... or its inherent cost. My landlord seems to be an exception to the rule where he actively involves the building inspectors for every facet of his new and reno projects. He says that the inspectors take lots of time on multiple trips to make sure everything is done according to current standards. If he ever sells his property, he'll have lots of paperwork proving his diligence and, for that, he'll likely be rewarded financially in excess of his expenses.

For the construction of small outbuildings, most people figure that nothing bad could happen so why bother? Examples of these abound on the property used by our farm. I sometimes imagine Mike Holmes showing up and, hours later, presiding over the torn-down ruins of virtually everything on the property. A tractor shack sheathed with rain-soaked particle board (who knew it rained in a rain forest?); a bike shack whose bottom 4' is comically overbuilt but whose poorly-home-built-extruck-cap roof was greatly strengthened recently by a double ply of 6 mil polyethylene; and, of course, a kids' playhouse cum chicken coop which seemed to have been well-built ... until the appropriate lumber ran out and the builder had to make do with 1X4.

The visible parts inside the structure are a combination of decent construction and sketchiness. Some 1X4 at the ends but mostly 2X4. Or so I thought. Yesterday I decided to pull off an interior sheet of 1/8" wood panelling so I could use the extra 3.5" stud space to recess some nesting boxes (the nesting boxes were originally ... nesting boxes in the chicken coop cum tractor shack, before I hung them on a wall for use as small-object storage). The "space" part of stud space better describes what I found behind the panelling. A couple of mouse nests, miscellaneous dirt and wood chips and 3 sticks of 1X4, randomly spaced and oriented. I would be embarrassed to show that too. The visible open wall above and on either side of the panelling is 2X4 but the portion inside the wall, not so much.

My 10 minute job hanging the nesting boxes turned into more than an hour as I had to scrounge for 2X4's all the while working in the very confined quarters of the chicken coop. I'm guessing that the other lower side wall, which is covered end to end with panelling, is of similar construction. The question is weather I want to deconstruct the perches I built onto that panelling and then rebuild that wall, too. After all, the playhouse, despite its dubious structure, has held up for many years of wind-, snow- and kid-load. It's much sturdier now than before even if not uniformly so. I think I'll leave it as is, at least for now.

Best not to think about the house...

W...T...F...?!

About half of our backyard flock is experiencing its first snow today but the veterans weren't too keen on getting out of the coop either and had to be coerced out. It seems like there has been about a foot of snow which, in a single snowfall, seems to have surpassed all the snow I remember us getting last year in Vesuvius. Of course, I saw and had to deal with a bit more snow up on Mt Maxwell last year when I was the snow-shoveller on call at Foxglove Farm, so as to protect their greenhouses from collapsing.

Speaking of collapsing structures, I recently assembled one of Crappy Tire's garages-in-a-box, which pretty much warns you that it should not be used outside, for fear of it collapsing, blowing away or otherwise dying due to normal weather. In other words, it's great if you want your car to be covered...inside a real garage.

I doubt we could the get the car up our driveway this morning, let alone make it to the farm, without getting stuck dozens of times. I called Mary and Blair as early as I dared and learned that they were already taking care of the farm, including the garage. From their description, it was moments from collapsing but they managed to clear the snow before calamity could strike. Phew.

The low tunnels were fine but parts of the plastic deer fence had ripped off their T-posts because of the snow load. Also, some branches from a huge maple tree apparently came down on a portion of the fence underneath. At this point, I'm not concerned about deer. The value of the crop that's not underneath the low tunnel is minimal and might not survive the elements anyway. Plus I'll be reconfiguring the fence with our expansion so it might actually save me some time.

In other news, I've been working on converting the playhouse, where we used to keep all of our farm tools and supplies, into a chicken coop in anticipation of moving our existing flock there and then adding to it. Mary noticed a few scrap pre-hung doors across the street from an ongoing reno which I got permission to take. There are now doors on either end of the coop. I ripped off lots of the existing single-ply sheeting (which makes for great kindling) and replaced it with 5/8" plywood that was itself salvaged from inside the playhouse and from a structure on the other side of the property that was used as a bike shed. I used hardware cloth and poly film to fill in an old window that was used as wall-filler on one side. In the summer, the poly will come down for better ventilation. I also cut out the top couple of feet of each end's gable to promote ventilation of the inevitable ammonia that will develop inside the coop over the winter.

The playhouse structure itself was a little sketchy, like most outbuildings on the property. The floor and side walls looked fine but the ends were weak, having been built of 1X4. The rafters were 2X4 with no collar ties, just a thin reinforcement plywood triangle at the peak of a couple of them. There was a play loft about 5' off the floor that I removed, salvaging its 2X6's and plywood (and my head, from further bonking). I moved those 2X6's up to the bottom of the rafters and screwed the plywood to one of the exterior sides. I also screwed reinforcement plates to the top of each set of sketchy rafters and installed horizontal cross members above each door to reduce the sway. All in all, I'm much more comfortable putting livestock in there now than before.

All that's left is putting harware cloth on the open ends of the gable tops, plugging other rat-size holes and constructing perches. Some 1 3/4" dowel I saved from a couple years ago might help with that although it would also be cool to use some deadfallen arbutus branches or similar. So far, it's cost $32 for 12' of hardware cloth and I don't expect the rest to cost much more. Perhaps a good rodent-proof feed pail. And, of course, some extra fencing for their pen. Still, very economical, if a little more time-consuming than I thought.



Now, to build a snowman...