Lots of interesting things happened this winter. The biggest of these is that the truck is has sides on it! Shortly after Christmas, Lindsey and Keith finished it for me! The chickens were almost more excited about warm living quarters than I was! I now need to put in some quality time in filling the cracks, calking it and painting it a nice bright red color! Stop by and check it out and I'll try to add a picture of it here.
Since the disappearance of the snow in the last couple weeks, the chickens now spend little time in the coop. They sleep there and lay eggs, but otherwise they're scratching around in the yard looking for tasty morsels of some variety or another! They don't care to walk around in snow much, but they certainly love warm and sunny, and sometimes muddy spring days!
Of the 7 peachicks we had last August, now only 2 are left. It appears that one is male and one is female, so that works out well! They seem to get along marvelously, which is also great. Hopefully they can keep each other alive until adulthood (about age 3). I'm in the process as I write of making them an outside coop so that they can enjoy the fresh air and sunshine of spring too! Peachicks don't seem to have the same inborn traits that the chickens do to come back to a familiar roost at night, so they will definitely need a run and coop so they stay with us instead of meeting their demise who knows where. I need to paint it and put on the wire and tarps and it should be ready to go! This one is much smaller than the other summer coop I made for the chickens last summer and it's also taken me oodles less time to make it as well! I'm not a natural construction person, so I'm just copying the first design to make it easier and faster for myself. :-)
The runner ducks are out and about too. Enjoying the fresh air and sun and especially the puddles, as all good ducks do! I still have no idea if I have mixed gender, so thus I have no idea if I'll have little ones from them. There are also some Muscovies running around with them (that don't belong to me) and because Muscovies get marvelously broody, we'll probably have some baby ducks of some variety in the upcoming months. :-)
Exciting times here! Stay tuned for more that happens by the day! :-)
