I should have worked on the grow out pen for the chicks yesterday...I did not. Some days I plan on doing one thing...try and get myself mentally prepared for the heat and humidity and get out there fairly early and just don't feel like hauling all the tools and running the extension cords out almost to the creek. The grow out pen is only about 30 feet from the bank of the creek in the furthest corner of the yard under some pine and cedar trees. I put the Rooster Condo, the Turkey House and now the Grow Out Pen up under those trees. It gets hot here in the Summer and it is cooler under the trees and with the moisture by the creek and the wind coming off the pond, even when it is over 100 you can sit out there and it actually feels pretty nice. I don't want my poultry to die from heat stroke.
Anyway, I was going to work on the pen...but didn't. The day before I hung up the gates I made and got the shade cloth over the tops of three pens. The shade cloth is not quite long enough to completely cover the third pen so I will have to work on getting that fixed. It does provide shade to 95% of the third pen, but it doesn't offer total protection from predators. We mainly worry about owls, Falcons and Hawks. The poultry yards are fenced and when we have predator issues, it has been the overhead predators that we usually have to worry about. My husband helped me get the second cattle panel in place on the Grow Out Pen too, since I did a panel type construction and then just put it together on-site I didn't have to drag out the table saw and compressor and all that went with it. Until now anyway...not the table saw but the compressor and the pneumatic staple gun. I use my garden dump cart to haul everything in...it is not so much getting everything out and hauling everything down there, it is running the extension cords, hooking everything up, working all day...then putting everything up when I am tired and hot. So, I mowed.
I don't mind doing yard work, I actually like transforming my yard into something nice to look at. The grass and weeds...and all those seed heads standing just over knee high drives me crazy...I don't like not being able to see if a snake is in the grass, or the thought of stepping on a fire ant hill and getting stung a hundred times before I realize they are crawling all over me. I also don't like poison ivy...at least if I mow, there is less of a chance of me getting into anything like that. I was going to weed eat, but I could not get it started, I tried for twenty minutes, at least...maybe I was not holding my mouth right or something, maybe my body was telling me no...not sure. My husband got it to start later, and I continued to mow while he ran the weed eater. Since we got an inch and a half of rain last week, everything grew fast...my garden was over run, he weeded it with that thing and some of those weeds were waist high! We have these things we call Chinese Lanterns, they have these little green paper looking seed pods on them that look like lanterns, the ducks decided to start laying eggs in the middle of a big patch of them. One female spent the night out in the patch...when I went out to put everyone up she didn't come out of the area. I couldn't find her but her two male Amigos were very upset when she didn't come out, I walked through the garden area calling for her while they stood outside the fence calling her and complaining to me when she didn't respond. She is fine, she came out of the garden the next morning.
I mowed...I call it mindless because I just go around and around, or in long swaths and because we just have a lawn tractor, it takes awhile to mow this front section of our yard. We only mow maybe 3 acres most of the time, but because I fenced the chicken yard the gates to several of the pens are too small to get the lawn tractor in them so I mow them with a push mower. I trimmed some of the fruit trees too, and cut down some weeds that looked more like trees with branch loppers around my compost pile. A raccoon has been visiting my compost...getting the eggs out, when you have that tall of weeds you don't want any surprises...I can just see myself now...getting chased by a large raccoon with rabies or something...wouldn't that be a funny site.
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