Getting Them Off The Porch!

It was a long hot summer, but fall has finally arrived!  It is nice to have daytime temperatures in the 70’s and 80’s again.  I hope to get out and get some major cleaning of the coops done this upcoming week.  I also need to put some rafters on the run of my breeding pens and roof it. I need to get the last of the babies off of the porch.  They are to big for the brooder now, but not really old enough to put with the adults.  I had far too many males hatch this year, I needed females...still need females.  I need to do a head count.  I want the young chickens off the porch...the flies get awful quickly because they dump their food a lot.  I am tired of cleaning up the poop trays too, they play with the waterers and water gets in the trays, mixes with the spilled food and poop, then you have a fly breeding nightmare.  I try getting the poop trays cleaned every few days, but it doesn’t always happen and then the maggots come, and then the flies.  Lots and lots of flies.

Cleaning the poop trays is one of the worst things I have to do, especially if the waterers leak or rain comes in heavy from the north and fills them up with water along with the feed and poop.   I have switched the young chickens on the porch to fermented feed now, so that helps a little...but if the dogs startle the chickens and they start flying and food sprays everywhere and babies are hitting me, biting me, and landing on my arms while I am trying to put the feed in their dishes, I can get splattered pretty badly.  I forget to check myself sometimes before my husband gets home, sometimes I have it on my eyebrows or glasses, or in my hair.  I wash my hands and arms when I get in the house, but that is usually at the kitchen sink.  What is really bad is when I am trying to remove a poop tray, with the wet poop and feed mixture in it and it is heavy and falls and splashes all over me...I have learned to keep my lips pressed tightly together...so nothing gets in my mouth, but I am battling flies at the same time.  Gross, huh?  I don’t know why I hate cleaning the liter boxes for the cats, when I can do the poop trays without gagging.  It may be that I have to do it so often and to so many coops it just doesn’t bother me that much any more....it is still one of the nastiest, most gross things I have ever done.  So yeah, I need to get the babies off of the porch!

On a more exciting note...my husband wrote a book!  He finished it...I did the cover art for it and it is now on Amazon.  It is just an ebook that can be downloaded and read, but it is a start.  He has started another book...the bad part for me is trying to come up with a character without reading the book.  I guess I may have to read the next one prior to trying to create the cover art, and I may need to do the editing...but it has been so long since I have played any type game like World of Warcraft that I just don’t remember that much about it.  My head can only retain so much information for so long before I replace what I know with new more relevant information to my current projects and interests.  Since  we moved to the country, I don’t have time to play computer games, nor can I sit for long periods of time doing it.  With the degenerative disk disease and my feet swelling the way they do since my foot surgeries, it is just too painful for me.  I worked on the book cover all day Monday and have paid dearly for it all week, but I needed to get it done.  I had to use three different computer programs to do it, and I had to figure out each one!  I actually drew the characters, but scanned them into my computer, used Coreldraw to color them and put a bit of details and shading...they are cartoony, not realistic.  But, to save time, I used an actual photo and manipulated it with photoshop, oh and the characters too because I wanted to place the characters without a background or paper in the photo, then after using some of the style features to make it look like a watercolor...I put it into Illustrator to add the text and some shadowing.  It was far from perfect, but...like I said, it is a start.

I decided not to plant a fall garden, just some corn and a few squash...I need to get things cleaned up, hauled off, build a retaining wall, get some more drainage work done, prepare the coops for winter, probably build a duck house...just a small portion of things I need to do.  Anyway, I need to get busy...always lots to do here on the farm and we need to mow, weed eat and trim bushes before it rains.  That and feed the critters.