Apparently the area where Meg and I live will be in for some unusually warm weather this weekend. I learned this while talking to Steveo outside, freezing our asses off, this afternoon. While conversing about the family, food, and drink of the holidays, he said that he heard on the weather station that we will be expecting Saturday to hit 50°F and the days to follow will get steadily warmer.
Meg and I agreed that we would be fools not to take advantage of the heat wave and get some much needed work done outside. As we've said in earlier posts, we inherited more leaves that need composting attention and the shredded leaves in the chicken pen are ready to be gathered. Before any of this can go on we need to make room for it all.
We decided that the best place for some new compost bins would be on the northern end of the garden. This is actually where we kept our cache of composting leaves last year before we shoveled it out and stored it for next spring. I don't want to say to much about it until we see how it plans to turn out.
What we're intending to do is make two 3'x3' bins on the left side of the fence (top photo) and a third 3'x3' bin on the right. The reason for the spacing is because we are going to make a second gate in the middle so we can access that part of the garden more easily for watering and what have you. The building of the bins shouldn't take too long, but the leaf swapping may take a few hours. Like I said, I'm not to sure how it will go until we get to it, but hopefully by the weekend we'll have five compost bins going.
02 January 2008
Warmer Weather Approaches
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
Oh wow - I'm in chicken-info HEAVEN! I posted a comment on a site that you did, too, and voila - I found your blog. What an incredible bounty of information on chickens, pens, predators, food, behavior, etc. I've been sitting here for 20 minutes reading all your entries on chickens, unable to tear myself away! Thank you - this is so cool. I am about to embark on my first ever chicken-raising adventure and, while terribly excited, I'm also very nervous - I've never done anything like this before. I can't tell what state you guys are in - do you state it anywhere in your blog?
Hi! We are in southeastern PA, kind of between Philly and Lancaster. I just clicked over to your blog and saw that you're in Oregon. You are probably a little warmer and wetter than us--chickens would love it. They are really the easiest, funniest pet I've ever had.
We got them sort of on a whim, and it didn't take us long at all to get to know them and figure out how to take care of them. Living with Chickens by Jay Rossier and Keeping Pet Chickens by Johannes Paul and William Windham are two really good books for getting started and basic chicken instructions. The Storey's Guides are also awesome for any kind of farm animal--they have a whole series--and I've read the chicken one, though we don't own it.
If you have any other questions, let us know. We have a ton of pictures from when we built the coop, but we never wrote up a post about it. Now that you've inspired me, maybe we will soon ...
Thanks for stopping by!
Hey, thanks for the book recommendations - I've got about 25 next to my bed right now, but another two probably wouldn't hurt! I've got Storey's Guide to Poultry and Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens - they're awesome.
I totally think you should blog about the building your coop. I, for one, would be really interested! :-)
Bins are on the agenda at Our Little Acre, too. We've got lots of leaves here and there's always a lot of deadheading throughout the year in the garden. I finally convinced Romie that we'd have enough to make it worthwhile. I think he was surprised at how much we had by the end of the summer, and then there were all those leaves. So there will be bins, too. :-)
Farmgirl_dk- Two of our larger projects that haven't been properly posted are the coop and the rain harvester. Meg and I started drafting some ideas of how we plan to go about it. We have plenty of pictures of the coop building process with some stories of theft and Steveo laughing at us from his living room window.
Kylee- Garden beds look so nice with a fresh layer of compost. We've only been composting for two years, but the benefits are so obvious that we are trying to compost everything. Honestly, it is impossible to have too much. If you're looking for suggestions on how to speed up the composting of that big ol' pile of leaves, try giving them a turn with a pitch fork every so often and add coffee grounds (ask your local coffee shop for their used stuff). The grounds add nitrates which help with the breaking down process by adding heat.
Oh, you really need to read my post about the pitchfork I use to turn the compost. By the end of three months or so, we were able to spread some of it over the vegetable garden plot before winter set in. I felt really good about that!
Hey Kylee - Thanks for the link. This is why I have you on my reader, so I don't miss gem posts like the one I obviously did in August. I actually laughed out loud at your take on American Gothic. Please keep us posted on future composting adventures.
You guys have such a great setup and I'm so excited to see all of your ideas and what you're up to!
Katie at GardenPunks
Katie, thanks! It's funny--I love reading blogs like yours with gardens in city or suburban backyards because I think they look so neat and clean compared to ours.
Post a Comment