Housing for the Girls

A desk should always be in front of a window. I know that in an office it's not conducive to the business environment where you're sitting and working hard, and someone comes to the door and you look up at them and have your important business conversation. Also, in an office you don't want people to have a perfect view over your shoulder to your computer screen, which they would if you were facing the window.

I used to sit at the kitchen counter every day with my laptop. In the morning I'd set it out, and just putter around all day with everything up and running. This is why I get email so quickly, because I have an audible alert, and I'm trained to go check. Last winter, after we had the inauguration party here, I had a foldable 2 X 4 table in the living room, and I set it in front of the french doors that open into the sunroom, which has a wall of windows ten feet tall, and found that it was the perfect place to sit. The sunroom was full of plants then, so I had to look beyond them, but as far as a bright place to spend time in the winter and hatch plans for projects, this was it. Then, in April I decided to get a nice Amish writing desk instead of the cheesy white plastic table, and I found a shop that would build a simple one, in cherry, with a drawer, for surprisingly little money, and it does look much nicer.

This time of year is one of retrospection for me, something about watching the cycle of the season as everything reaches the end of its annual growth. It was in the early, early spring that I had the brainstorm that having chickens would be a great idea - inside the garden fence until time to plant the garden, where they would scratch for grubs from japanese beetles and nasty garden pests. Then outside for the summer where they would free range and give us eggs and eat the mosquito and insect larva.

Sometimes things just work out. One of my "church ladies" has friends that farm, and their kids had been raising hens for 4-H, and they wanted to get rid of some of them. So, not only did I get full-grown laying hens, instead of baby chicks that I would have had to wait five months to get eggs, but they were delivered to my house! Thanks, Arlene and Bruce! We've had eggs all summer, and very few mosquitoes, and they have completely turned last years mountain of leaves into compost. They have done some damage to the more delicate flowers in the gardens, especially the alyssum, but they have done an outstanding job cultivating around the perennials, and the asparagus bed looks better than I have ever seen it this time of year, big and bushy plants and zero weeds, and I'm assuming, well fertilized.

Well, now it's September and there's a list of fall chores and having hens adds a whole new list of things to get ready for a Cleveland winter. We haven't done this before, so we're going to have to make it up as we go along. I think we'll put the girls back inside the garden area, but I think they need a more serious henhouse and they'll need a little heat and some way to keep their water from freezing. So, do we put an addition on the tiny house we have now, which is narrow enough to go through the garden gate? It would have to be something that detaches, so it can come back out of the garden in the spring. Or, do we make a new, wider gate for the garden? This definitely has advantages. The gate is barely wide enough to get a wheelbarrow through, and it would be great to get the lawn tractor inside to dump the leaves that we vacuum up. We have serious leaves in the fall. I'm not kidding. And the chickens have proved that they can make compost happen.

Or....we could turn the tool shed into a chicken house. It's got power to it, which would be a big plus because then we could get one of those nifty chicken water heaters for the sub-freezing weather, and install a light bulb for some heat. But then what would we do with all the tools, the lawn tractor, tiller? How about this -- we could do a Funk family project and start that pole barn that Greg has been wanting. We would just build one side of it, big enough for the tractor to be under cover, and the chickens in the rear. Or better yet, put the lawn tractor and tiller under roof with the red tractor, and turn the existing tool shed into the chicken house. A big advantage to this is that I can see the tool shed / future chicken house from where I sit here, at my lovely cherry writing desk in front of the tall windows of the sunroom, where I sit and hatch my project plans.



How many ways can you have eggs for dinner?

Fried. Scrambled. Boiled.
Deviled. Baked in a casserole.
Egg drop soup. Souffle. Frittata.
Omelets. Pad thai. Fried rice.
Raw, in a chocolate milkshake. Oh, yeah.