Finding Contentment

Winterizing the chickens

02:19 PM, Friday, November 23, 2007 .. Posted in Chickens .. 1 comments .. Link

Today we hit Black Friday sales at Bass Pro Shop and Wal-Mart, made a stop by the cemetery to put flowers on my mother's grave, and made a trip to Tractor Supply to get chicken feed and pine shavings. We did all this and managed to be home by lunchtime.

Right now Mark is outside "winterizing" the chicken coop, and I snapped a few pictures of my babies as they foraged in the yard.

Here are the chickens in what's left of the vegetable garden. And here's a bigger shot with Mark behind them in the coop. Those are old okra stalks in the garden. Mark pulled them up and cleaned out the garden.

He is dumping the stuff from the floor of the coop into the garden, and it will have all winter to make the soil better. He is putting clean shavings in the coop, hanging the water dish that always seem to get dirty sitting on the ground, and putting plastic around the chicken wire to keep the coop warmer.

The chickens have stopped laying. We considered putting in a lamp to keep them laying throughout the winter, but decided to just let nature take its course. I can buy store-bought eggs during the winter months.

Here the chickens are in my flower garden. Unfortunately, I planted flowers like cannas and roses that attract Japanese beetles and the entire garden is infested with them. As soon as I get a chance I plan to pull all the flowers and introduce either some milky spore disease or beneficial nematodes to help kill the beetle larvae organically. Then in the spring I will turn my flower garden into something more beneficial - an herb garden!