Summer Stay-Cation

Summer is here, finally! You may laugh because I bet it's warm where you are. Well, in Central Oregon, we still got below freezing nights all the way up until June 20th. Yeah, you read that right. About two weeks ago, I was still wearing a beanie and puffy jacket in the evenings. But we're holding steady at 80 degree days and 50 degree nights now, and it's blissful to get outside and get some Vitamin D.

Us at a concert on June 13th - heavy sweaters, scarves, and beanies.

We're relatively far north, and this means loooong summer days. It's light from 4:30am to almost 10pm. You can get a whole lot accomplished (apparently not blogging, though - haha) in 16+ hours of daylight. It's very motivating! A siesta and a couple cups of coffee don't hurt, either. 

Here is our original front yard! Two dog-pee-burned trees blocking the front door, a dead tree in the middle of the yard, and patchy, scratchy grass with weeds and clover; all of which cost a ridiculous amount to water in the summer.

Water costs to maintain this grass ran us at least $50/month in the summer!

We got rid of several trees, took down the front porch railing, and put in a new, more modern fence. 

The scraggly rose bush in the foreground eventually got ripped out as well.

We went and picked out some boulders and flowers...

The fence color is accidental...and now sanding the fence is on our to-do list!

...and added some woodchips and a large dead stump we found while hiking...

Behind the stump is a baby apple tree with 5 different kinds of apples grafted to it!

...and now, I pay only $15/month to water our drought-tolerant, food-and-herb-providing, pollinator-friendly front lawn! Some of the things we've got here: an apple tree (which will produce in about 2-3 years), blueberry bush (already producing!), sage, 2 kinds of lavender, peonies, Icelandic poppies, 2 kinds of elderberry bushes (with which you can make wine and syrup), sunflowers (to feed the chickens), catmint (similar to catnip), rhubarb, and a Nanking cherry bush. They'll all grow in a lot more next year, and hopefully the yard will look a little closer to how I imagine it in my head. Plants definitely require patience.

Meanwhile, in the backyard...potato boxes/towers are all the rage on the internet. Since we have the space, I thought I'd try one. The idea is that you cover up the bottom 6" of the plant continuously as it grows, encouraging it to put out extra roots (and therefore, extra potatoes). You stack it up higher and higher, and ideally you should be able to harvest insane amounts of potatoes. 

Potato box at the 4th level. This was about 1.5 months into growing.

The potatoes at 5 levels high...we had to build more!

We used to be able to get German Butterball potatoes easily, at the Hollywood Farmer's Market. They're small and creamy and so good! While potatoes grow well up here in the Pacific Northwest, I haven't seen any of that variety at the markets, so that's what I'm growing in here.

We didn't know how well they'd do but we had to double the number of levels we had! It's only the beginning of July and we have at least 70 more days to go in the growing season. If this works, we will definitely build another one for next summer.

Our backyard was disgusting when we bought the house: it was basically a gravel dog run, with weeds, unkempt bushes, and a broke-ass fence in the back. The fence is the builder original, from 1992.

We got rid of all the gravel, weeds, and since we're on a slope, decided to put in a sunken patio, to help make the yard areas more level. We also replaced and upgraded the fence.

We had professionals put in the patio, since it involved heavy machinery.

The first night the patio was done, we ran out and bought a firepit! It's the perfect little space to relax in, although I hope to get some actual patio furniture in the future, rather than our camping chairs. 

All the backyard work means the chickens no longer are free range. They have the entire side yard, though, with compost bins and a pear tree, so I don't think they're sad about it. 

One of our three compost bins starting to sprout some "volunteer" squash.

The compost bin and squash just recently - it's doing REALLY well!

Our little baby chicks turned out to both be girls, and their rapper names (Tupac/Two-Spot and Notorious B.I.R.D.) stuck. 

The chicks at 2 days old.

At 5 weeks old, they still lived in the house with us.

At 8 weeks old, when we finally knew for sure they were girls.

They are now 10 weeks old and almost completely feathered out!

The baby chicks are Mottled Cochins, a Chinese breed that is hardy in the winter, with their little feathered feet! They are the sweetest things and are about 1lb each. They're almost full grown and will stay tiny. For comparison, here's a picture of our regular sized chicken in the background, and these two in the foreground:

Those are plums from our neighbor's tree all over the ground. 

So, that's the domestic side of our life right now. It's sort of amazing how much we can get done by staying home (and admittedly, working part time with a short commute - that sure helps as well). That travel bug itches pretty bad, though, so we've got some small trips planned at the end of the summer to visit friends and family, and a big trip in the works for the end of the year. But for now it's nice to make a home, which makes us want to stay home!

Feathering Our Nest - With Chickens

One of my daydreams, once I had a yard, was to get chickens and have fresh eggs. If you have researched anything about homesteading, then you know that almost everyone has chickens (if not goats, sheep, cows, pigs, ducks, geese, etc.). So we jumped on the urban-backyard-farmer/homesteader bandwagon and started building a chicken coop. 

Luckily, we have awesome friends! Josh and Bernice pitched in to help us build our ambitious coop and run, which turned out being a lot more expensive and labor intensive than we realized. But it was a great lesson in construction. We situated it in our side yard, in between the compost bin and the pear tree.

Building the frame - after a whole day of digging the foundation.

Working on the floor of the coop

Harvesting pears while the guys are working on the coop

In case you're wondering how we figured out how to build a coop, we solved that as we solve all our problems - by Googling it. I researched the hell out of coops and chickens, learning as much as I could about their needs, health problems, climates, etc. After hours upon hours of staring at the computer screen, I concluded that it was well worth the $30 to pay for plans - so we bought the "Garden Coop," which you can find online. It's very well designed and super easy to alter, customize, and make to suit your space and budget. 

Mike made it all pretty with cedar siding, to match the fence.

Part of the roof and wire up, and Bernice staining the wood

We got all fancy on the inside - painted the walls a cheerful yellow and insulated them with styrofoam packing stuff (so proud of repurposing the styrofoam from all our boxes!). We also cut way bigger doors than they proposed, and laid vinyl parquet tile floors, for ease of cleaning. Turns out this was great foresight, because I clean the coop every day. I can't stand poop.

The inside of the coop after we laid the vinyl tiles and painted

Almost done! We got a proper lock for the human door and finished the roof
and the siding on the coop wall that faces the run. The chickens also get
to forage around the side yard, pear tree, and compost bins every day.

Learning about chickens has been fun and life-changing. Chickens can be nasty. The term, "pecking order" really has meaning now. Their hierarchy isn't a pyramid; it's a linear line. There is one top chicken, and everyone else falls in line below, and there truly is a bottom chicken on the totem pole. It took us a little bit of time (and some re-homing of a little tiny fluffball chicken we named "Death Metal" because she was so mean) to get the balance just right. We still have one "bully" chicken (the 2nd to last on the hierarchy), but no one is bleeding and for the most part, they like each other.

Upper left is our best layer - about 5 eggs/week. The white is the sweetest,
the silver (lower left) is the mean one, and the littlest one (lower right) is the smartest!

I'm not sure if we'll end up naming them. Chickens are weird little creatures - pretty closely related to dinosaurs, actually - and although ours are all friendly and you can pet them and pick them up, there is something really primitive and savage about them. Did you know they can cannibalize each other and their eggs? 

Regardless, we do nothing but the best for them. I clean their coop and run every single day, we spend hours playing with them in the backyard, and we sprout and ferment all their food. Everything they eat is organic, whole grains or veggies, non-soy, non-corn, and real (I don't believe in those pellets, crumbles or "feed" you buy in the store - it looks too much like kitty litter). 

Fermented grains in the jars, and sprouting mung beans, lentils and wheat.

Despite all this, Mike is still weirded out by the fact that the egg comes out of a chicken's butt. The first egg tasted like tuna fish because I had been feeding them tuna (high protein) to help them through molting season. After that, we switched to an all vegetarian (plus bugs) diet, and they get greek yogurt, peas, lentils and sprouted beans for protein, plus these disgusting mealworms that I've been raising in a bin - I won't gross you out with a picture of that. The eggs taste MUCH better now. But Mike still isn't a fan because now we know how dirty chickens can be, and we see how eggs are produced. I'm slightly weirded out but less so (I've eaten some pretty crazy stuff in my life), and even though I think bugs are THE WORST, chickens can turn earwigs, spiders, and mealworms into some pretty yummy eggs!

Seeing where our food comes from makes me believe that if we got more involved, like raising a pig, goat, sheep, cow, etc, it'd be pretty easy to go vegetarian or even vegan. It's so easy to eat something that's packaged pristinely in the grocery store. You never see the poop and the blood and the feathers and the fur. There's a lot of labor, and life, and sweat and dirt that goes into making a meal. If it's this disgusting on an organic-free range-happy life level, imagine how gross it is on an industrial-battery cage-stockyard level.

We've had the chickens about one month now, and our conclusion...

It's been super educational, in terms of getting to know your food and learning about the care of another animal. We'll have to have chickens for at least a year or two to "re-coop" expenses (see what I did there?), but they're relatively inexpensive to maintain, even doing all organic, non-soy, non-corn, *true* free range. I'd say that our 4 chickens probably cost about $20/month. This just about breaks even for what I'd pay in the store for free-range organic eggs ($4.50-$5.00/dozen large), but I have peace of mind knowing exactly what is in my eggs, I can control the nutritional content of the eggs through what I'm feeding the chickens, I know the chickens are truly happy, safe, and loved, and they are really fun to have. We'll see how we feel after a year!