So here I am finding myself with multiple projects in multiple arenas. Laundry Room rip up, garden, chicken and cattle. It’s amazing how life doesn’t hardly ever fit into our own personal categorization of what we expect. This seems to happen more often than not. While me personally I would love to be able to write separate posts about each thing I do, it usually works out that I am only getting little fits of each project done then moving on to the next. I would love to focus on one thing and get it done, but I learned a long time ago that you can do only so much on one thing before you have to wait for something, usually a minor thing like something drying or you run out an item and have to buy something else, before you can move on to the next section or step.
So my weekend was mostly made up of ripping apart the laundry room floor and trying to put it back together. We had a rat chew through the pex piping under the house and didn’t know it, leaked for sometime before i noticed the floor squish beneath my feet. So here I am ripping up the old floor, repairing damaged members and throwing the new sub-floor back down. This would have been much easy and way less frustrating 10 years ago when I was doing construction and had all the right tools. As it stands nowadays I make due with what I have, which is generally not what I should have, and kick, shove, hammer, yell, cry, and then finally have an evil stair down with the thing I am trying to put together. 🙂 It usually isn’t as pretty as it could have been when I am done, but hey as long as I don’t let that 3/4 sub-floor win, then its all good. So got it ripped and laid on Saturday so the wife felt secure then screwed and floated the floor Sunday. Man talk about being soar.
Garden:
After an easy day on Sunday I grabbed some drip fitting for the garden and got the garden all plumbed out for the current beds and existing tomatoes and okra. I love cherry tomatoes, I am thinking next year I am doing all cherry tomatoes. I was unimpressed with the black krim or the Roma tomatoes that we planted this year, just not much flavor to them. I had grown some Black Pearl Tomatoes back at our M Street house and they were the best I have ever tasted. I may throw in a couple of heirloom beefsteaks but it will be all Black Pearls for sure. I finished out my fittings and brought out my old rain-bird timer from M Street as well. This getting good, watering should be more stable now. I will be getting some more dirt this week to finish out the other bed and my seeds should be arriving this week so timing is working out great.
Chickens:
Baby Brooder
I have more meat birds coming in about three weeks and I have a hen that’s gone broody, same one as last time. This means I need to build two new houses, one small, one medium to large. The small one I was able to start from scrap I have laying around, I have been able to make just about everything at this point from the scrap I have left over from one project or another. The small hatchery/brooder pictured here will be for the broody hen and her clutch. I learned the last time that I need to move the broody hen and her eggs out of the main house. I lost way to many last time due to a rival broody hen and her fighting over the eggs. So I will separate her so she can brood in peace. I will put about 8 – 12 eggs in with her and see what happens. That’s about 2 days worth of eggs right now. I am ranging from 4 – 7 eggs a day. All of our eggs go to my day office and the staff usually buys them. This helps pay for feed. The meat bird coup I will definitely have to buy material for as it will be much larger. Due to lessons learned from the first batch it will be highly securable so that predators don’t get to them this time. I will house both new coups in the existing chicken run and likely just section off a part of it for the meat birds to go out in.
Cattle Update:
I have been trying to get out to look for some steers for the past month. The issue is none of my normal private party folks have any. I have found a fella that has some so I will be going out this week to hopefully take a look.
Well that’s it for this week. Progress is slow, but it is at least moving in the right direction.