The Garden on January 1st. 2014

Hello and Happy New Year. Trust me, I have a whole stock pile of pictures from this summer and fall and winter to post. Time got away from me in 2013 but I hope to post more regularly this winter and then once it warms up, we'll see. So today is our warm, March-ish day until another round of cold weather hits. I spent a chunk of the afternoon goofing off outside the house, and all of these pictures are from today. I let the chickens out to range and boy did they have fun. They have all their feathers now and are back to laying. I get about 2 eggs a day from 4 chickens so they are laying every other day but as the days get longer, more eggs will appear in the nest box. Here they are enjoying the raised beds. I had to herd them out of the garage more than once as I was putting recycling in the car. They are fascinated by the garage and love it. We do not like them in the garage because there are too many bad things for them to get into, and you know, the spontaneous pooping.

Life is never far around the corner even during this already cold winter. I was amazed to find dozens of these teeny tiny evening primroses in the herb garden. Such bright color in the afternoon sun!

Oh what's this? Someone is watching the chickens...and they are very interested. Is it Maxwell or Molly...?

It looks like someone new! You'll have to what for another blog post to meet them. I only have so much time today. One of the things we didn't get around to doing was digging the carrots up. I keep telling myself they are basically refrigerated and we can eat them later but I'm not really so sure. Can you find the carrot in the picture?

Wintering the chickens has been a challenge of course. I have a big powerful flashlight to take down to the pen after dark to make sure there aren't any critters (like a skunk) that I may surprise. Maybe you can see the path of worn in on my trips to shut them in at night and let them out in the morning. Notice too, the dark green metal sheet to the left. This is an improvement from the summer, to give the chickens a wind block so they can stay outside.

One new thing I am doing this winter is putting grass hay inside this little enclosure so the ground won't be so cold on their feet. So in the morning, they can come out of their box, and come to the enclosure for food, water, and then nest in the grass hay so they can stay outside for a bit. Also notice the black rubber water pan. The plastic water containers were getting to be too much hassle, and leaking a lot for contracting and expanding according to the temperature fluctuations. When the sun is out, the black rubber absorbs heat to keep the water from freezing longer and when frozen, it's super easy to pop out of the pan.

And here is their box stuffed to the gills with grass hay. Every warm day I clean the box out and put in fresh so I've been going through it a lot. It's pretty fluffy now but once the hens get in it tonight, they will tamp it down and shape the grass in the nest box.

I've had about 6 eggs freeze on me so far this year, and last year only 1. I'm not latching the "back door" anymore, just shutting it so it can't freeze and lock me out. Andrew has a board on the other side of the door that fits over another board quite nicely and it's a snug enough fit to not need the latch for now.

Well I'm heading over to update the www.blacklablavender.blogspot.com site to show you how the lavenders are doing in this weather, so follow me on over and don't forget that on the right hand side of the blog you can sign up to get posts emailed to you directly.