A few photos from a recent walk through the park near our house.
Here it is, the thing I have dreamed of for so many years - a fresh, homegrown egg from my own hens!!
Well, we have finally finished the coop enough that I decided it was time to tell you a bit about our summer project.
We're pretty pleased with how it turned out, considering that it's made almost entirely out of leftovers from our house. The only things that we had to buy were a few extra roofing shingles, a couple of sheets of plywood for the roof, a gallon of exterior paint, and wire mesh for the run.
Still a few things left to do, but mostly done.
The work involved was a little more than we anticipated (and most of it through record summer temperatures), but since almost every room in the house looks out on to the coop, we wanted it to be something that we enjoyed looking at.
While we didn't have any actual building plans, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted it to look like. Using Google Sketchup, we played with things like the wall height, roof pitch, and window/door placement until we ended up with something that we were happy with.
My husband hadn't done a lot of framing before, but he did an amazing job of turning our ideas into an actual structure.
Some of the features that we planned for are:
Insulation and back door into the garden.
As mentioned, we used almost entirely recycled materials, many of which were given to us. My mom and stepfather are renovating their house (which was built in 1909) to turn it into a B&B, so we were able to take a lot of things that would have otherwise gone to the dump, including the insulation in the photo above. We insulated the ceiling using rock wool and styrofoam sheets that were left over from insulating our basement slab.
The interior walls are covered with shiplap that was torn up from the floors and walls of my mom's house (beautiful one foot wide, 100 year old fir boards). They will eventually get a coat of paint to make them easier to clean, but right now they are a weathered grey, which gives the coop a rustic, barnlike feel.
The exterior is covered with fiber cement lap siding, which we painted to match the house. I built the ramps out of cedar decking cut-offs.
This is the day that we let the girls out into the run for the first time. They were pretty sure that we were up to no good...
My favorite Speckled Sussex was the first one out of the coop.
...but it wasn't long before they were outside and charging around the run.
I'm still amazed at the instincts possessed by these domesticated birds. They kept a constant watch on the sky, and would run inside at the first sign of an aerial attack (it was usually just an airplane - our property is on a flight path).
You can see in the above photo that the bottom of the coop is enclosed with 1/2" wire mesh, which was given to us by our neighbor. It's a much heavier gauge than hardware cloth, and will hopefully keep anything from digging under and making a home under the coop.
Pippin - our beautiful Dark Brahma
The run is about 5 1/2 feet tall, so the kids and I can stand in there comfortably. The top four feet are covered with 2" square wire mesh, and the bottom 18" with 3/4" hardware cloth. The hardware cloth is actually 3 feet wide, but we buried the bottom 18" underground to prevent anything from digging under the fence. While we don't have many of the usual predators here (not even raccoons or skunks), with the public trail running past our property, there is some concern about dogs.
Of a bigger concern are attacks from the sky, so I used the deer fence that didn't work so well on the veggie garden to cover the run and keep out winged predators.
This second gate from the garden into the run will make it easier for me to bring them garden scraps. We also want to be able to let them into the garden from time to time for a change of scenery and to help clean things up at the end of the growing season.
I fashioned their roosts out of cedar decking and 1 x 4 cedar trim (which had been pre-stained). I sealed the cedar with the same non-toxic linseed oil product that we used on our butcher block countertops.
The east facing window provides them with a sunny spot to bask and preen in during the early morning hours...
...and I built a perch under it so that they can take in the view during the day. It's easy to tell who is at the top of the pecking order by observing who gets to sleep here at night - it's clearly their favorite spot. 
I'm in a rush to build some nest boxes, as their faces are starting to turn red, which I understand is a sign that they're getting ready to lay. I'm thinking about building a "community" box as opposed to individual nests, as I keep hearing that they will all use the same one anyway. Any thoughts on this from those of you with chickens? My girls are a cuddly bunch, so I can't see it being a problem.
After all of that hard work, I think my favorite part of the coop project is the stepping stone that my daughter made to go in front of it. It makes me smile whenever I see it.
Now if only they would start laying!
Ours is a family that loves big flavors. Salty, bitter, spicy, sour - you name it, we love it. Even the kids adore things like garlic, dijon mustard, kalamata olives, and tonic water, which is a dream for me, 'cause there's no way I'd enjoy cooking nothing but plain pasta or white bread sandwiches.
One of our very favorite things is sauerkraut. A hot dog or reuben sandwich (veggie or otherwise) just isn't the same without it. I remember my grandmother making sauerkraut when I was a kid, but it's something that I've never been brave enough to try my hand at. The benefit of making your own kraut is that it can be left unpasteurised so that it will retain the healthy probiotic bacteria (similar to those found in yogurt) that are responsible for the fermentation process.
Until now, the thought of overseeing a crock of fermenting cabbage for several weeks has always seemed a bit daunting, but this year I decided to throw caution to the wind and go for it.
Aside from complaining about four-legged invaders, I haven't really spoken much about the garden this summer so I thought I'd do a brief update.
Our soil is still really awful, so things still aren't doing as well as I would like. One of our friends described the soil here as "rock flour", and that's exactly what it is (a result of glacier movement over this area during the ice age). It's extremely fine, but it doesn't clump together like clay, so when you first dig it, it looks deceivingly rich and light, but a few days without rain and it reverts to its powdery form and blows away in the wind. It drains well enough, but there's almost no organic material in it, so whatever water it absorbs, it doesn't hold on to for very long. We amended it as much as we could this spring with horse manure, coconut husks, and compost, but it wasn't nearly enough. I'm madly composting piles of veggie scraps with chicken litter and seaweed that I've collected on the beach, so next year it will get another much-needed boost.
We had the hottest summer on record this year (Vancouver broke its all-time heat record one day [33.8 C] and then broke that record again the next day [34.4 C]). We got to 39 degrees celcius (102 F) in the shade here at our place, which is unheard of on the coast (we're higher up and farther from the water than much of the surrounding area, so we tend to get hotter summers and colder winters). We've also gotten less rainfall since April than ever before - our usually rainy spring was eerily dry. These extremes hindered many of the plants in the garden, but at least the eggplants are happy:
If you're a fan of peach and raspberry jams, then you've got to give this recipe a try. It's the perfect blend of the two flavors, which go together unbelievably well, and the color of the resulting jam is amazing.
I made this for the first time a few years ago, and my kids loved it so much that they dubbed it "Mommy's Special Jam". It's especially good on freshly made crepes (one of our favorite desserts for those times when we're craving something but have nothing in the house).
One thing I didn't have to contend with in my city garden was four footed garden pests. As long as the dog didn't get in and run roughshod over my plants, the only things I really had to worry about were slugs and aphids. Not so here in deer central.
My winter broccoli crop is also a goner:
And the lovely pepper plant which is loaded with peppers is now missing it's top.
They also chewed my winter cabbages, ate the leaves off both grape vines, and decapitated the heritage bean plants that I was growing solely for seed for next years crop. An entire summer's worth of babying these plants and they're gone in 24 hours - grrrr! It almost seems unnecessary to explain my absence anymore - it's pretty much a given that there will be a good month or more between posts these days. Here's a brief update.
The garden is doing fairly well, with some things faring better than others (isn't that always the case?). This is the first tomato of the season, a Cherokee Purple that I harvested a few weeks ago. We've also had a few Speckled Romans, and there are a lot more out there that are getting close.
Last month we had a major thunder storm pass through the area - the sky was the most amazing golden colour right before it started. We sat with the lights off and watched the fork lightening dance across the sky all evening. The only one of us who wasn't impressed was poor Princess, who stayed under the bed for hours after it ended.
I posted this recipe on my homelearning blog almost three years ago, but it's still such a favorite of ours that I thought I would post it over here as well, especially as I've been intending to share low cost recipes. When trying to lower one's food bill it's critical to cut out non-essentials, but thankfully chocolate cake doesn't fall into that category.
