Winter Is Coming

Over three days on the weekend, the hoop house went from its summer job as a growing area, to its winter service as a home for the chickens.  I hauled out the tomato cages, pulled vines, harvested *the absolute last* tomatoes, and Adrian managed to fit all of the greenery into the yard waste bin.  Because we cannot burn the tomato vines, and they can carry virus or disease from one season to the next, we send them to the city where their larger, turned compost pile will heat up much more than ours every could.

 

After cleaning the rabbitry, Adrian dumped the excess sawdust, wasted greens, and rabbit droppings onto the dirt, and topped that with fresh straw.  Over the winter, the chickens will add their own contributions to the straw, which will balance the nitrogen, and they'll scratch through all of the dirt; we'll add more straw, and they'll break down the waste, fertilizing the site for next year.  The dirt-covered frame under the chicken tractor has several passes of chicken wire to protect the girls from predators burrowing in - we learned that one the hard way.

 

 

While he was busy with that, I scrubbed and hosed out their living quarters, which are holding up quite well I think, for being built by newbies who had never built a chicken tractor or kept chickens before.  Of course, I should add that we had friends to help us through some of the process, though they'd never done anything like this before either. Tell you what though, we'll never build something this heavy again - whew!  Adrian was kind enough to crawl underneath, and attach their heat lamp and heated water bucket for the cold months, and voila!

 

Then we just had to wrangle the chickens into their winter digs....... I only had to chase them around the hoop house once!