Obligatory New-Chick Video

I had two hens that had a broody relay race. One of them sat on the eggs for 2 weeks and gave up and the next hen finished it out and won the prize. The prize is 3 Mottle Java chicks and one Australorp hybrid.

I'm excited about the Javas. I drove out to Mira Loma, CA a month ago to get the eggs from a nice lady that has a giant garden interspersed with a few varieties of chickens and a fair number of cats.

Javas are credited with being the foundation of several popular American Breeds like Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks. I read some great things about them so I thought it would give them a try.

Although the chicks are mostly yellow they should be mostly black with white mottling when mature:

©2005-2010 MY PET CHICKEN

Furcraea macdouglii

When I was in Palm Springs recently we went to the Living Desert and took a tour of the gardens. I wanted to share one plant that I fell in love with. It looks like a cross between an aloe and mean agave.
:

There was also this mature specimen that was amazing:

They had some for sale but I wasn't sure I wanted to cart one back from the desert in my car. Hopefully I can find one here in L.A. and then wait ten years for it to get big and scary.

Mauraders

I've been letting the hen out with her chicks cuz it's so fun to watch them running around the yard. It does have it's risks though. I usually worry more about hawks and cats, but sometimes I have to worry about my cucumbers.

These two are doing a good job of looking nonchalant. They're just hanging out, no big thing.


But when I came back later they were stomping all over everything. They aren't so interested in the plants as what's under them. They scratch through all the dirt looking for bugs.


Here they are high tailing it to escape my rage.

The chicks are at that awkward stage of half feathers half fuzz and all legs. It's not a good look.



And back in jail, where they belong

Tipu Tree

One of the trees that I got from DWP last year was a Tipuana tipu. I planted it in my front yard imaging the beautiful umbrella like canopy that it would grow into to shade the front patio. It's first year in the ground it seemed to be bidding it's time and didn't grow much. I liked to believe that it was spending all of its energy growing strong roots and that it would focus on growing branches when it was ready.

This is what it looked like at the beginning of spring:

This is a crappy picture that I took with my phone as I left one morning for work. For some reason I was always happy to see this tree.

At the time it had three little branches and some tattered leaves left over from last year. Over the course of a week it lost all of it's remaining leaves and pushed out a flurry of new growth. It seemed that it was well on it's way towards fulfilling my expectations of a beautiful, arching shade giver.

It grew so fast that the canopy started to weigh the tree down and it started to lean towards the house. I decided to tie it back and train it to grow in the opposite direction. This would give it a little more room and would require less pruning in the long run. I didn't want it to be growing right on top of the house or for it's future branches to block the path to the rest of the yard.

I tied it down to the Solandra that grows next to it and figured that it would only take a couple weeks to get used to it's new orientation. What I wasn't expecting was the freak wind storm the next day. The wind was so strong that it snapped the whole top of the tree off. All of the new growth was gone and what was left couldn't even be called a tree. It was more of a stick poking out of the ground.

Here's the stump:

I actually cried. Not just out of sadness but out of anger at my own stupidity. Maybe if I'd tied it lower there would have been enough flex in the trunk to bear the wind. Maybe if I'd been a little more patient I could have let the tree get a little bigger or trained it more slowly. I guess we learn more from our failures than our successes. I won't be making this mistake again.

Luckily the tree is giving me another chance. It has already sent out about ten new branches to compensate for my blunder.

I'm getting the message that the tree won't be rushed. It's going to grow the way it has to grow and too much meddling from me is only going to muck things up.

New Chicks V.5

I used to think that chicks were the cutest thing ever, but now I think that chicks with a mother hen are the cutest thing ever.


She's teaching them the all important skill of scratching in the dirt.

Vegetable Bed

I don't have a lot of flat space around my house so this little patch is pretty valuable. Part of it is taken up by the chicken tractor that has since become the brooder coop. My first two chickens were happy with it as long as they could run around in the yard too.

I decided to try to get a little more use out of the space and build a raised planter for vegetables


I built it out of 2x10s, with hardware cloth on the bottom.


This is to keep the gophers out. I first time I saw the gophers I thought they were kinda cute. Then I watched one pull an entire creeping fig vine into its burrow after it had eaten all of its roots. Now I plant everything with mesh around it.


I filled it with two truck loads of free compost from the Griffith Park Composting Facility. John likes to joke that it is full of elephant dung because the facility is right over the hill from the LA Zoo. It might be true. This stuff is like black gold.


I can never get my act together to grow from seed so I used started plants from home depot. I planted tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and threw in some radish and beet seeds. They look so dainty here, but I had planted way too much. My friend Sora warned me that the tomatoes and squash were going to battle for supremacy. She wasn't kidding.


I'm not sure who the winner was. The squash took up more space but the tomatoes lasted longer. I was still getting tomatoes just a month ago, and I still have butternut squash waiting to be made into soup.


My plans were to clean this all out and plant a winter garden but I never got around to it. Once the squash was gone there were little radish plants trying to grow underneath. They ended up getting big and bushy with gnarly twisted radishes about a foot long.

The last batch of chicks did a pretty good job of cleaning the bed out before they went up to the big house. Now I just need to replant. I'm thinking that this year I'll grow the tomatoes and squash in their own self watering containers and reserve the raised bed for vegetables that are a little more delicate.

A Look Back

I get so excited by the things going on in the moment that sometimes it's hard for me to look back. Nevertheless I thought I should add a couple posts that I probably should have started out with.

This is my first box of chicks. I ordered with a friend and we ended up with 50. The hatchery added some extras to make sure the box was packed with enough chicks to keep each other warm. They came in the US mail and spent 2 days in transit. The extras are the yellow ones with red dots on their heads.

Chicks are so cute and fun to have around, but it's possible to have too much of a good thing. They were OK for the first few days when all they seemed to do was eat sleep and poop. But after only a couple of weeks they had tripled in size and were a rambunctious group of dust monsters.

I ended up making a 4'x 1o' corral for them in the living room where they had more room to run around, but they grew a lot faster than I expected and were more aggressive then their little fuzzy butts would lead you to expect. I had only had them for about three weeks when I woke up to the neighborhood roosters crowing as usual. It took me a few minutes to realize that one of the crowers was a lot closer than the others, he was in my living room. One of the little cockerels was practicing and doing a pretty good job. He sounded a little like a tin wind up toy but I could hear the potential.

I got to work building their permanent home.

My yard has an incline ranging from about 30 degrees to 75 degrees. I chose a spot near the end up my property under this white sapote tree. It would offer shade from the afternoon sun and it wasn't quite as steep as other parts of the yard.


I wanted to have a dirt floor so that I could use the deep litter method inside the coop. I had to dig out the back end to make room for the foundation. It was a lot harder than I expected. Even though this spot initially looked reasonably level, as I spent a weekend excavating, it started to seem steeper and steeper.


It took me the whole weekend to get this far. So little, and yet I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, matched only by my desperation to get the chicks out of the house.



I spent the next weekend assembling this metal shed that I got cheap off of Craigslist. I probably could have built it cheaper from scratch and it would have looked more charming, but this was fast and easy and I could carry the piece up the hill by myself. I can't imagine what it would have been like to drag a bunch of plywood up there.


The shed had crappy little sliding doors that I didn't have much confidence in. I made two new doors meshed with hardware cloth. This provides light and ventilation but should still be secure enough to keep predators out.


I put the hasp on the door and started carting the chicks up to their new coop. They seemed to adjust pretty well. The shed is 10' x 8' so they had more space and they loved scratching around in the dirt.



It didn't take long though for them to outgrow this too.
Look how big this mofo is. This is one of those little yellow chicks with the red spot on the head.


It took me another month to finish the run that connects to the back. I don't have a good picture of that but you can sort of see it here, almost overgrown with grass.

The metal shed has been easy to work with and modify as necessary. I've been able to use a pocket knife to cut through the sheet metal to create more ventilation and to make a door into the run. I still think it's kind of ugly but one of my neighbors said that she loves to see it as she hikes along the top of the ridge. She feels like she's almost home when she see it.