Another full weekend at the farm. We started bright and early Saturday morning… well, Friday night, and worked right up until dark-thirty Sunday. We couldn’t have asked for better weather; it was absolutely perfect out.

Last week our roosters found their voices, which meant emergency relocation. On Tuesday our first batch of 15 chickens moved to the farm, and 3 roosters were brought to the local feed store to find new homes. Another batch of 15 hens were moved on Thursday, another 15 on Friday, 20 were moved on Saturday, and the final 12 moved out Sunday morning giving us a total of 77 chickens living at the farm (74 hens and 3 roosters). They are happy, happy chickens, and we are happy that we raised them, and got them out of the yard with out getting in trouble with the HOA.

The big task for the weekend was moving and filling our raised beds. Friday we collected enough cardboard to cover the bottom of the beds to use as a weed block. Saturday was the day I had been fearing for months: 24 yards of garden soil was delivered in 2 large dump trucks. Last year we got 2 yards of soil for our home beds, and that was tiring work, so getting 12x that amount had me frightened. Luckily we had the trusty little Kubota to help us move the soil… 1/5 yard at a time.

Saturday we were able to get one and a half beds filled. Each bed took 10 scoops of soil, and a LOT of raking and smoothing.

Farmer Jen working the soil in the beds

So after relocating chickens, moving and leveling the beds, and starting to fill the beds, we were exhausted and ready for a camp out! We set up the tent, started a campfire, and the boys cooked hot dogs and made s’mores.

Farmer Jen and Farm Boy Sid spent the night in the tent while Farmer Mike and Farm Boy Spencer headed home to tend to our chickens, cats, and fish at home. We were all asleep by 8pm.

Sunday morning came too early. Farm Boy Spencer and Farmer Mike loaded up the remaining chickens into the Jeep, and were back at the farm just after sunrise. We knew we had a full day of dirt work in front of us, so we all pitched in to build the farm.

After 100+ trips on the tractor, and many blisters from raking, the beds were full. Filling the beds was actually penciled in to take a full two weekends, but we knocked it out in one. We are tired, we are sore, but we are one happy family.

Remember the old cotton trailer we bought a few weeks ago? Well, we have now finished converting it into our chicken tractor. It took a full two weekends, but we are very happy with the end results.

Step one was to put on a roof. Sounds easy enough until I realized that meant drilling sixteen 1/2″ holes through 1/8″ steel. But twenty 2x4s, four 2x6s, six sheets of plywood, a box of screws, and many drill bits later we finished.

As you can see we also cut out a panel and installed a chain link fence door/ramp for the chickens to walk up, and so we can close them up to secure them at night.

Did I mention that the burn ban was lifted for Fort Bend County? We hadn’t been able to burn for almost a year, so we had some large brush piles. We tossed a match to our two piles, and they went up fast! Within 30 minutes the piles disappeared. I’ve never seen anything burn so fast.

End of weekend number one.

Weekend two started slow and drizzly. Went to Lowe’s and bought more wood… it seems like we are always buying wood at Lowe’s. Anyway, we got back and put up 6 roosting poles and built 12 nesting boxes.

The chicken tractor is done! Well, mostly. I still want to reinforce the door (it was bent from us walking up/down it all weekend). I also want to put shingles or corrugated panels on the roof, because I have a feeling that plywood isn’t going to handle the Houston weather very well. We also might wrap the entire thing with contractor plastic to keep the weather out if it gets cold and rainy again before winter ends.

Only one problem… we built everything backwards. The roof pitched the wrong way, and the door opened on the wrong side. So I hooked it back up to the Jeep and took it for a drive to turn it around. I was nervous how the roof would handle driving on our uneven ground. I was fearing that it would rip apart from the trailer flexing. But it held together perfectly, and we got it positioned exactly where we wanted it to be.

The last thing we needed to do to get ready for the chickens was install 350′ of chicken fencing, wire up the energizer, pound in a 6′ grounding rod, and plug it in. 8000 volts of electrified goodness sprang to life.

The chickens should be very happy at their new home in the country…

It is a very busy time of the year for the new farm.  Our 90 baby chicks are almost old enough to be moved to the farm, the vegetable seedlings needed to be moved from the garage to the greenhouse, we inherited a shed from some friends that needed to be moved, the grass and weeds were finally tall enough to need mowing, and the county burn ban has been lifted so we can get rid of the big brush piles that have accumulated over the last year.  With all of that on our plates I decided to take a weeks vacation from my city job to get a bunch of these tasks knocked out.

First up was evicting the youngest chicks out of the greenhouse, and combine them with the older girls living in the temporary coop.  This needed to happen so we could get the vegetable seedlings out of the dark garage and moved into the greenhouse.  It actually went really smoothly until mice invaded the greenhouse and ate two flats of tomato seedlings.  150 tomato plants gone in a night.  We put out traps and caught 6 mice.  The rest of the seedlings are now safe.

On to getting the farm ready for the chickens… Last week Farmer Jen drove all around Needville and Fairchild looking for an old cotton trailer that we could turn into a mobile chicken coop (chicken tractor). She got a call a few days later, and the next day we drove the jeep into Pleak, TX, hooked up the cotton trailer, and drove the 15 miles back to the farm very slowly. Luckily we didn’t have a tire blow out, and we made it safe and sound to the farm.

Another fun adventure was loading 25 – 2″x10″x16′ boards for the raised beds onto our 11′ long trailer, and towing those 15+ miles to the farm. But, amazingly, we made that trip without incident as well. Once we got the lumber to the farm we spent a day building 10 raised beds.

Up next? Moving our new shed. It took everything the little Kubota could give (and then some) to move the shed into its new location and get it leveled on cinder blocks. The tractor’s front end loader popped off one time, we snapped one hook that we were using to pull the shed, and pulled the other hook out of the 4×4 it was screwed in to. We ended up pulling the shed with the jeep. In the end no one got hurt, and we got the storage shed into position. This is going to be VERY useful to have at the farm.

In between all of these jobs I actually had some time to get the whole farm mowed. Due to last years drought I hadn’t mowed in 9 months! It took about 4 hours total, but the grass and weeds are now all a respectable height. We just need to get the chickens moved out there, and I’ll never have to mow again.

Speaking of the chickens and rain… Lola was not amused at all of the rain we got earlier this week.

So what’s left? This weekend we are going to burn the brush piles, put a roof on the cotton trailer to make it safe for the chickens, and put up the electric chicken fencing (UPS says it’ll arrive on Friday). If we can get all of that done this weekend we’ll be fully ready to move the chickens to the farm at the first sound of a rooster crowing… hopefully that won’t happen for another 2-3 weeks. Next week we’ll need to have 20 yards of garden soil delivered, and then fill the raised beds. After the beds are full of soil we’ll install deer fencing around them, and run drip irrigation lines through them. We will then be ready for planting the week of February 15th.