DH has reinforced one of the breeder pens and managed to complete the screen doors for my coop. I'm just so happy to have both of the screen doors installed. He even painted them white for me. I'll have to get a pic in the next day or so. I'm feeling so much more confident in my birds being safe again. I plan to finish cutting a hole in the south wall of the coop and covering with hardware cloth. I'm not quite sure how I will keep rain out, assuming of course that we ever get any in the future, but I'll figure something out.
Here are a couple pics just for fun. Just see how big Turkey is getting! I don't know if it's a she or he, but really doesn't matter to me. I enjoy that funny bird so much. I bring it out in the mornings for a walk about the garden and it's so cute to hear it booping with excitement over finding some tidbit or another. It is just the sweetest thing! The other pic is one of several of the chickens enjoying the seeds from a sunflower DS planted in the garden.
I LOL'ed about your garden being used for the birds. Granted, I've gotten tons of squash from my garden but I also share it with the chickens. I cut them into chunks and freeze them. Then in the heat of the late afternoon, take it to them for a treat. They really love them! Oddly enough, the strawberries have begun to put on some tiny little berries again. The bantams snatch them up as soon as they pink up a bit.
That's the thing, HEChicken. If it's not working, it's not working and I know what you mean about looking at the long term investment and what it's going to cost to also keep them in the yard. DH just got completely overwhelmed with it all just thinking about it. I haven't had any further problems once I realized my mistake with the electric fence. (I had one extra section of netting than the energizer could handle)
I love your GP's! They are a great mix of caution and friendliness. It's great to hear your DH made some progress on the coop today. It seems like everytime we are working on a project we run out of this, that, or the other thing and have to run to Lowe's. It really takes the wind out of the sails, doesn't it?
Here are a couple pics just for fun. Just see how big Turkey is getting! I don't know if it's a she or he, but really doesn't matter to me. I enjoy that funny bird so much. I bring it out in the mornings for a walk about the garden and it's so cute to hear it booping with excitement over finding some tidbit or another. It is just the sweetest thing! The other pic is one of several of the chickens enjoying the seeds from a sunflower DS planted in the garden.
I would be very interested in some! Next time, give me a PM and I'll be in.
Danz, that guy's natural trellises sound pretty cool. I've thought about doing something like that with all those branches I have in my back brush pile. I think that would be a good way to use up some of that stuff without just taking it to the dump.
I LOL'ed about your garden being used for the birds. Granted, I've gotten tons of squash from my garden but I also share it with the chickens. I cut them into chunks and freeze them. Then in the heat of the late afternoon, take it to them for a treat. They really love them! Oddly enough, the strawberries have begun to put on some tiny little berries again. The bantams snatch them up as soon as they pink up a bit.
Well, we have decided not to keep Tory. Long story short, the stress of dealing with her was worse than the stress of worrying about the chickens. The first couple of weeks she was doing fine but this last week she really started to roam and it was stressing out DH and therefore causing tension between us. Although the neighbors have so far been nice about it, he is acutely aware that we are new to the neighborhood and he doesn't want rifts with the neighbors before we even get started here. Already I have roosters crowing and guineas, so a wandering dog might be more than they can take. Also, she started to run out to the fence and squeeze under whenever a jogger or bicyclist would go by and ignored my command to stop. I understand LGD's are free spirits but they are still dogs at the end of the day and in my mind, they can't call the shots - they have to accept me as pack leader, just like my other dogs do. Tory will come when called - if she feels like it. If she doesn't, she'll just look over at me and continue on her way. And if there were a jogger, bicyclist or someone walking another dog, forget it. I've had to run out and apologize profusely more than once and while everyone has been understanding so far, quite honestly, I wouldn't be that happy if I were the recipient of a huge dog running at me barking while I jogged past so I wouldn't blame someone one bit for getting upset enough to report it. We've spent days discussing various options, and I've talked to my neighbor from two doors down about installing do-it-yourself electric fencing. He did his own and rigged up a neat way to do it, borrowing a relatives tractor and hooking up a hook upside down so it dug a little farrow when it was pulled. He even got the wire to feed down through the hook and directly into the ground and then his wife walked along behind pushing the dirt back down with her foot. So I was going to ask him to help me do the same at my place. However even he said the ground is just too hard now and we should wait until Fall so in some ways it felt like I got a free pass to wait a few months (although his isn't the only place she roams). Although that also means 2-3 more months of daily stress over wondering where she is at any given time. I had previously asked my neighbor if I couldn't just install it above ground but he said he wouldn't recommend it because it would be too easy to take it out with a mower or weeds or even weather, and then the system wouldn't work at all until repaired.
However even to install it myself, buying the system online and paying him to help me install it was going to end up costing several hundred dollars so I had to sit down and give it more thought. I have a small flock of poultry, and to protect them I adopted a large dog who is going to need care and feeding the rest of her life, only now, in order to keep the dog home where she can actually DO her job, I have to spend hundreds to keep her in. And it hit me that although I value my flock, that was going overboard.
The other piece of it is that I'm not sure how good a LGD she is going to turn out to be anyway. It is to the point now that she will disappear in the morning to go and play with above-mentioned neighbor's dog and be gone (if we don't go and get her) for hours. They are far enough up the road that if something were going on down at our place, she would never know it. When she comes home, she sleeps for the day (which is fine - I get that they are nocturnal dogs) but this dog sleeps far more soundly than most people. I've walked over her, opened and closed the house door or car doors loudly right next to her and its not that she's just deciding these are sounds she doesn't need to react to - she is so sound asleep she never even hears us. When Trish came to visit the other day, my other dog ran out and barked and sounded the alert that someone was here - I don't think Tory ever knew Trish was here even though we walked down to the coop a couple of times and stood in the driveway talking - only feet from where Tory was asleep under the front porch - before she left. And, although she did find the possum the other night, when a stray cat ventured onto the property, Tory never saw it. I had to lead her to within 20' of it and once she saw it she chased it off but it made me wonder how effective she would be at chasing off a daytime predator, like my fox that attacked at 5:30 in the afternoon - a time when Tory is typically still sound asleep. I'm not that concerned about nocturnal predators as my coop would really be pretty tough for something to break into.
So what we have decided to do is to go back to the two dogs we already had, except we are now putting them in the chicken yard to sleep at night. We're going to even move our Dogloo into the chicken yard so they'll have a way to get out of the weather and a place to sleep in the winter. And, if we're going to be gone for a few hours, we can put them in there then too. I trust both of them completely around the chickens. They've slept there the past two nights and even though the chicken door is open by the time I go to let them out in the morning, none of the birds seems worried about the dogs. I am hopeful that their presence will keep any nocturnal predators from even thinking about climbing into the yard. I'm also going to hope that the 5:30pm fox was an anomaly and that future attacks will not happen during the day (although like I said, I'm not sure Tory would notice if she was here)
That's the thing, HEChicken. If it's not working, it's not working and I know what you mean about looking at the long term investment and what it's going to cost to also keep them in the yard. DH just got completely overwhelmed with it all just thinking about it. I haven't had any further problems once I realized my mistake with the electric fence. (I had one extra section of netting than the energizer could handle)
I love your GP's! They are a great mix of caution and friendliness. It's great to hear your DH made some progress on the coop today. It seems like everytime we are working on a project we run out of this, that, or the other thing and have to run to Lowe's. It really takes the wind out of the sails, doesn't it?
The keets are a lot smaller than the chickens.. the chickens are probably 3 or 4 times the keets' size right now - this might be a good time to move them.. there are 4 keets and 5 chickens. (and the 3 kittens who think they too are poultry!)
