So glad to see so many new folks here on the OKIE thread.
I'm leaving on Wednesday with my two sisters to visit my aging father in Florida...we will be gone 9 days. My "to do" list for streamlining the chicken and garden chores is very lengthy. Roger will have his hands full. Besides my garden and chickens, it is getting time for hay season.
So far in the garden I've weeded all 23 beds, tied up the tomatoes, planted sweet potatoes, pulled the onion crop, processed the peach harvest, collected a two gallon bucket of poppy seed pods, removed the deadwood from the fruit trees and repotted all the indoor plants for the deck. I still have some flowers to set out in the front flower bed and the Starks Nursery trees arrived for me to plant.
For the chickens, I've cleaned the brooder room, placed all hens with brood on the ground, refurbished all the nest boxes with clean hay, repaired all the tarps in the outside pens, hauled eight wheelbarrows loads of deep litter from the henhouse to the garden and spread it, moved all hens with brood to the floor of the henhouse and sorted the roosters for butchering. I still need to release the pheasants to the back pasture and sanitize their indoor pen for the Seramas, rearrange the Columbian Wyandotte into two pens for the summer, butcher 12 roosters and candle the eggs in the incubator that are due three days after my return.
Enjoying some time at the beach will be a nice vacation from all the prep for the trip.