- Apr 9, 2011
- 3,974
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Boy, I could use that compost bin.
I'm trying to come back from a major case of over-did on Sunday; I moved both the broody pen (which is built of 4X4 heavy-duty livestock panel, 24 running feet of it, plus sheet plastic and both wire and plastic mesh) and the hoop house (the recipe for which starts "take two twelve foot 4X4s") and did some damage to my joints and muscles. Monday I felt OK, yesterday the glycogen depletion issues hit, and today it's full-on joint pain.
I need a keeper, or something.
Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that I need to use up my "spare" cheapo landscape trellises to make the bantam pen, and might as well get started on it today. I say "spare" because I really wanted to make a triangular cage for what's apparently the tastiest rose I grow, Reviele de Dijon, which the bunnies and gophers and blasted SHEEP all think is the best snack ever (the only thing worse, for me, are the summer-blooming magnolias M. watsonii and M. wilsonii, which have rabbits crashing double-wire plant cages and call deer out of the wind: planted three, lost three, don't get to try again). I need the Tower of Solitude for quarantine, and it's actually too big for bantams in many ways and rebuilding it would be more work than putting a new pen together..
I was taken with the desire to put the bantam pen out amidst the lilacs where I could see it from the study window, until I remembered that the Cooper's Hawk hits the feeder there quite regularly and I don't have the materials to build an accipterine-proof cage. So it's back to thinking how I could jigger some kind of catio out there, to give Lana hunting territory without endangering the tweetybirds.
Speaking of Lana, one of my most exciting adventures lately came Monday, when I'd been busy outside in various ways including a whole-house airing, and then come in to take a shower. I left the inside laundry room door open, and then, when I closed my bathroom door the back door popped open and Lana found her way outside. Stewie is my cat, Lana is Franklins, and she does not like me even a little because I will not let her sleep on my bed, nor go outside, and I keep mending the windowscreens where she make exits. Anyway, she was exploring the underside of the back porch, a grody place at the best of times, let alone when I've finally stolen the time to wash my hair, and it was getting on toward evening, when I had to go grocery shopping. I untethered the sheep and let him into the yard, where oatmeal and an apple put him in his pen, and went to get Deary from her outside pen to take her in to her safe pen inside. I was carrying her up the back steps and there was Lana, going into the house... until she saw me and turned around. There I was with a tiny bantam, and a cat who wants to hunt things, and one chance to catch the cat and not hurt the chicken.
It was a juggling act that would have made the Flying Karamozov Brothers proud, and probably used up my luck with these things for the year, and almost certainly has something to do with the way my lower back feels right now.
I'm trying to come back from a major case of over-did on Sunday; I moved both the broody pen (which is built of 4X4 heavy-duty livestock panel, 24 running feet of it, plus sheet plastic and both wire and plastic mesh) and the hoop house (the recipe for which starts "take two twelve foot 4X4s") and did some damage to my joints and muscles. Monday I felt OK, yesterday the glycogen depletion issues hit, and today it's full-on joint pain.
I need a keeper, or something.
Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that I need to use up my "spare" cheapo landscape trellises to make the bantam pen, and might as well get started on it today. I say "spare" because I really wanted to make a triangular cage for what's apparently the tastiest rose I grow, Reviele de Dijon, which the bunnies and gophers and blasted SHEEP all think is the best snack ever (the only thing worse, for me, are the summer-blooming magnolias M. watsonii and M. wilsonii, which have rabbits crashing double-wire plant cages and call deer out of the wind: planted three, lost three, don't get to try again). I need the Tower of Solitude for quarantine, and it's actually too big for bantams in many ways and rebuilding it would be more work than putting a new pen together..
I was taken with the desire to put the bantam pen out amidst the lilacs where I could see it from the study window, until I remembered that the Cooper's Hawk hits the feeder there quite regularly and I don't have the materials to build an accipterine-proof cage. So it's back to thinking how I could jigger some kind of catio out there, to give Lana hunting territory without endangering the tweetybirds.
Speaking of Lana, one of my most exciting adventures lately came Monday, when I'd been busy outside in various ways including a whole-house airing, and then come in to take a shower. I left the inside laundry room door open, and then, when I closed my bathroom door the back door popped open and Lana found her way outside. Stewie is my cat, Lana is Franklins, and she does not like me even a little because I will not let her sleep on my bed, nor go outside, and I keep mending the windowscreens where she make exits. Anyway, she was exploring the underside of the back porch, a grody place at the best of times, let alone when I've finally stolen the time to wash my hair, and it was getting on toward evening, when I had to go grocery shopping. I untethered the sheep and let him into the yard, where oatmeal and an apple put him in his pen, and went to get Deary from her outside pen to take her in to her safe pen inside. I was carrying her up the back steps and there was Lana, going into the house... until she saw me and turned around. There I was with a tiny bantam, and a cat who wants to hunt things, and one chance to catch the cat and not hurt the chicken.
It was a juggling act that would have made the Flying Karamozov Brothers proud, and probably used up my luck with these things for the year, and almost certainly has something to do with the way my lower back feels right now.
I hate rain!
