Author: Siobhan Watters

I did a whole lot of trying not to do too much this week. The heat wave was fairly intense and we have no a/c. Did have to invest some energy in the chickens each day as they required water changes and mud puddles to keep cool. Now I need to get caught up on chores. The coop needs cleaning, the lawn needs cutting, the porch needs painting and the gardens still need reclaiming if I want to be able to plant next year.

But for now I am sitting on the porch enjoying the breeze with Jamie and the pooches…

With all the excitement of my family coming to visit and the work on the porch I haven’t had time to talk about our lovely ladies and their eggs.We’ve been enjoying our eggs and sharing them with others.

Not so good was a night last week when Jamie came in and said, “I’m having trouble counting to 8.” We had lost track of time and not made it out before dark to close up the coop. So we were now faced with a missing chicken and darkness. They are contained, or should I say we have provided them a fenced area to keep predators out, which they can fly over. Their enclosed area was/is mostly overgrown weeds and such that they have been making paths through it.

I went outside in my flip flops and pyjamas carrying a lantern. I was using the handle of the broom to move the tall weeds around. Bent at the waist holding lantern in one hand sweeping weeds with a broom calling “here chicken chicken” in pyjamas, it occurred to me that I was very glad to be living in the country with no neighbours in site.

We looked for 20 minutes but no chicken was found. I got a little sad and announced we are bad chicken parents – at this point I resigned myself to the fact she had been eaten and we went to bed.

The next morning I got up and went to let the chickens out. I opened the human door to their enclosure so I could let down their ramp and their she was, sitting silently in the gravel, as if to say “how come you locked me out?” I finished the chicken chores and went inside to tell Jamie of my find. We decided to call her Amelia. For Jamie the reference is Amelia Earhart for me Amelia Bedelia from the children’s book series of my youth. In either case it works – well except for Jamie’s reference was never seen again.

Lesson learned, we ensure to get to the coop before dark. Amelia tried staying out a couple more nights but has started going into the coop with the others before we even get out there.

My parents went home early this week so I took a break from the porch – that and the weather was miserable and wet which is less than ideal for working on salvaging rotting wood. The remaining posts had some rot but we decided we can wait and replace them. We are planning to do them one or two a year.

To fix the damage that does exist we used a wood hardener (or petrifier). They recommend drilling holes and squirting it into the holes on vertical surfaces – I went one better and used a syringe and a 18 gauge needle to inject into the soft spots on the wood. After letting that set up for a couple of days I used an epoxy wood filler to fix up areas with missing wood. The great thing about the epoxy is how hard it sets up and how well it sands.

It wouldn’t be a post from me without some photos…

Before

After

We (in this case my dad) did some replacement pieces, the difficulty is that replacement wood does not come in the same sizes. There was definitely some fancy slicing and dicing to make this happen. Before we rebuild any more columns we will need a thickness planner.