The Story of "The Girls", Part 2

Once my chicks grew into pullethood (is that even a word?) I moved them from the little brooding box in the laundry room to a larger box in the garage. They stayed there until just a few days ago. I had wanted to move them earlier but my chicken coop arrived with missing parts and it took me a month of back and forth with the vendor to get things straightened out. This box is 6'x3'x32" high and I just got them moved into the coop in time. They were seriously overcrowded.

Ed Rovera

The Story of "The Girls", Part 1

I've recently received requests to add my new chickens -- aka, "the girls" -- to this blog. At first, I thought this would be a bad idea. I've since decided it really is reasonable. It makes the name of the blog a bit odd but I don't want to go through and try to reserve something like TheUrbanRanch.com. To heck with that!
So, here's the story in its short form: I grew up with chickens, rabbits, and other farm animals. When I retired, I wanted to get a few chickens and add them to my small petting zoo. In February, I purchased six three-day-old chicks -- three Rhode Island Reds (which was the breed my parents preferred) and three Ameraucanas. Why Ameraucanas? Because the feed store only had three Rhode Islands and I wanted six chickens. Why six? Because three of them are at least nominally my neighbor's chickens thanks to Oakland's three hen per household rule. The one plus to the Ameraucanas is that their eggs are blue and green. As long as they lay eggs the way they are supposed to I think that will be interesting.

A Downside to having Goats

In 2002, the empty lot across the street from us was purchased and the new owner built a beautiful two-story house on it. Unfortunately, this altered the flow of the underground springs in our area and brought a lot more water into our basement. To mitigate this problem, I cut a French drain across my front yard. I trenched all the way down the driveway so the water collected could dissipate out behind the garage. While I had the trenches cut and open, I decided to tie the downspouts on the house together and placed PVC pipes running over to closest trench. More piping was set on top of the gravel bag before I filled it in. All the flow from the downspouts was connected into the six-inch outflow pipe that ran to the “Back Forty”. Finally, I dug a drain pond to catch all the water so it could soak into the ground and not create a problem for my neighbor down the hill. All that worked fine until I got B&C.

You see, goats like to dig holes and lie in them during the summer. This helps them stay cool in the heat. When they do this, they toss dirt in all directions. Sometimes that direction is straight over the outflow from my carefully designed drainage system. Come winter and the rain, the draining water can’t escape into the pond; it runs into a bunch of dirt instead.

Today, I checked on the goats to make sure they were handling the rain. Even after almost six hours of light but steady rain, the collection pond had only about an inch of water in it. A quick look at where the outflow should have been visible told me I had some digging to do or the water would soon back up into the goat enclosure.

Fifteen minutes of manual labor with my “shit shovel” and I had the outflow open. B&C don’t know how close they came to having their world get even muddier than it is currently.

Ed Rovera