Cheap tricks

I've been contemplating how to best insulate the coop against the coming cold weather. I have heard good things about Foil-Bubble-Bubble-Foil insulation and was planning on purchasing some. Then I remembered I have a garage full of thick, multilayer corrugated cardboard! The stuff traps air, so it should be good for some insulating properties and it's free, so it cost nothing to try. I lined the ceiling and East & West walls of the coop with it. Since the coop is on the East side of a hill, it gets a fair amount of shielding from our Northwest winter winds, but every little bit helps.

I can't say how it compares to "normal" insulation, but on one of the nights last week where the outside freshwater tub froze over, I had put the bird waterer in the coop and it emerged frost-free the next morning! So the inside is definitely above freezing when the outside was in the upper teens/low 20's. My next experiment will be to line the inside of the cardboard on the ceiling with cheap aluminum foil so it will reflect radiated heat back down. I also plan to line the inside of the North wall with plastic film and fill the space with shredded newsprint for more insulation. Need to set up some temperature sensors so I can see how much difference all this is making. That's something I can do tomorrow if I have time.

I'm still keeping the fresh air vents, but I need to block them from direct wind, or there will be strong, cold drafts inside come winter since they face North-South.

Keeping up

A month ago I wondered when they'd start laying. Now I wonder how we're going to get through all these eggs: we have about 4 dozen, of which 18 are store-bought! My five RIR hens are laying on average three eggs per day. Today I found four. Time to break out the souffle recipes, I guess.

I finally found time to start building my LED (Light Emitting Diode) lighting system. There are three 1 Watt LEDs mounted to an aluminum heatsinking block that is screwed into the ceiling of the coop. I'm using a surplus 12Volt Lead-Acid battery from an emergency light that I got for about $6 (yay Ax-Man surplus!). Tonight I tested it and it's bright enough to get the birds off the roosts and looking around for something to eat. Next will either be a timer that will run the light for four hours every day, or depending on how much I get done, my Bluetooth remote monitoring system will be ready so the computer in the house can turn the light on and off as necessary. It would actually work right now, but while the Bluetooth module on the monitor hardware has 300' range (Class 1), the one on the PC only has 30' range (Class 2), so they can't "see" each other over the distance between house & coop.

But first I have to get other chores done: like getting my Xterra roadworthy again after the accident in August. Snow's coming: gonna have to stop driving the car soon.

About flippin' time!!

The first egg was actually laid two days ago, but I held off saying anything to my (now) 8 year-old so he could think the chickens were waiting for his birthday to lay eggs :-)

In vino veritas

Walking around the back of the property with my seven year-old son, we came across a bunch of vines I had seen before and wondered about. But this time they were loaded down with familiar-looking fruit. Is it really what it looks like? Tight clusters of small purple berries, with a hazy bloom. Really? Pluck, taste. eww! Sour, but yes, they're grapes!

Now to some of you this is old news, but I had never seen wild grapes before. Did I mention I am (OK, used to be :-) an avid winemaker? So one week later, now I have 10 lbs of grapes, crushed, with two gallons of pure water and two pounds of sugar and a packet of Montrachet gently bubbling in a fermenter! My first batch of wine in over two years and the first ever made from raw fruit.

It's a small pleasure, but an important one. You see, when we moved into this place almost three years ago, I wanted to make my first mead to celebrate. Never got around to it. Now the celebration is late, but more fitting: the wine is made from grapes growing on my own little patch of land. And that is infinitely more satisfying.

Hey, laughing boy: no eggs yet

Yeah, I'm a Daffy Duck fan (anyone catch the reference :-)

In the news: drakes don't lay eggs! Yup, both my ducks are showing those unmistakable signs of being male Mallards! Good luck getting eggs out of them!

The hens -- we now clearly have 5 pullets & two cockerels, one of which has started to crow, albeit quietly -- should start laying any day now. Every morning I open the coop hoping for a little brown egg and am greeted with nothing but impatient birds in a hurry to get out and start scratching for stuff.

Patience, they say, is a virtue. I ain't the virtuous type apparently :-)

p.s.,
I'm known as HeyLaughingBoy on a number of online forums. Shout if you see me anywhere!

Electronic reminders

Hmmm. Been a month since the last post. Only exciting thing around here was finding the mysterious single stalk of wheat growing amongst my potatoes! Courtesy of a "bird bomb?" Dunno.

A while back I mentioned that I was working on a small system to monitor the coop temperature. Well, I'm still working on that mainly because the solar cells I was going to use to charge the batteries aren't as good as I thought.

But now I have even more reason to get it done. Last night I was sitting here at about the same time when I looked outside wondering why I could hear dogs barking in the distance and realized "crap, I didn't put the birds to bed." Around here dogs barking at night can mean they hear coyotes so I grabbed a flashlight and went running down the hill. Luckily everyone was OK and the ducks were even in the coop (I usually have to herd them in) so all I had to do was close and latch the door. They were a bit annoyed by the light but otherwise OK.

Since the remote computer I built has inputs for reading switches, I'm going to put a "door closed" switch on the coop and have a short program running on the PC so if it's after dark and the door isn't closed, it sounds an alarm in the house. Hopefully I'll never need it, but if nothing else, it'll be a fun little project. Ah, the magic of wireless technology.

Few pics

No content today, just posting some pics for someone who wants to see...