Our Life Together

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Met the New Neighbors

We had a late taste of winter this week. It snowed enough for Lawman to get out and use the snow blower to cut a path down to the slanty shanty. The birds are kinda goofy about coming out in the mornings when there is snow on the ground. Once they see the ground, they come out of the coop and go about their regular routine.

After the girls came out and started milling around, we heard a commotion outside. Lawman went to investigate and found a dog steady running down and killing our girls.

He went back to the house and grabbed the trusty 1911 and managed to scare the dog off. It's owners, our new neighbors, were chasing them around the yard yelling for them to stop, but the dogs were having none of it. After Lawman started shooting, the killer dog turned and ran toward Cupcake. This put Lawman's rule of not killing a dog to the test. Proper shot placement turned the dog away from Cupcake and back towards it's house with the neighbors trailing behind them. They caught and stopped one dog before it did any damage.
After the carnage was over, the majority of the hens did not come back to the coop. We have sixty birds total, this was all that went up the night after the attack.

Over the next two days, the hens started returning to the coop. We lost twelve total, and egg production dropped by one dozen a day, so we lost layers. Yay us.
Lawman finished the top bar bee hive, and put a coat of Teak Oil on it. It really made the cedar wood 'pop'. Bring on the bees.

We've had a couple of plum trees in the garage, we've been waiting for the weather to break so we could plant them. It's calling for heavy rain in the coming week, so we went ahead and planted them over the weekend.

The last plum trees we bought died, a couple of them never had leaves on them so they were probably dead when we bought them. These have leaves and even blooms. We're sure the fruit won't make it this season, but we're nothing if not patient.
Our onion sets arrived, so garden stuff is about to jump off. We put these in water to keep them alive until we can get the garden in shape.

On the food front, we used up the leftover brisket to make baked burritos one night.

"The Boy" wanted another home made pizza for dinner one night.

And as always, we ended the week with wings. And oysters.

K&K

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Customer Service

Last week we left y'all with our chicken coop on it's side. For the first couple of days, the hens kept laying eggs inside the nest boxes even though it was on a serious slant. We figured there was no rush to get the coop righted. That was until Monday, when we only got a dozen or so eggs from the nest boxes. We thought maybe the stress of the storm had finally caught up with the girls? On the way back to the house we found a hole under the back porch full of eggs. The girls had been using this hole for at least a couple of days and we knew we had to get the coop fixed up before they found another place to lay and we lost all of our eggs.
Lawman called a guy advertising on the Craigslist, and he wasn't interested in the job. At all. We're not sure why anyone would advertise a business if you don't want the work, but we moved on. We called the man who set up the coop for us when it was delivered, and he said he was in town Monday for another job, he would come out and set it back up. We waited around all day, and around 1700hrs, he called to let us know he just couldn't make it out. He said he would do the job, but could only nail down a time frame of "one day this week."
Now, Lawman isn't that busy during the week, but sitting by the phone, hoping to get a call, isn't how he wants to spend his days. We went on to a recommendation of a friend of ours, he gave us a name of a guy who has a rollback truck and might be able to set the coop back. We called and he agreed to come out and help us. Then he never showed or called.
Lawman became a little frustrated, so he took Deathstroke down to the coop, hooked his thirty foot tow strap to the rails underneath the coop, and pulled it upright, then up the hill and back under the pine tree. On Saturday, we went down to the slanty shanty and cleaned out the poop, changed the straw, and fixed the side doors that got knocked out of track. After we got the coop cleaned out, Lawman borrowed Pop's floor jack and jacked the back side of the shanty up to where it was almost level and set some blocks under it. It's not a professional job, but the hens don't seem to mind. They are back to production levels before the storm.

Not only did the girls use the hole under the porch, but one brown nosing bird would deliver her egg right to the back door on the porch.

We guess when you fry chicken wings every Sunday, she wants to keep hers attached? We are sure she will go back to the next boxes at the shanty soon.
Lawman does the lions share of cooking and baking around The Acre, but this week, Cupcake wanted to dust off her baking tools and make a homemade cinnamon roll.

We had a spaghetti dinner one night this week, we used our fresh from the vine to the jar homemade sauce, and nothing goes with homemade sauce like a fresh loaf of olive bread.

And it was a slower week for Cupcake on the work front, so we had time to have a real breakfast each morning. Lawman made her scratch made buttermilk biscuits, bacon and eggs and had it on the table when she got home from dropping the girl at school.

There was a new wrinkle on Thor's red meat offering this week. Lawman has been smoking brisket for a few years now, and he seems to have it down to a science. Not happy to rest on his heels, he tried a new way of cooking a brisket. He slow roasted it in our cast iron dutch oven. It was so tender, we're pretty sure we could eat it with a straw.

Sunday rolled around, and we needed a new pie for dessert this coming week. We went back to chocolate pie for the coming week.

We ended the week with wings, and oysters.
K&K

Sunday, March 4, 2018

The Slanty Shanty

We always have a nice breeze blowing here at The Acre, but this past week, mother nature really showed herself. We got the notice that high wind warnings were in place but we don't keep anything outside that would be damaged so we didn't skip a beat and went to bed. We woke up to the sound of the wind hitting the front of the house like a truck.
Uncle Billy built the house, so we were just waiting for the roof to peel off like a sardine can. Just around dawn our back up rooster walked up under our bedroom window and began crowing. We thought this was odd, because we hadn't opened the coop up yet. We have a couple of crazy birds that sleep in a pine tree every night, we thought maybe the rooster spent the night camping with the girls. Until we got up and started our day.

The "Coop Devile" is now the "Slanty Shanty". The wind blew the whole shed off the foundation it was on. The shed must weight over a ton, so the wind was really howling. It obviously blew the side doors open before it came off the foundation, which is how "Joe" got out to come alert us of trouble. He usually comes to the bedroom window when there is a predator in the yard, so we guess we should start paying closer attention to him?
We contacted the shed guy who set it up for us and he's due to come out this coming week so we hope to have the girls back upright and back on the rail to our three dozen eggs a day production.
Last week we said we had a problem with pie, then "The Boy" said he wanted one of our home made pizza pies for dinner. It's a pie, so it still counts.