Chicken Pen Work and Making Two Bridges

Thursday March 4, 2024 Guerneville CA.

Egg eater

That’s not good when it’s a chicken eating the eggs.

I wanted to change  my motion cam to monitor the chicken’s nesting boxes.

Cam

I needed to move this cam to the boxes which was easy as it’s mount just had some wires holding it up and the nest boxes where only ten feet away.

I fed the chicken’s first, in this pen. I noted that it needed more mulch as there were puddles of water and mud in there.

After that, I got the cam mounted in front of the nest boxes and set it up to watch the boxes and record when there was motion to catch that egg eater.

Mulch for the chickens

I moved several loads of these woodchips to the chicken pen.

This load of woodchips is ready to dump in the pen.

All mulched and that looks better. It also makes the chickens hunt for the seeds I throw in there for them to eat, so the seeds last longer.

Making bridges

I’ve been thinking about making some bridges to cross the creeks when it’s raining hard as that’s the only time the water flows. Wooden bridges are too big and take too long to build and rot out in about 20 years or so. I decided against those.

So, this 8x2x13 foot steel bridge makes more sense and will last a very long time and actually blend into the forest better than a big bridge and no maintenance ether.

We have a lot of scrap pieces of this metal that Tom scrounged when he was working making stainless steel tanks for grapes.

All I had to do was weld the sections together. That would be easy if each end was square, but some of the ends were cut with a slight angle to them. I had to mix and match a bit to get the angled cuts on the ends of each bridge so I was able to weld things up easier and not have to weld up those unsquared ends.

Frist bridge

Here’s my first bridge almost complete. It’s about 13 feet long. Eight inches wide is fairly easy to walk across as long as it’s only a couple feet off the ground.

Dated and signed

First I decided to weld a date on it and then also decided to put my name on it. The name should catch some attention when people cross it and people will wonder who the heck Bob Noble was after I’m long gone.

Chicken manure

I needed to give my back a break so I cleaned out the chicken manure under the chickens roost. There wasn’t much of it as they tend to eat it.

I put some of the manure on the avocado tree I recently planted.

And I put the rest of it on these citrus fruit trees that I planted a couple years ago.

2nd bridge construction

There was still quite a bit of time left in the day so I started building the second bridge and got most of it done when real light rain  started so I had to close the work down and it was getting dark soon anyway.

Nice day.