It was drizzling this morning when I woke up so I stayed in bed for a bit longer just because I could.
The drizzle stopped by the time I got it going and the sun was out nicely as I went outside to see if the chickens needed any feed. I put some feed in their feeders and checked their water which was ok.
Cutting wire for gates
Today I was going to get the wire on the three new gates I’ve been working on constructing so I got the tools out, took some measurements and cut the wire.
Bought the wrong wire
When I went to cut the new roll of welded fence wire I found I’d gotten five foot high wire instead of the six foot wire I paid for which was totally my fault as I loaded the wire. Five foot would work ok for the gates so I was good to go on that so I used hog nose clips to fasten the wire to the rebar frames I’d made.
The hog nose clips work real well and really sped up the wire attachment process.
Installing gates
After a break I installed this gate. the fence wire was already up so I just needed to stick the gate in there and wire it up. It’s nice to be able to walk through here instead of walking all the way around.
This is the second gate I installed. The fence wire was already up on that one too so I made quick time getting it up and functioning.
Wires too short
I was going to use the fence wire I bought to fence the raspberry patch, but decided it was just too short and I needed to get some six foot fence to do it but that didn’t stop me from installing the gate for now.
Extending the coops roof
After another break I took all the roofing material down that I’d been checking out on the new bigger chicken coop roof. I decided I needed that roof longer. I had 4 feet up but decided I really needed 8 foot lengths but all I had left of my old scrap roofing was too short.
Making things work
So I laid all the roofing pieces on the ground and rounded up enough pieces to extend each piece to 8 feet. I found I just barely had enough roofing material to do the job and some of it wasn’t in real good condition, but, hey, it’s just a chicken coop roof and all it had to do was stop most of the rain water from coming through so it would work. I’m sure I’ll have to use some silicone to seal up some of the old holes in it.
Popping rivets
I drilled and used pop rivets to fasten it together to make the 8 foot lengths over lapping it a bit.
I got all the pieces riveted together and put them aside for now as I have to make the roof frame larger now. One thing always leads to another.
Grazing time
It was time to let the chickens out to graze in the yard so I opened the gate and got out of the way.
Here they are rushing over to graze in the raspberry patch.
The new gate didn’t stop them. :O) It’s ok as the raspberry plants are dormant and they are eating all the bugs and weeds and putting a bit of poo on the ground which the berries should like in the spring.
Moving poo dirt
While the chickens were out of their pen and out of the way I got the shovel and wheelbarrow and removed about three inches of dirt full of poo. It was getting too wet and I wanted to put some woodchips in there to make things nicer and I think it would be a better collector of the poo.
Here’s the part that was getting wet with the poo dirt replaced with the woodchips.
Poo for trees
I wheeled the poo dirt I dug out of the pen over to some of my fruit trees and put some around the trees sparingly as the stuff is likely hot as it hasn’t aged much.
This winter the rain will slowly wash the poo stuff into the ground ready for the trees when they start to grow in the spring.
Patting the chickens
After that I was ready to go in for the day but I had to wait for the chickens to get up on their roost for the night so I could lock them in so I waited a bit until they did. I closed the gate and then I try to give each one a pat on the back while they are on the roost just to get them more used to me.
Now I could go in for the day and I did.
Nice day, especially since it didn’t shower all day like the weather guys said it would.
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
