I left the coop chicken door open last night so the chicks where already out in the run today when I got it going. They were running around feeding away.
A bit later I sat in the pen and noticed some chicks where up in the high roost for the first time. They go up the ladder to get up there and sorta fly down when they want to come down.
Some of the chicks use the lower resting pole I put in there. They are resting after a hard morning foraging food.
Seems they found their new bedding material
I put this straw in the pen yesterday for a possible future bed for the chicks when I shut them out of the coop. I was surprised to find a bunch of them resting on it.
And even more of them piled in there for a noon break.
I’m sitting in my chair taking a break myself and this is my view.
Checked the van’s engine fluids
I worked some more prepping my van, checking the oil and water in the engine but forgot to check the tire pressures maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow.
I need a dill patch for pickles
I wanted to plant some dill seeds and I had a spot that gets water from the enclosure sprinkler, but in order to plant where I wanted to I first had to bury the six inches of wire that goes underground on that side of the enclosure. I have the ditch dug here and now need to bury the wire.
Shovel means worms to the chicks
All buried. The chicks saw the shovel and wanted worms, but there were none in this spot yet, so I’ll have to make it nicer for the worms with some mulch. You can see the little peeps on the other side of the wire peeping away, but no worms.
The shovel means worms to the peeps. They train easily and really like worms
The ground needed tilling for planting
Once I had the wire buried I had to dig up the ground to plant the dill seed so I used the shovel and dug twice to break up the soil enough to plant the seed.
Sprinkler in action
I set the sprinkler up on top of this enclosure as I hadn’t done that yet. Here’s the sprinkler in action which over water’s onto the dill patch I just planted.
I spent most of the rest of the day puttering around the yard. I did plant some more tomato plants from my brother mostly for chicken feed later. I planted them here and there in the enclosures as I heard the chickens don’t like to eat the plants, so we’ll see if that is true.
Now that I have chickens I thought a mulch bag on my mower would be handy to bring cut weeds to the run as they are also full of seeds. The only problem was I didn’t have a mulch bag for the mower.
Ray has one
But while I was visiting Ray a couple weeks ago I mentioned a mulch bag would handy to have on my mower. He said he just happened to have one for his mower that he didn’t use and I could have it. Lucky me he had it stored in his shed so it was in pretty good shape for being so old as he’d had that mower for a long time.
Anyway today I had the time to get it mounted on the mower.
Need to make a bracket
Here’s the bag that needs to mount to the side there. It’s actually made to mount on the back but that can’t be done with this type of mower so it’s going on the side.
I needed to make a bracket that would attach to the bag so the bag could be easily removed to dump it so I constructed a bracket for the bag then figured out how to mount it on the mower and this is what I ended up with.
The bag drops right on the bracket and is easy to put on and off.
Here’s the finished product ready to try out.
Giving the bag a test
I had some weeds I needed to get mowed that I hadn’t been able to get to so that’s what I did. The bag worked out rather well. Three of them fill the wheelbarrow. I just have to learn to empty the bag sooner as it fills up pretty fast.
Peeps like it
l dumped most of the grass in the chicken’s mulch run on top of where I’ve been digging up worms as I’ll mix this in with the dirt eventually. It didn’t take the little peeps long to find it.
With all the feed ,the peeps were getting full so some of them went to the roost to digest. They only went this high so far on my new ladder. Some of them have been up higher but for now they seem to prefer this lower area.
Continue prepping my van for a trip
One of the things I wanted to get accomplished today was to grease my van and check the fluids in the transfer case and transmission so I got the tools and grease gun out and did that.
4 way emergency flashers don’t work for a long time
I also worked on getting the 4 way flashers to go. They haven’t worked in years so I thought I’d work on them a bit. Yesterday I measured the voltage from the fuse that supplies power to it and it checked out ok, so I thought about it some more last night and decided I need to check out the blinker pod which is the pod which is that one in he upper left. The turn signal flasher is the same and on the bottom left. The trouble with the 4 way flasher pod is it’s hard to line up the prongs on the pod to fit the socket in the fuse block that it plugs into as it’s tucked up under there.
Checking out the pod
I removed the pod and thought it came out of the socket too easy like maybe it wasn’t plugged in right. I measured the pod with my meter and also checked it against the turn signal flasher unit as it’s the same. Both flasher units measured the same so the pod should be good.
Had to fiddle with it and now it works, but I had more to do
I fiddled with trying to plug the unit in several times and would test it and no go, but finally after more fiddling and being very careful it felt like it might have going into the socket properly. I turned the switch on and I now had blinker lights on the dash.
I walked around the van to check to make sure all the lights were working. The front left light was barely working, very deem it was.
So I pulled the light bulb out and had a look at the solder end contacts on the bulb. You can see that the solder contacts are totally flattened out and that’s why it’s not making good contact. All those back washboardy roads take their toll.
I built up the contacts but that didn’t work out
I got the soldering iron out and added a bit of solder to each contact. But when I tried to put the blub back in the socket, it wouldn’t fit, so I just got a new blub I knew I had and put it in and all is well. I will save that blub for another larger socket in the back which I might need some day. Into the repair parts with it.
I was ready for a nap by then so after I washed my greasy hands I napped a bit.
A pie from Dominique’s Sweets
After my nap I went outside again and found this apricot pie on my car’s hood. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnn.
Dominique who does Dominique’s Sweets and sells mostly at farmer’s markets made me this delicious apricot pie. She’s also my partner in the chickens as I need someone to tend them when I’m away on a trip.
Needless to say I went back in the house and had a piece and boy was it good. She sure knows how to bring out the flavors. Looking good eh Patsy.
It wasn’t easy, but I was able to stick with only one piece for now. :O)
Just before dark I went out and tended to the chicks. Water in the containers and feed in their feeders. I also noticed two of the little black ones were outside the run which they shouldn’t be. Once they get out they mostly want back in with the flock. I looked for the place they got out but couldn’t find it right away. A bit latter I looked again and found where they had been taking a dust bath and removed some dirt by a gate and got under the rebar. Some of the black chicks are still fairly small so they can get out, but soon as they grow a bit more it won’t be so easy. Until then I need to keep and eye on them.
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.
