Removal of the front Lawn: Part 2 Full Swale ahead!

Howdy All!

Bye bye lawn, hello beautiful California natives! After three weeks, our grass is dead! Here is an awesome photo of the grass after the 3 weeks:

Here is our original front yard plan: Lots of California natives! We changed things up slightly, for instance we put some stepping stones from the sidewalk to the front hose.

You only get so far with a plan, so in the end we needed to buy the plants. We have a local native nursery that both fortunately and unfortunately went out of business. Fortunately because we got all of our plants on sale. Unfortunately because now we can never go back!

We planted these native plants:

Front yard plants - right side from side walk

Bee's bliss Sage x2

White monkeyflower x1

Pink monkeyflower x3

Artemisia x3

Dymondia mixed in with pavers

Purple needle-grass x2

Grass (can't remember which kind) x2

Cleveland sage x1

Front yard plants - left side from side walk

Ceanothus 'yankee point' x1

blue-eyed grass x2

showy blue penstemon x4

purple rock cress x4

red buckwheat x1

cleveland sage x1

We first started by making a swell swale to catch the run off from our roof. N dug the trench first:

The bottom of the swale we covered with weed cloth to prevent weeds from growing up from below. We placed "All purpose gravel" on the bottom, to maybe an inch. You can see it here holding the weed cloth down:

On top of the "All Purpose Gravel" we put "River Rock" which has a better look to it and is a bit bigger than the other rock

We then laid out all of the plant and where we were going to plant them.

After that, N got to planting. It was kind of hard to dig through the cardboard. You can see G in the background, giving moral support as he worked on his crawling.

Here you can see the detail of our front drain, which will be going into the swell. We may be in a drought, but it is supposed to rain in a couple of days, so I'll try to get a picture of it in action!

Here is a photo of the lay out of the plants on the left side of the the front yard:

A picture of the far left side of the front yard, showing the existing rose bush, and some plantings:

Here is a photo of the front "lawn" about 3 weeks after we did all the plantings. All of the plants are a bit small still, but hopefully in a year we will have a beautiful front yard! So far we are seeing a lot more butterflies and hummingbirds in the front, which before we only saw in our back yard!

Happy plantings!

M & N

First big harvest of the year!

Ping pong ball for scale

Chicken Run

Howdy all!

Our chickens are getting pretty big, and it is time to get them the heck out of the house, so we finished the chicken run! To start, we moved around the dirt near the chicken coop, to create a (roughly) flat area to set up the run:

We also wanted to give the chickens a nice base in which to play (and poop), so we took an old (and unsuccessful) compost heap, and moved it into the chicken run. The compost was mostly unbroken down leaves, hay, and grasses.

The run has a base of redwood beams. We were afraid of using the chemically treated, rot resistant wood given the proximity of the wood to the chickens. We want nice health eggs.

Here is a good photo showing the outline of the chicken run, in a nice little 'T'. The chickens need about 10 square feet per chicken, so this gives them enough room to run around.

After the base was done, we installed the vertical posts of 2x 4s, that will support the hardware cloth (do not use chicken wire! The holes are too big, and critters can still get their hands through the holes. We chose 1/4" hardware cloth, so nothing hopefully can get in.)

Here is Nicky relaxing:

After the vertical posts went up, we attached the horizontal ones that will hold the roof of wire up. We attached these to the chicken coop, which is a nice sturdy base.

After the wood was done, we put on a nice thick layer of paint to protect the wood:

Here is our door, which will be big enough to allow us to move compost in and out of the chicken run once our little egg makers start their magic.

A confused Ford investigates the chicken run.

Here I work to install the Hardware cloth (again don't use Chicken wire), which covers all the sides of the run to protect our chickens from possums, raccoons and alley cats.

Ford investigates the inside of the chicken coop.

The excess wire at the bottom of the run was folded 90 degrees, to prevent digging by creatures under the edges of the run. We will eventually cover these with concrete paver stones that will be heavy enough to prevent digging. As well, our dog Flint **loves** to stare at the chickens, eagerly licking his lips. The pavers will prevent him from digging into the coop as well.

Ford supervises our work from on top of the chicken coop:

Success! Our chicken wire can support the weight of a slightly overweight kitty cat : )

Still to do: Move the chickens out to the chicken coop.
                Finish the egg laying boxes
                Finish putting the pavers around the chicken run.
                Clean out my destroyed office!

Chickens have arrived!

Howdy All,

We got our chickens finally! Here they are when they were small, and we first got them. We ordered them from Dare 2 Dream Farm, who (delivered!) us 6 chicks, a box, a water bottle, a food dispenser, food, and shavings for their bed. Unfortunately one was sick, and died a couple of days after we got them, but the company nicely replaced her for free!

We purchased:

2 Rhode island reds,
2 Easter Eggers,
2 Plymouth barred rocks

Here is a video we took of our chickens doing their thing: usually pooping, especially in their water bowl, which we have to clean out every 2 hours! (if you see nothing below, you can follow this link: Chicks!)

 Two weeks later, and our little chicks have gotten a lot bigger! We took them outside a couple of days ago, to let them see what the big wide world was like, but they didn't want to leave their box. We let them loose inside our enclosed veggie garden, thinking that they would be safe (which they weren't)!

Eventually we coaxed them out, and here they are, among the buckwheat and winter rye that we planted for the winter to revitalize the soil.

So cute! Poop my little darlings! Poop!

Flint is so curious about our little chicks, that he just loves to stare at them and lick his lips..... hmmmm. Eventually he snuck into the garden, and tried to either play (hopefully) or eat (unsuccessfully) the chickens! We caught him in time before he did any permanent damage to the chicks, other than psychological.

Hope you enjoy pictures of our chicks! We will update soon, as they get bigger!

 M & N

Before and after...

A quick taste of before (move-in May 2012) and after (summertime 2013). yep, we've been busy!