Coops

I managed to find a coop on Craigslist for about $50 that was someone's 4-H project. It just fit in the back of the big truck (Silver), and I got it home and positioned with help from Robyn and Tim. Tomorrow I'm going to stake out where the fencing on the run goes, maybe go out and get diatomaceous earth to sprinkle into the coop and around the run, and find the left over house paint to paint the coop with. It's a lovely shade of blue. There may be pictures. :3

Chicks!

Yesterday my boyfriend and I drove up to Washington to get five silkie chicks. Yes, they look like chocobos - especially the buff ones!

In order of appearance from left to right, their colors are buff, blue splash, buff (head), white, black/lavender split (butt). They keep climbing on their feeder and kicking shavings into it.

They were supposed to be in a watermelon box, but the guy who was going to give me the box didn't tell his coworker, who was working yesterday, and spent his spare time chopping up a few extra watermelon boxes so they could be recycled. The only one left was soggy. >:

I was pretty frustrated, but had an extra box lying in my room "just in case" -- which was a good thing, all things considered. Well, my room is full of boxes -- it's the storage room -- but I had an empty box saved for them.

The white, the larger buff, and the black/lavender split are suspected roosters. The larger of the two buffs keeps standing up at pecking at me, and the black just won't let me pick him/her up. The blue splash and smaller buffs are the most docile, and slept on me last night while I was reading on the sofa I just moved into the room. (I swapped it out for the old treadmill.)

Puppies are adorable.

Two of our mares sold last night, so today Linda (the owner) took them up to Washington to meet their new humans. Which meant that Nikki and I got to go back and feed horses, change who was in the arena running around (although it's been sunny and hot for the past couple of days, the ground is still pretty wet), and, most importantly, let the puppy out to run around and pee.

Nikki knows the feeding schedule better than I do, so while she was scooping grain and carrying hay, I was running around in the sun with a young Australian Shepherd puppy. We're still teaching him not to jump up on people, but he did "sit" and "go get it" pretty well. I wasn't sure if he wanted me to throw his toy, play tug-of-war with his toy, or just admire it, though. He was pretty happy to sit on my boots and get his head scratched, regardless. Wash is a few months old and adorable! But I don't have any pictures -- I didn't want to bring my big camera to play with the puppy, and I don't have a point and shoot.

Oh yeah -- I definitely got the better end of this deal. Nikki feeds horses while I play with a hyperactive stuck-in-a-crate-all-day puppy. Though why Linda is trying to make an energetic breed into an indoor dog is just beyond me.


The ground here on the farm is still too wet to till, which is too bad. Our tomato plants are withering and yellowed, though the peppers are flowering. There is grass growing in the vegetable patch and I'm just a few steps closer to getting actual chickens. So far in the mail I've received a chick feeder, the screw-on bottom for a quart-jar-style waterer, and a 50-watt red heat bulb. I have a box to make into a brooder, and no cats have been in my room for over a week.

Phew!

That barn work sure tires me out! My best friend, who also works there (only she's worked there for a few more years than I have) says that it took her about a month to work up the muscle mass needed to be able to move at all after a day there. Fortunately it doesn't actually start until.. well, really, whenever we want it to. The kicker to that is the fact that it starts to get really blisteringly hot (well, hot for Oregon -- 80 to 90 degrees) around 1:00 in the afternoon. I get to sleep in later than I ever did during the school year - I get up around 9:00 or 9:30, get to the barn by 10:00.

Once it stops raining so much, I'll be able to till the vegetable patch and finish the (collapsed) drainage ditches. However, as it stands, we've had one sunny day in the past two weeks and other than that we've had straight rain or drizzle or showers. It's been overcast every day except yesterday. The only problem with this is the fact that we can't get anything to dry out, and multiple runs at the barn have flooded. One of the stalls even had a puddle coming up through the mats under the shavings and was about the size of one or two couch cushions. It rained all night last night and everything is muddy.

Hopefully it'll dry out some time this week and we can till, fix the driveway, and dig ditches (yeah, we said that last week...).

Chick supplies!

Today... well, yesterday, I guess. Anyway, today was a really easy day at the barn. Tomorrow I finish clearing the arena boards, probably pull weeds if the incessant rain lets up a bit, probably refill water barrels -- at the barn. Then it's back to those drainage ditches -- apparently, unfinished ditches can collapse under the weight of new rain and mud and muck.

Today, I got a bunch of supplies off of Amazon.com for future chicks. Eventually I want to raise silkies (not gonna lie, I like them because they remind me of chocobos), easter eggers (for their colorful eggs - they can lay blue, green, yellow, pink, brown, tinted, and lavender eggs), and Buckeyes (they're a heritage breed). For now, though, it's just going to be silkies. They're extremely docile, apparently, and very soft. I got a feeder, waterer, heat-emitting infrared bulb, and a clamp lamp for a total of about $20. Now all I need is the actual box, bedding, feed, grit, and chicks! Plus, this gives me more motivation to get going on that coop.. which I'm currently lacking, to be honest. It seems like such a far-off-in-the-future kind of thing that to start on it at all is to spook it and then it runs off, unattainable. Instead, my chick raising supplies will arrive around the middle of next week (which happens to be my 21st birthday).

Nikki had the day off so we didn't do much as far as work goes. Actually, we went shopping and then to my father's house to pick up some stuff I'd forgotten and desperately needed (like a hairbrush, and socks).

Greetings and Salutations!

"So just what is an adventitious farm girl, aside from you?" This is the first question I think my imaginary readers would ask. "Adventitious" is a synonym for "accidental," and in botany it means "structures that develop in an unusual place," such as roots growing from leaves; in medicine, it refers to a condition developed after birth, such as diabetes.

You see, I was born in Portland, Oregon. You may have heard of us. If not, that link will take you to the Wikipedia page. My family moved to Eugene for a couple of years, but I don't remember that very much. When I was two years old, we moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon. If you don't bother to read the article, it's a snobby, new-money-rich, self-obsessive little town filled with much the same; most of my classmates and friends called it "the bubble" and couldn't wait to get away to college. My freshman year of university, my roommate happened to have horses. I love horses, and used to ride! What a crazy random happenstance. (Also, her mother loves Joss Whedon.)

A couple of years later, here I find myself, sitting on the couch in the house on her 50-acre farm. She and I just got back from a morning spent at an appaloosa barn, which is where we work. Then it was back home, where she cleaned out the ponies' stalls and I worked on drainage ditches.

Yeah, I said ponies. She has two ponies (Smokey and Starfire), four horses (Bugsy, Rev, Spencer, and Lucy), two dogs (Chip and Lucky), and four cats (Leo, Mia, Princess Fuzzball Kitten Person, and Spike Thunderpaws -- yes, seriously). Most of their land is unused, but I'm working on a vegetable patch near the house and I'm hoping to get chickens this summer. Eventually I'd like to produce a lot of food here.

Those chicken coop plans aren't going to draw themselves!