Broody Chicken

It is amazing how many new things you can learn from raising chickens. We have had our chickens for about a year now, and just when we think we have it down, they throw something new at us. The past two weeks we have been dealing with a broody chicken. And what, you ask, is a broody chicken? It is a hen who is trying to hatch an egg - even though it's not fertilized. Yep, no rooster in our hen house, yet this chick won't leave the nesting box.
Not only will she not leave the nesting box, she happened to pick the favored nesting box in the coop. We went from four eggs a day to one at most, because the other hens won't use the other nesting box to lay eggs.

At this point we have tried removing her from the box every time we enter the coop. For those of you who don't know, hens who are broody can be nasty and will peck at you if you try and remove them from the nesting box and then attempt to stare you down and ruffle their feathers at you as you remove the eggs that are in the box (yes some of the other hens will squeeze in there and lay eggs on top of her). Andy actually attempted a staring contest with her to try and intimidate her out off the box ( I am very sorry I missed this one). Tomorrow we are going to try closing off that particular box, as suggested by one of my coworkers who owns chickens, in hopes that she will forget why she wanted to be in there and go about her merry hen ways. If that does not work there are several other "interesting" suggestions found online that we may resort to.

KinderGARDEN-Beautiful Dirt

Amidst all the rain this week, the soil for our raised beds arrived!

(http://www.intervalecompost.net/)

(We love our soil!)

We immediately got right to work loading up the raised beds before the impending rainstorm. Little Man dug right in.

And then he lost some of his dirt.

Followed by the complete abandonment of his wheelbarrow all together

He ended up giving us directions as to where the soil went.

Until.....he figured out there was a big pile of dirt to play with

Taking Advantage of the Sun!

Due to the insane amount of snow we received well into the month of May, followed by flooding rains, we have not seen a whole lot of sunshine lately and my gardening has fallen severely behind. This past week we finally were able to break out and took advantage of every minute of sunshine. We ran on the bike trails, went to the park and made a few mini-toddler-sized hiking trips.

I even managed to get out and enjoy my flower gardens a little.

And then on Saturday, we retreated back under cover as the rains started to fall again.

kinderGARDEN- Waiting

Since we are patiently waiting for our compost to be delivered for our raised beds(Tuesday) we decided to add some decorative touches to little man's garden.

Ps. If anyone can tell me how to add the kinderGARDEN link to my page that would be great!I am having a little bit of trouble.

Gardening with Little Man

Rather than sit by and read others' blogs about gardening with their children, we are going to join up with the Inadvertant Farmer's KinderGARDEN blog roll this year. Not that we haven't gardened before, but this year it is going to be about Little Man having his own garden plot to get dirty in; not that I actually think I can keep him out of mine. Having his very own raised bed was actually his idea: when we decided to switch over to raised beds this year and he saw them being built, he decided that he wanted his own.

Actually, he also determined that certain plants were his as well as we were starting seeds this year. I can tell age three is going to be a year of independence, starting with him getting dirty in his own garden.

Of course, this is also the child who thinks the chickens are having a conversation with him and often tells me the bunny is not listening.