So we meet again

For the first time, for the last time.

Bonus points if you know what that line is from.

After losing two barred rock girls to the hawk, we locked all seven of the remaining chickens in the covered run together.  We're pleased to announce that we still have all seven!  We've started giving them limited access to the pasture and that seems to be working.  The group combined with minimal trouble and no violence, so at least that part is done.  We now have just one chicken coop occupied, which cuts down on my work.

We also had some guys out to deal with the trees that were too close to the house.

There will be updated pictures of the back yard later, now that the big hemlock in the middle is gone.  I have a lot more room for my vegetable garden.

But this post is mostly about my midwinter project:  my bathroom, and specifically, ripping out yet more wallpaper. 

 My husband is a very smart man and got me my own tool set for Christmas.  Now we don't have to bicker over tools and where they should be stored.  Cowboy approves.

The bathroom in question is technically the guest bathroom, a two piece on the landing at the third level of the house.  I keep all of my stuff in there, making it my bathroom.  It's quite tiny but has a big built in nook that gives me a lot of space for storing stuff.  The original sink jutted out into the room and I was constantly clipping my hip on it.

So that had to come out, along with the matching mirror.  It's going on Craigslist, since it's in good shape.  We have a new sink and cabinet from Ikea that's made for tiny bathrooms and it will fit a lot better.  Joe's also going to replace the obnoxious light.  I hit my head on it a lot.

That leaves the nook that has not been updated since . . . ever and the horrible wallpaper.  Yes, I hate all wallpaper, but this is particularly obnoxious.

The nook had some rather off center shelving and blue shag carpeting.  Yes, that is blue shag carpeting in the bottom that smelled a bit off. 

Glad to see all of that mess gone.

And then I started pulling out all of the base board and trim in preparation for removing the wallpaper.  I got an extra little surprise.

Well, hello there, my single celled nemesis.  I'm allergic to mold and mildew, so that was an unpleasant discovery.  The good news is that we've found it, so it can all be torn out.  Throwing out the base boards, tearing off the wall paper, and soaking the dry wall with mold and mildew killer should take care of this.  The root cause (condensation from the toilet) was already handled.

I also don't know my own strength.  I punched a hole in the dry wall with the flat bar.  Oops.

I'll be taking some benadryl tonight and probably using filtration when I go back in there tomorrow to start tearing down the wallpaper.  Once the wallpaper is down, the nook is getting new dry wall to cover the popcorn stuff and cover the gaps.  I want a seamless inset that I'll paint white.  The walls are going to be purple (my bathroom, my favorite color).  Silver shelving in the nook and recessed lighting will make my little bathroom look like it's actually from this century.

Another room of wallpaper bites the dust!

Circle of life

If you live in the country and let your birds free range, you're going to lose some eventually.

This morning I went out to let the dogs out.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a big bird take off.  I looked fast enough to see a gray hawk with a black mask fly away from the rhododendron that the laying hens usually duck underneath.  There was a mass of black and white feathers just at the edge of the bush.

Just when egg production had gotten back to 3 eggs a day, one of the Rock girls gets taken down by a hawk.  Joe had just been out and all of the other chickens were under cover, so we think I just barely missed it.  The hawk barely got anything out of the kill.  Hopefully that means it won't be in a hurry to come back.

The three remaining Rock girls came out of hiding and went back about their chicken business.  The four little layers still haven't come out of their coop, but I can't say I blame them.

We'll have to see if this is the start of a new problem.  Until now, we've been relying on the tree cover to keep the hawks out and the dogs to keep the foxes at bay.  Winter makes them hungry and this hawk got his Christmas dinner a little early.  I'm hoping this was just a fluke, especially when I have my spring birds ordered.

I'm picking up a trio of Nankin bantams in January from a breeder.  Those are just for me to breed and keep for fun.  I'm also picking up 30 Chantecler chicks this spring.  The dorkings were too difficult to find, so I now have 30 Canadian developed, very hardy chicks to start our own self sustaining flock.  No more buying chicks every year!

Both of these breeds are quite rare, so I'm going to be watching the predator situation like a . . . too soon?

The bantams will require some supplemental heat in the winter, so I'm now devising a plan to keep them in a greenhouse.  It's a win win scenario!  Year round greens and adorable little birds.  Joe has entered the 'nod and say yes dear' phase of this plan.  Building a greenhouse can't be that hard, can it?  I'm sure I can manage it.  I might even be able to retain all of my limbs while doing it.

Photoshoot

Today was warm, sunny, and lovely, especially for November.  I decided to take advantage of the 60 degree temps and took out the good camera.  Enjoy a tour of our little baby homestead.


The Hen House, home to our beautiful Barred Rock girls:

The Duck Hut, which our ducks refuse to use since they'd rather sleep outside:

And the Double Meat Palace, which is currently home to the little layers and our cockrel, Rarity:

The duckies!

The chickens, including the big girls, the little layers, and Rarity:

And some shots on what life's like at Chez les Geeks.  Gardening is more entertaining when you have poultry under foot and the world's most adorable (and tiniest) live stock dog.

Baby, it's cold outside

Fun fact of the week, I have a fish tank.

6g salt water tank

Well, I have ten tanks, but whatever.  The point being that I have a lot of aquarium equipment.  What does this have to do with country living?  Wait for it.

Tonight we're getting down to 19 degrees Fahrenheit with steady wind around 15mph.  Brr.  The chickens were all fluffed up, the ducks couldn't care less.  I chipped ice out of the 5g waterer today and I don't think I want to repeat that very often.  Cue the search for what heated water solution we want to use for the winter.  Metal heating stands and floating de-icers and some interesting dyi solutions that all seemed expensive and a bit dicey.  The metal ones rust and the plastic model we found was a pain to refill.  The floating ones seemed likely to melt our plastic waterers.  It seemed to be a matter of picking our poison or accepting that we'd be hauling out buckets of water.

It took me until today to realize I have an entire box of heaters meant for use in water that won't melt plastic and aren't a fire hazard.  Not my most shining moment.

I dropped some aquarium heaters into the waterers for tonight.  The 5 gallon waterer also got a powerhead to help out the 25 watt heater.  The open bucket of water out for the big girls just got a 50 watt heater chucked in it.  That should be plenty to keep 2 gallons of water warm.  Their nipple water system has frozen solid, but we'll be fixing that this weekend.  A five gallon bucket with four nipples stuck on the bottom and an aquarium heater chucked inside should keep them well hydrated this winter.

Much simpler than dropping $60 for a metal watering system that will rust out or a plastic system with a reputation for melting.  Thanks, but no thanks.  I'll stick to my aquarium heaters.

Critter Monitoring on the Homestead with Raspberry Pi

Successfully captured a freshly laid egg:

• Objectives
• Discover what is happening with our chicken eggs. We went from 2-3 eggs per day to no eggs at all. As was mentioned in previous posts it turned out that the stop in eggs was from a chicken virus, but this project was started before that discovery. We needed to know where our eggs were going despite seeing the chickens nesting in the boxes and in the middle of the coop, and one bird possibly going broody.
• The solution needed to be remotely accessible, and it needed to be wireless. In other words it need to be monitored from the comfort of my couch.
• The solution needed to be asynchronous. In other words it needed to record activity and allow me to review in a fraction of the real rime that was monitored = time lapse video.
• Equipment
• Raspberry Pi (I used model B+, but any model would work)
• 2.1 Amp USB power supply (smart phone charger)
• USB WiFi (because who really wants to trench CAT 5 cable through their yard)
• USB webcam
• USB memory card (or a really big SD card)
• dust and water barrier (1 quart sandwich bag works)
• Software
• Raspbian (any unix version running on your Pi could work)
• fswebcam (capture images from the webcam)
• mencoder (converts images to an avi)
• x11vnc (for remote desktop on the pi, this is easy enough to setup, but tightVNCserver is even easier, has more publicity and will work in most cases)
• Remmina Remote Desktop Client (remote gui / remote desktop)
• SSH from a terminal window on my desktop (remote command line access)
• My coop set up
• Outside
• Inside
• Camera placements
• Camera point of view
• My scripts
• Image capture
• Slow frame images (1 image per minute)
• webcam.sh
• Fast frame images (4 images per minute)
• webcamfast.sh
• Video creation
• timelapse.sh
• Still image clean up
• flushold.sh
• my stills are stores on a USB drive, and I'm deleting images that are 2 days old or older. This script is scheduled to run once per week.
• Crontab entries
• crontabsample.txt
• 4 tasks are in my cron table, 
• fast images, 
• slow images, 
• video creation, 
• still image clean up
• you edit your cron jobs with "sudo crontab -e
• 2 commands from my home machine
• grab the new video
• SSH - image flushing, I'll write a bash script and add it to the crontab eventually
• Tips and things you will become familiar with
• As soon as you have it mostly working start making image copies of your Raspberry Pi SD card. If you don't, you will eventually do something that messing up your card and you will have to re-install and configure everything again. I had to do this twice before I learned my lesson while getting everything to autostart on boot.
• Cron jobs
• These are basically scheduled tasks, but they can only be triggered to run as fast as once per minute. Chickens move around a lot in 1 minute.
• 24/7 video recording doesn't make sense when your observable area is empty for 6 hours and black for 12 hours.
• Use the crontab to record different rates during different time windows
• Bash scripting
• because typing 12 characters on 1 line 20 times is way better than 100's of characters on multiple lines 20 times is much easier
• because updating 1 file (script) is much better than updating the same time 20 times.
• because bash has flow control, logic, and 'pause'
• because you can use variables
• Performance issues
• Image resolutions
• size conversions take processor power and time, make everything the same resolution. If your webcam is 720p set your image capture resolution to 1280x720, and set your video output to be 1280x720. This will make your webcam capture faster so you can take more pictures and have better video, and the video creation will be much faster. If you need to change resolutions do it first at the camera capture and try to scale by an integer like 2 or 4 especially if making things smaller. Computers have an easier time dividing evenly without remainders to deal with, can pictures scale faster and better when the process doesn't have to deal with partial pixels. If you scale during video creation be prepared to wait more than an hour for it create the video from the day. Without scaling my setup with create the video file at approximately 15fps, and if there is scaling to be done that drops to 3fps or slower. The other problem with video scaling is it needs to create a temporary file for each image that it scales and the disk access speeds on the Pi is slow (limited by the speed of your SD card or USB stick).
• WiFi Range and interference
• walls add up, you make need an access point outside or you may be able to us an USB WiFi with external antennae. My smart phone had WiFi at the the chicken coop, but had no signal from inside the chicken coop. Now you could just set a static IP on your Pi and go outside next to your coop with a laptop configured with a static IP in the same domain as the Pi and get your video, but that's a horrible option when it's below freezing, or really sunny (can't view your screen), or raining. For me, it is really worth it to get your remote Pi onto your home network. Despite being able to see my home router through a window in the house I still needed to use an external antennae on my Pi and I have the antennae poking out through a roof vent to maintain good stable WiFi signal.
• Chicken wire is a bad RF blocker in general, but it really causes signal degradation in WiFi zones. I have WiFi signal inside my garage which is further from the router than the coop is. My next desperate attempt to have coop connectivity was to run CAT5 from the coop to the garage and put an access point in the garage.
• Start with your camera far away as possible. You want to see the whole area first and not just the small area you think the issue is at. There is a lot that happens off camera if you start the other direction. I learned that the hard way so you won't have to.
• If your camera is placed where your critters can touch it, you need to protect it. With my chickens they really couldn't hurt it, and they mostly ignored it. The ignored the camera so much so that they roosted on it, giving me 1/2 a day of taking pictures of the bedding 12 inches from the camera and 4 hours of feathers on a chicken butt.
• A day in a chicken coop (sample video)
• At about 2:30 clock time an egg appears This mean the birds will get to stay for at least another week.
• Future add-ons to this project
• streaming video with audio
• temperature and humidity monitoring
• automatic coop door

Future of meat production

We got the 25 Cornish X birds back from processing today.  Yes, we did manage to get all 25 to the age of 10 weeks without a single death or broken hip.  I'm pretty darn proud of that.  We're pretty sure we got the slow growing strain (assortment pack, so not sure what the line was).  Combine that with rationed food and we got moderate growth on the birds which led to a flock that could still run around at 10 weeks old.

With an average of 4.6 lbs, a maximum of 6 pounds, and a minimum of 3 lbs, 7 oz, these birds were very similar in size to the red broilers we raised in the spring.  We could have grown them more aggressively, but there would have been loses and health issues.  We went into it with the plan to raise the birds as naturally as possible.  They lived in a pasture and had limited food in their feeders.  This kept them from breaking their hips or having heart attacks, but it also made them hungry, cranky birdies.  By the end, they would swarm me and bite my legs any time I went in the pasture.  They had enough room and distraction to keep them from turning on each other, but I can see why they are frequently debeaked.  Bad personalities.

We haven't eaten any of them yet, but I can tell by looking at them that they'll be much closer to the commerical birds.  They look pretty much identical to the whole, young chickens you see at the grocery store.  About 4.5 to 5 pounds a pop, though the commercial birds get there in seven weeks.  Lots of breast meat, I'll get pictures for comparison.

Compared to our red broilers, the Cornish X birds were not easy on the eyes, didn't work the ground well, and were always on the edge of getting sick.  Prone to diarrhea and made a terrible mess of their coop.  Overall, I'd rather raise the broilers.  It takes a bit longer, but they're actual chickens instead of freaks where we have to balance food with them killing themselves by eating too much too fast.  They choked almost every time I fed them because they would try to jam all of their food down their throat at once!

So now that we've raised the commercial lines and the backyard line, we've decided we want backyard birds.  We also want to be able to breed them ourselves.  This whole deal with buying chicks and paying for shipping each time really gets expensive.  The Cornish X birds and the broilers are both hybrids, so not really starting points for breeding our own.  That means that we need to look elsewhere.

This is where I've landed for the future of our chicken flock:

Behold, the dorking!  It's a fun breed name, I'll admit it.  This is a heritage breed that is known for it's excellent table qualities, decent laying abilities, and being wonderful mothers.  They're supposed to be friendly and quiet birds with sweet, well behaved roosters.  Slower growing than the birds that we have raised before, but we're not in a great hurry.  They're also good foragers, so that cuts down on the feed bill while providing more bug control for us.  It's a rare breed, so I'll be maintaining a pure bred flock.  There's the possibility of trading or selling some of the youngsters to others interested in the breed.

This does mean we'll be phasing out the mixed laying flock we have.  It will take some time, since the dorkings will need to be raised to laying age (probably 8 months).  Assuming the starter flock shows up in spring, they would start laying the next winter.  That would put the barred rocks at two years old and the new layers at just over a year old.  The dorkings will want to sit on their eggs in spring, so we'll need some commerical birds to boost production while that's happening.  The dorkings are well known to lay through the winter, when the commercial birds drop off.  I suspect we'll always have a couple of production hens in the group to even out production, but only the dorkings will be sitting on clutches and raising offspring. 
The first emails have been sent out to secure a starter flock for the spring.  Between the dorkings and the muscovies, we should be all set for meat and eggs.  Exciting!

Aura's World: A distraction from my chores

Last Christmas we added Aura to the family. We flew through our first basic obedience class, and stumbled in our first attempt at her Canine Good Citizen class. With with our trainer we took a step back and went through basic obedience again and now we are week away from taking our first CGC test, and there is a chance that we could actually pass the test. At our run through this week. The test environment is handler, dog, and judge in the ring instead of our normal 10 handler/dogs and 2 trainers in the ring. Aura was too excited to see the judge and could sit still for the entrance greeting and she got bored and tried to walk away during the down stay exercise. Given where she started this is really awesome for us.

I few pictures of Aura impatiently (but adorably) waiting for me to make her dinner.

A couple of Aura favorite newer toys. The yellow dragon is her second one. The first shredded in the first 5 minutes she had it. I talked to the company and the pet store I bought it at, and they both were amazed that it shredded apart. The part store gave me a new one, and the company offered to send me a coupon for a free one if the pet store had any issue with an exchange. Sometimes it really pays off to stay calm, be polite, and talk to your suppliers. The 2nd dragon is now a month old, it's been gutted, lost a leg and the head finally popped off during a game of tug. For a house where squeaky toys rarely last a full week, I have been very happy with the dragon.

This is the most expensive ball I have ever bought at $24 USD. It's mint scented, it's soft and chewy, and Aura loves to play with it. It's gets a daily chewing and a round or 2 of fetch. After a month of abuse the only damage in the tip of Alaska is peeled up. Other than that there is not a single tooth mark to be found on Aura's World. This ball also has a lifetime guarantee, for a free one time no question no hassle replacement. I don't think I'll be needing to test the guarantee on this one. 

Aura's World