Last weekend I went out in the morning to feed the chickens, and well…
…it wasn’t as cold as it had been, see, and…
…well, I noticed some things to do, and what with one thing or another…
…I ended spending the whole day outside, working in the yard, enjoying that particular kind of air that you get in the desert winter, where the air is cold but the sun is warm and as long as you keep working you can hang your jacket on the wall and even sometimes roll up your shirtsleeves.
Our three youngest chickens have taken to sleeping on this one particular part of the fence, between the garden part of the yard and the short passage between our back door and the laundry room, and as cute as it is when they all sleep there, it also leads to this:
That, in case you are wondering, is a giant conglomerated pile of chicken- ahem – feces, stuck to the fence and to the ivy growing there. Here in winter, when all freezes during the night, this is not so bad, but come spring it will warm up and stink.
So I spent the morning redecorating, turning their comfortable fence into a funky but inhospitable different sort of fence to discourage them. I used leftover sunflower carcasses from the summer, jammed them down the fence to make a cool looking barrier the chickens could not surmount:
This became humorous later, when our well-meaning daughter realized there wasn’t room for the chickens and took the new fence down, stacking it carefully; when we looked out that evening there they were, all asleep on the fence. In the end it took two days, and some very humorous moments I wish I had filmed of watching chickens try to get up there, before they gave in and found a new place to sleep.
The other task was chippin’ and shreddin’. My gardening buddy down the street told me he had a chipper/shredder I could use, and in the spring I was planning on taking him up on it, but then a complicated series of events not worth explaining made it so that my large pile of brush to be chipped and shredded became unwelcome where it was resting, and had to be dealt with. So I went and got his shredder and went to work.
That thing was awesome! It is much smaller than other ones I’ve seen, and electric, and could handle some serious pieces, as wide as two inches. I was able to reduce three Christmas trees to stumps, and shred a huge pile of all kinds of stuff into a surprisingly small layer of ground up future healthy garden stuff.
Three trees, you say? We must love Christmas, yes? No. When one starts shredding it is amazing all the neighbors who emerge with things to be shredded. I’d look up from my work and see one of them, holding a tree or a pair of black plastic bags in each arm. Which is fine. More goodies for the garden. The results are below:
So, an unexpectedly satisfying day of gardening in the middle of winter. Nice!