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ongoing and upcoming

Hudson's Hardware released their chick list for the spring!!!! Every year we try to add at least two new birds to our flock since we often lose birds to predators. This year, since so many of our birds have been hatched from birds we've already had, I'd like to add some "non-family" blood to the flock.

But that also means we need to do some repair work on both hen houses we have. The small hen house needs some basic maintenance, like re-attaching the side coverings and the door frame, as well as either repairing or replacing the pen that connects to it. The large hen house needs a little more drastic work. I'm dreaming big here, but I'd like to gut it down to the frame and redesign it. Since we have more than one rooster and the wiring on the pen is getting holes in it (as well as the netting on top, I think now is the perfect time for a new design.  I think with the 8' board, we could easily go to two smaller houses (think duplex) on the same frame with two separate openings into the same pen. That way the roosters would each have their own house (well, two of them would) and hopefully it would decrease some of the pecking between the older hens and the new ones. If we start getting birds the last week of February, then what would give us from now to the middle of March to get both houses done. (We normally start moving birds out of the brooder box into the small house at week 3.)

Upcoming project #2 is the area on the east side of our yard where they re-did part of the road in the paving process. Between the new drainage system and the debris that has been piled in various corners of the woods, rainwater now drains into our yard instead of the the creekbed towards the pond. I'd like to clean out the debris in that area, and create a new creekbed for part of the way until it reconnects with the old one. I think that will save part of our yard. It will still continue to make a culvert in that one section, but there's not much I can do about that part.

And I've almost got my sewing room semi-organized and have an idea of what projects need to be tackled next. It's still overwhelming and a bit formidable, but I'm feeling a tad more confident that I will actually be making progress on things this year. So hopefully, within the next two weeks I'll have something to post in the quilt department. (But I'm making no promises!)

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