Chicken Coop - Final Improvements

Way back in January I first posted about the improvements we began on the chicken coop that came with the house. That weekend we cleared the run of blackberry brambles, made some small improvements to the access panel to the coop, and painted a single coat.

Now, nearly 6 months later, we've completed the rest of the improvements we planned to make and finally have chickens. Here are the rest of the coop updates we made before bringing them home:

Nick cut a new door out of plywood, which was much more sturdy that the original. This new door also includes new hinges, a bolt that secures it shut at night, and a metal hook and screw eye to hold the door open during the daytime. When I went over the entire coop with a second coat of new paint, I also painted the new door:

New chicken feeder and fount

Nick did the same for the access door to the nesting box at the back of the coop. It didn't need to be a thicker wood so we re-used the existing door, but we did add hinges. Before it was just screwed in and you pushed it aside to gain access, with no way to lock it. Like the coop door above, there's a new bolt mechanism to keep this side more secure as well.

I painted this as well. You can see how well it blends in below. 

Now at quick look at the inside:

The inside was pretty dirty, with chicken droppings and old shavings on the floor and nesting box. I swept out all of the shavings and removed the existing cloth ceiling from the top of the nesting box, replacing it with plywood. After the floor was clear, I pulled out the linoleum lining the coop and hosed it down outside. Once dry and placed back in the coop, I put a layer of fresh shavings down.

While I worked on cleaning and painting, Nick focused on outer security. There were some areas that weren't as secure as we'd like, including the door to the run. The door was surprisingly wobbly at the top and bottom and had only one bolt closure in the middle. To strengthen the door, Nick reenforced it by screwing lengths of wood around the entire perimeter. No more wobbly door. He also added a second bolt closure and changed the location of the original, so now there's one down lower and one near the top.

One all the door reinforcements were added, I painted it and the frame of the roof. We also added a door handle. In addition to the door, we did some spot securing of the wire around the run. This was an incredibly well made run and coop. The wire edging was dug down into the ground at least 6-8 inches. The chickens have dug down about that far in a couple areas and the wire continues even deeper.

I also cleaned the run and coop roofs by hosing them down, removing all the leaves and gunk build up with a power wash. That was around the time I added the new and extended gutter and added rain barrel.

Ready for chickens

And the before shot:

Patio Planter & Raspberry Shortcake

On our drive back to Portland from the olive grove tour last fall we stopped at this locally-owned nursery/garden center near Sherwood, Oregon because it was advertising a Japanese maple sale, and we wanted one of those for the garden area outside of the living room window. While there we looked at what else they had and there were several small potted raspberry plants that were fruiting. They were call 'raspberry shortcake' and they were delicious! We didn't buy then since it was the end of the season, but made a mental note to come back and get some for the spring.

Our house came with a bed of established golden raspberries, which I'd never had before because they are too fragile for transport so they may occasionally be found at a local farmers market, but that's it. Raspberries are y favorite berry, so I wanted to have several varieties. Raspberry shortcake is a dwarf variety, which meant they would do well in a planter and make a great green addition to our patio living room plan.

This project started with the purchase of a storage bench in the Ikea Applaro outdoor furniture line, which is what we picked for the patio. I put the bench together, leaving off the top lid piece to get what you see below:

Ikea Applaro storage bench

Then I used a staple gun and some very thick tarp (from a torn Burning Man shade structure) to create a sturdy liner:
 

Before filling it with soil, I made a few drainage holes in the bottom of the tarp. Then added the dirt and the two raspberry plants we picked up at the end of February when we passed the same nursery again on the way back from a beach trip:

Planted March 15th, 2014

It looked really sad. But just two months later last year's canes are full of leaves and ripening berries and new growth has filled in all around, which will provide a second round harvest later in the summer:

May 16, 2014

So perfect for a planter. These little guys would have been completely overrun by the giant raspberries in the garden box. We did have some extra space in there so I ended up planting an additional 3 varieties: Newburgh, Amity, and some starts of an unknown variety from a friend's garden. And it really does work perfectly as a planter on the patio, where I plan to spend many summer evenings relaxing on the outdoor couch with a bowl full of just-picked raspberries:

Pierre also enjoys relaxing on the patio

Update: June 12, 2014

We've been getting berries for about a week! Just 3 months between emergence from dormancy to this:

The Pink Pearl

Nick and I went with some friends on a local winery tour last fall, and at one of the tastings there was a selection paired with apple slices that were such a bright pink that I thought maybe they'd been soaked in wine. I asked about the variety and was told it was a "Pink Pearl."

The inside of a Pink Pearl apple

After doing some research and finding they aren't very common to find for purchase, obviously the answer to this problem was to grow our own tree. There weren't a lot of places online that carry the variety and those that do appear to sell out quickly, so I put in an order right away.

The place I purchased my tree, Bay Laurel Nursery, doesn't ship right when you order. They allow you to select delivery date ranges in the early spring based on when the best time to plant is in your specific zone, so the tree arrives near the end of its dormant period and ready for transplant.

There was a slight delay in getting my tree as UPS fucked up and delivered to a completely wrong address several miles away, where some jerk signed for it even with the wrong address and name. On their third attempt to retrieve the package, UPS finally succeeded and got it to me--5 days late. I was worried a bit about it being in the box for so long, but since it was dormant, it was fine.

The area I chose for this tree is this little cove in the most south/eastern corner of the back yard:

Before

When we bought the house, the above is what this area looked like. Right off the photo on the left side is the east fence gate, and to the right is the house. This space wasn't being utilized well. A couple random tree seedlings were coming up, there was a large bush of dead grasses of some kind, and a cute but overgrown non-deciduous bush that I haven't identified. The latter was close enough to the house to be out of the way and nice enough to keep, but the tree seedlings and dead grass bush had to go.

At some point over the winter I took the hand saw to the seedlings. I also removed the random chicken wire and other junk. When the Pink Pearl arrived I prepped the rest: dug up the dead brush and pulled up all the long grass and ground covers. Nick helped dig up the roots from the previously-removed seedlings. After everything was cleared out I used the rototiller and turned all of the soil.

After

After moving the tree around to decide where best to place it, I dug a large hole and filled in around the roots. It's several feet from the fence on both sides so it should have plenty of room to grow up and out. With the sun high in the sky over the summer, it should have plenty of light where it is.  

Tree planted

There were a few fuzzy buds on this little guy when I planted it. I'll add some more photos when it has some leaves and blossoms on it this spring. It's only about 2 1/2 feet tall now, so I'm looking forward to seeing how much it grows. And maybe we'll have a couple of apples in the fall!

Chicken Coop Improvements

In early January we had two consecutive weekends of partly-sunny skies and mid-40s temperatures, which gave us a jump start on some outdoor projects. The chicken coop needs some improvements before we can bring home a couple hens in the spring, so we started there.

The chicken run/yard area around the coop was really overgrown with weeds and blackberries, so first we cleared all of that out. Now we can finally walk around inside the entire enclosure!

Here's a before shot from early spring last year, before the yard became overgrown:

Fire thing Nick did was unhinge and flip that wall with the door as shown below so now the little chicken entrance is on the right side of the coop, which solved the problem of the chicken ladder being in the way of the human entrance. Nick also fastened extra gate latches to make the human entrance door more secure from predators. He also attached hook and eye latches in such a way that we can now keep the hinged front wall shown below open and safely attached to the 2 x 4 supports above when we need to clean out the inside of the coop.

Painting was the next big piece. The coop was white, but we wanted something more colorful. We selected this reddish-orange, which kind of makes the coop resemble one of those big red barns. 

Kind of matches Nick's vest too

First coat complete

On another nice weekend we'll put on a second coat of paint, clean out the inside of the coop, increase the size of the access door to the nesting box. After that we'll be adding a removable tray to the nesting box to make it easier to clean and finally line the coop with shavings. Then just add chickens. They don't really lay eggs unless it's warmer so now is the perfect time to get this all prepared for spring.

Pierre checking out the coop

Digging up and Moving an Apple Tree

I love that our yard is has some established fruit trees and berries. It's definitely one of the things we were looking for in property. Unfortunately that meant not getting to choose where the previous owners had planted those things. Most of it is fine, but for some reason there was a young semi-dwarf Pink Lady apple tree purposely planted in the middle of a garden bed full of golden raspberries. I thought that was pretty odd, but wasn't sure at the time whether we'd want to keep it there or move it. 

Here is a photo of that bed area from mid-summer. In the bed on the right you can kind of see the apple tree in with all the raspberries - it's the tall thing in the middle. 

Now that fall is here, it was time to make that decision. The younger a fruit tree is, the easier it is to transplant, and fall is the time to do it because they are entering dormancy. After brief deliberation, we decided to go ahead and move it nearby to the space between the the two garden beds, which we briefly used for tossing weeds during our first weekend of yard clean up. Most of those weeds had deteriorated nicely into compost soil, some of which I shoveled into the nearby beds.

Here's that area once I'd cleaned it out.

I found something strange when I was cleaning out this space: tile. There were almost a dozen pieces of tile laying between the beds, covered by dirt and grass and then the weed compost pile. Someone's attempt at preventing weeds or??? Not sure. But I used all of them to cover the compost which covered the weeds in the raspberry bed, trying to smother them out.

I also found two old stumps and root balls back in this area, nearer to the fence. Roots are so much easier to dig out when they've been dead for a very long time! This big thing was hardly any work.

Here's the Pink Lady in the raspberry bed pre-move:

And here it is in it's new location:

I forgot to take a picture of it, but I tilled this whole area down as far as I could go before digging the hole. Easily dug up the tree since it's still young and the roots aren't too large, and moved it over. I mixed in some of the soil from it's original planting with the new stuff, staked it to keep it straight, and watered. Now to see how well it handles the winter and then grows in the spring.

I'm really happy we decided to move it. It has it's own space now and will be easier to access for picking/pruning. This was a fun project, and because it was really nice for the past few days, it was a great break from doing things in the house.

New Addition to the Yard: Olives!

Since Portland's climate is so mild it's considered Mediterranean, we brainstormed about what kinds of additional plants we would like to have that might grow here. Nick said he'd really love to have some olive trees, so I did some research online and found that olives do in fact grow here. I even found this website, which is completely dedicated to growing olives in Oregon. They even have grove tours, and the following weekend was the last of the season, so I emailed them to get on the list.

Here is a photo of a row of their olive trees, which are really more like large bushes:

These olive trees are about 8 years old

This is a small family-owned grove located about an hour southwest of Portland. All of the information anyone could possible want about growing olives in Oregon is on the website. The guy who gave us the tour has tried all kinds of varieties and sells established cuttings of the ones that grow the best here.

We decided it would be really fun to grow our own even though it will take years to get a large harvest. Fortunately they are really easy. The grower said he doesn't water them because there is enough rain year round here and that he doesn't even prune them, though that's something we'll likely do to keep them looking clean and under control. 

They had several dozen varieties to choose from, and we decided to buy a single start of three different cultivars, which gives us ample opportunity for cross-pollination. Below are our olive babies, which are still doing great in their pots a month after we brought them home. The three kinds are Pendolino, Amfissa, and Santa Catarina. They are all table olives, which means we will cure them and eat them whole. The Amfissa and Santa Catarina olives are large and green, while the Pendolino are a smaller, darker variety. Chopped and mixed together they will make a great homemade tapenade.

Spring is the time to transplant these guys, so they will remain in their pots over the winter. Then we will plant them in the front yard near the street where they will all receive direct south/east sunlight, which is best for heavy olive production.

Numbers & Light

Not that these were at the top of our 'must do before we can live here' list, but they were simple projects that made a huge difference to the exterior feel and make the house look more our style. Now the front entrance features clean modern-looking numbers on an even plane and a more modern light with a slight Asian style.

Here is a photo of the original numbers and porch light:

Original numbers and light

New house numbers and porch light:

New numbers and light

Nick admiring his handiwork