November 11, 2013
Reclaiming the Chicken Yard                                                

Tim made a comment on my last post about all the work we had done.  My response was that, in the pictures I posted yesterday, you can't really see all the work we've done.  So I took a walk around what used to be part of the chicken yard and took some pictures.  The area is a little over a 1/4 acre of land that had almost 400 trees on it.  All of them are down or damaged and will have to be cut down.

This shows the progress on uncovering the turkey hutch.  Mike did some major log cutting and stacking, so this area is pretty opened up.  

Here are a couple of the brush piles a stack of larger branches.  The green in the background are downed trees that are outside the chicken yard.  

This is just beyond the turkey hutch and to the left.

This is past the hutch heading toward the eastern boundary of the lot.

This is further to the east and just to the left.

And this is to the right.

Another log pile.

Another shot to the right.  And yes, that is Heather sitting up on fallen tree cutting off the limbs.

Go Heather!!

At this point we are still about 20 feet from the eastern boundary - still lots of work to do!

November 10, 2013
Finding the Turkey Hutch                      

Since our return from Auckland, we have continued the clean-up and have finally uncovered the turkey hutch.

Three tress fell in front of it, three on top of it, and I'm not sure how many fell behind it, because we haven't cleared those yet.  Mike worked through yesterday afternoon to clear the front.

Obviously it was seriously damaged, but it did not collapse.  Kudos to Mike for building a strong structure!

We've also cleared some of the mess behind the garden and cleaned out all of the garden boxes. 

 We had actually planted most of the garden when about 10 days ago we had another wind storm.  We lost everything planted in the garden,except the potatoes, as well as another 25-30 trees.  Two fell in the orchard and damaged some of the trees that had survived the first storm.  Many trees behind the Wee Mansion went down and again blocked our path to the south boundary.  Mike spent another day clearing that path again.

Mike cleaned out the wood shed and disassembled it so it can be re-built.  That is a work in progress right now.

And we continue the work to clear the chicken area so it can be re-fenced.

And it is a large area - probably a quarter of an acre or more.

This is what it looked like before we started the clean up.  You can see the top of the chicken coop just to the right of the one still standing tree!

Here is a picture of 6 small chickens.  Annie sat on her nest, nestled in the stump pile, through the September storm and two days after the storm hatched these chicks.

And the chickens keep laying their eggs!!  Many have started nesting the in brush piles all over the yard.  As we find them we remove most of the eggs so Heather and Mike will not be overrun with little chicks again this year.  So we have four Splash Orpington chicks from eggs Heather had gathered before the storm.

Two hens were hatched by a turkey last year and practically hand raised by Heather.  They each went broody after the storm and were sitting on eggs in nests in brush piles.  Heather took out most of the eggs and they ended up hatching one chick each.

Here is Bebe with her chick.

And here is Golden with hers (and of course Heather)

So we continue the clean up and at the end of the day, with few tress in the way, we enjoy beautiful sunsets!