Barriers

It’s been a little while since my last blog post. I haven’t done much around the homestead of late, with the rainy and cold weather, and lots of Dejal work to do.

One tiny thing was to repair a screen covering a hatch under our bedroom closet. The outdoor cats (or some other wild animals) had ripped off the old screen:

So after evicting the kittens, I recently repaired it with three layers: hardware cloth, insect screen, and more hardware cloth. Not the prettiest job, but that should prevent any further intrusion:

We’ve had a lot of wind, so this morning I set up an ad hoc windbreak in front of the beehives, to give them some shelter, using some bits of junk I had lying around:

Speaking of, we’re currently feeding the bees some 2:1 sugar water, though they aren’t taking much, since they’re largely dormant, except on warmer days (they also have their honey stores to sustain them):

Chickens in the veggie garden

Now that we’re done with the veggies for the year, it’s time to let the chickens in to clean up the beds. In no time at all they’ll eat all the leftover vegetation, and till the beds.

Here’s a YouTube video:

I cut a hole in the fence from the new run:

Enabling the new chickens to enter the veggie garden:

And re-opened the hole from the old run, for the old girls:

The new chickens didn’t take long to start investigating the garden beds:

For the most part, the two flocks are staying on opposite sides of the garden, though there have been some interactions: