Chicken grazing box repair

Believe it or not, we have more than just feral cats at the homestead, despite them being a popular topic of my blog posts.

We also have chickens, and I recently did a minor repair of their grazing box. This is a wood and hardware cloth (wire) cover over some grass, to enable the grass to grow without being pecked to the ground by the chickens. They can nibble on the tips that grow above the wire.

Some of the wires had come loose at one end:

So I snipped off that panel and replaced it with fresh hardware cloth, nailed down with U-shaped nails:

Here’s the whole thing:

Just a simple little repair.

Cat update: stretches, snacks, strangers, sunbeams, snuggles

Happy #Caturday!

I have three cameras constantly watching our outdoor feral cats (plus one for the shop ferals), and I review the recorded footage each morning to see if there were any issues, and let’s face it, to capture pictures and video of them being cute. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it. I often end up with hundreds of pics each week. This past week, I count 96 photos and videos.

But fear not, I wouldn’t subject you to that much cuteness. You’ll just have to make do with the following 22 hand-picked selections.

First up, enjoying the deck of the cat house:

Enjoying a good stretch inside:

Last Sunday the food dispenser ran out during breakfast. Porcini came up onto the deck to let me know (though I already knew, since I had been manually dispensing food via the WiFi-connected food dispenser):

She watched me refilling it from a safe distance (might be hard to see; look above the rock in the center of the picture):

Hail:

A bit of play-fighting:

Portabella brought a snack home; a mouse or vole:

Which wasn’t dead, so gave a couple of them some fun chasing it around the house:

Some disappointed visitors; the alien gray cat:

And a raccoon:

Breakfast rush:

Did you see the YouTube video that included that, and all five cats at breakfast? I’m not a professional video editor, and usually don’t bother adding a music track, but I did do some basic editing, transitions, and titles. I just use Apple’s iMovie app, which is very basic in what it can do, but good enough for me.

Back to the pics. A sunbeam through the window:

Sun on the deck:

Big yawn:

And stretch:

Three cat snuggle:

A screenshot from my iPad, showing cat(s) in each of the views. The upper-left camera shows the inside of the workshop, where two other feral cats live; this is Pansy:

More snuggles:

Another screenshot, this time showing all five cats; four in the shelter, one eating:

Breakfast queue of four cats, keeping out of the rain:

Pretzel stretch:

Yet more cute snuggles:

That’s it for this week!