A New Place for Myrtle to Park Her Woozle...

We're not quite ready to declare ourselves funky, but we have come quite a few steps beyond merely functional.  The latest addition is a new laying box for the girls, and in addition to giving them a fully protected eating and drinking area, it adds a good 10 square feet of laying space above and beyond what they had with their old re-designed IKEA dresser-drawers (hey, a girl's gotta rest her backside somewhere, right?), and, just as impressively, gives them fully 20 square feet more foraging space.

Plus, it's an extra windbreak in winter and an extra 20 square feet of good shade in summer. 

Of course, getting them to actually lay eggs in this new creation took a while.  You'd think architectural improvements would be enough to change even chicken temperaments to something grateful and cheery.  Sadly, no.  Quoth Myrtle:  "This is different.  Different is BAAAAAAAD!!!!"

Sigh.

Our next chicken-related improvements will be purely aesthetic.  We will be painting the exterior of the roof (top will be sun-reflective white, sides will be black, with biker-chicken related mural designed by our 11 year old daughter).

There are a lot of non-chicken related improvements going on, too.  We have embarked, for example, upon a new line of inquiry related to the reduction of our plastic usage about the place.  This is a more complicated line of inquiry, and may take some time before we can report on what success would actually look like, let alone whether or not we have accomplished it.  When we realized early this week that the bromides leached from plastic affect numerous endocrine conditions (particularly hypothyroidism), we opened a new "Myrtle File" on plastic.  A "Myrtle File" is something we have decided we're no longer going to do simply because everyone does it this way, and that's the way it's done.

It won't be easy.  We just got back from H.E.B. with as little plastic as we could manage on short notice (without having planned a non-plastic trip first), and we're stunned by how much plastic we brought into the house.  Eliminating it entirely, we have decided, will be impossible.  But as a first approximation, we believe we can reduce it by 90% over the course of the next year.  We'll keep you updated.

Meanwhile.... herbs and raspberry autumn sage going into the ground this weekend, summer veggies next weekend.

Happy farming!