Aah, three day weekend.  There are no words for how thankful I am for an extra day off.  On the downside, Sunday afternoon I started to panic that I only had one more day off.  Ugh.

Back on the positive side, I did a lot of gardening Saturday and yesterday.  My spinach plants were ready to be moved out of the greenhouse and into the garden, so I had to clear out some insanely old radishes.

I don’t really have an explanation for that.

I also got my first carrot!  Hooray!  I have a hard time growing carrots for some reason.  These guys I actually started in the greenhouse and transplanted.  I know transplanting carrots is a no-no, but I put them out in the garden when they were really tiny, and they seem to be okay.  Last weekend I direct-seeded a patch of carrots in another garden plot, and I’m crossing my fingers for good results there.

Purple outside, orange inside.  Fancy!

I planted a bunch of potatoes, weeded some areas, thought out where the new beehives are going to go, saved some spaces for tomatoes, and generally puttered out there with the chickens.  The chickens discovered a chair yesterday:

They were up there for a good, long time, eventually settling in and claiming it as their own.  I took about 100 photos, but I like this one the best since they look tough and gangster chickens are highly appropriate for my neighborhood (and the graffiti on the fence behind them).

Overnight temperatures have been dropping into the low 30′s lately,  so here and there I’ve been closing the door of the Eglu at night to keep the chickens nice and snug.  The other morning, I headed out to the yard to let them out before work, and I saw all three chickens standing outside of the run, looking at the closed door of the run, and the closed door of the Eglu itself.

WHAT!?  How could chickens escape from a still-closed Eglu? I was so confused. So were the chickens, apparently, since they were trying to get in the run for their breakfast, and were baffled by the closed door.

Part of the mystery was explained when I realized that the back of the Eglu had opened up and fallen flat to the ground.  I have no idea how it happened, but I can only guess that the last time I opened it, I didn’t close it securely enough, and it eventually just fell over.  Thankfully, no predators made their way into the yard that night, because that would have been seriously bad for the chickens.

Anyway, ever since the escape, I’ve been extra paranoid about quadruple-checking the back door of the Eglu.  The chickens still aren’t laying, so I don’t even open it that often, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking (just one more time) every single time I go outside.

Or something interesting is going on up there at least!

Marta is a fan of the new camera, because now we can finally appreciate the true beauty of her feathers.

If smugness comes in chicken form, this is what it looks like.

In other chicken news, here is a shot that displays the size discrepancy between Greta and Liesel.  If any of the chickens needed to be consumed for dinner, the best bet is definitely Greta.  That girl is a beast.

Liesel, on the other hand, I wouldn’t even bother.

Poor Liesel.  She is on the road to re-grown feather recovery now, but a week or so ago, it looked like it was snowing chicken feathers.

Can chickens feel ashamed?  Poor Liesel is NOT happy to be molting, and Greta is seriously not impressed, either.

Now that Greta is post-molt, her feathers are lovely and smooth and beautiful.  She was always the biggest chicken of the three, and Liesel was always the smallest, but now that Greata is fully feathered and Liesel is going bald, the size difference between them is pretty crazy.

They’re not really great at lining up for comparison, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

The good news is that Greta’s tail feathers are growing back, and she now has a mini-stumpy tail.

The other good news is that now that she is done being broody and molting, Greta is finally laying eggs again.

The bad news, for Marta-Chicken, at least, is that Marta is now molting.

She’s down to her last tail feather, and is going bald in the neck.  She’s also missing some key feathers in the front.  As ragggedy as she looks, she is still handling herself with a bit more class than poor Greta-Chicken did during her molt.  It is a pretty interesting process, the molting.  The chickens seem to lose most of their under fluff, and both lost tail feathers, but Greta kept all of her neck feathers, while poor Marta has chicken-pattern-baldness.  I wonder why they only lose some, and how that gets decided?

Poor, unknowing Liesel.  I’m guessing she’s about to molt next.

Because of the rain this week, I got a fancy new set up for the chickens:

It is one of those pop-up shade tent things, and I’m hoping for the best.  Also, you can see that my sad little fence is still propped up.  My idiot neighbors over there decided they didn’t want to have it fixed.  Punks.  HOWEVER, they are currently doing all kinds of fixing-up on their house, and they also straightened out one of the boards along the bottom of the fence where there used to be a big gap so that it appears that the fence is not totally collapsing on my side.  Hmm.  When I approached them back in April (March?) about the fence, the dude said he didn’t want to spend any money because they were going to sell it soon.  Now I’m wondering if they’re going to put it on the market.  If they do, can I picket outside every open house to let people know the fence is busted and these idiots won’t help fix it?  Good.  Because I have my sign ready.

Anywho, a few more ridiculous things related to chickens:

Greta does not have any tail feathers left at all.

I had to buy chicken poop.  Doesn’t that just seem crazy?  Clearly I need more chickens.

Marta-Chicken dug herself a hole in the leaf/compost pile, and had a little vacation in there:

Her back is about level with the ground, so she was serious about her hole-digging.

The chickens never cease to entertain.

Oh, poor Greta-Chicken.  She is always such a mess. This week, she FINALLY got over being broody, just in time to start molting.

I’m pretty sure Liesel is telling her: “Girl, you look a mess.”

Greta just can’t catch a break.  Last year, she was so disgusting that I had to give her a bath.  Now, the ground is covered with her sad little feathers.  She leaves a trail of them wherever she goes.

Today she was struttin’ around with feathers just dangling off of her.  There was one hanging from her little wing at a cockeyed angle that I really just wanted to yank off. And her tail has the worst of it:  By this afternoon, she had about five feathers left, looking like someone had jabbed them into her, not like a real chicken at all.  Liesel and Marta are really trying not to notice how appalling the whole thing is.

"What are you looking at? As if you don't molt, too. Pfft."

I can see through her remaining fluff that her new feathers are on their way in.  Hopefully they grow quickly, because girlfriend is seriously about to be bald.

And here’s Liesel, demonstrating what a chicken is supposed to look like.  Such a show off, that Liesel.

…..learn how to make chicken sweaters:

http://littlehenrescue.co.uk/Hensandtheirjumpers.aspx

chicken sweater