2016 Coop Tour

Jay, Matt, Marisa and I participated in the June 4, 2016 Mad City Coop Tour, a self-guided tour of 11 chicken coops around Madison and surrounding suburbs that (presumably) allow back yard chickens.

The weekend before the tour Jay and I cleaned out the coop, just like you would if you were having guests over for supper. We changed out the bedding, scrubbed down the walls and power washed the exterior to take off a year of dust. I also cleaned out a layer of litter and chicken poop from the run, and discovered that indeed, our decision to fill the run with gravel was a very, very bad idea. (The sand had filtered down to below the gravel, and digging out the run brought lots of gravel with it. Once composted, I will have to sift out the gravel. My long-term goal is to dig out all the gravel (a couple yards of it) and replace with sand which we’d replenish once a year.)

The tour lasted from 9 AM to 1 PM. Jay and I had the first shift from 9 to 11, after which I took my nieces and nephew to the children's opera for a 45-minute version of “The Magic Flute." We set a table with literature that the coop tour organizers provided, a stack of magazines, a few printed maps of the other coops on the tour, and some snacks. We also had a foot washing station for people to step into — a 1:32 solution of bleach to water to help prevent the spread of disease from coop to coop. The 2015 Coop tour was canceled due to an outbreak of bird flu in Wisconsin. Fortunately, that your I did not hear of any backyard flocks affected by the disease, but several large-scale poultry operations had to destroy it many, many birds and the coop to organizers did not want to take that risk.

I really enjoyed putting together a slide show of the coop building and the first year of the bird’s growth, and printed it out for people to page through. I thought you’d enjoy seeing in, and thanks to the Internet and decent bandwidth, you can download a Powerpoint or a PDF of the show to see photos of the coop construction and photos of our birds.

PowerPoint Coop tour slide show (this will start a download, after which you can open in PowerPoint)

PDF Coop tour slide show (this will open as a PDF. For best results, after opening, select the "expand" icon (see example at right) to view in full screen.)

Jay and I prepared a table with sprinkles of rain in the air. The light drizzle passed before the tour started.

I created signs to hang on the coop to highlight some of our favorite features and lessons learned.

The coop tour organizers even provided us with sidewalk chalk -- we marked the road too.

So impressed with the tour organizers, they provided magazines, extra maps and other literature. We added some of our favorite books and the snacks.

All set and ready to tour.

2016 Mad City Coop tour June 4

You are invited to the 2016 Mad City Chicken Coup tour, and one of the stop is our Eggplant. Come and see what two DINK couples built for a small flock of birds (read, we pulled out all the stops).

DATE: June 4
TIME: 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.
WHERE: 1933 E Mifflin St and throughout the city
See tour map here 

A few features you might not see anywhere else:

• how two families share a flock and coop
• nest warmer to keep eggs from freezing
• clever locked storage area
• a chicken swing
• special door between coop and run to keep critters and winter wind out
• BRIGHT purple paint

Blue in the garden

I was walking in the orchard today and to my surprise, found some bluish/purplish berries (honeysuckle I think, aka honeyberries). Looking up and around me, many blue things caught my eye. Here's what I saw.

Honeyberries - first fruit of the season in our orchard

Chives

I have no idea, anyone?

Lupin

Iris

     

Even the creeping charlie has something to add this time of year

Sage flowers

Earth to Paris - The Ocean

The #earthtoparis tag is trending, so is the desire for the human species to continue to exist on this planet. I recently saw a series of videos that draw a new perspective. Mother Nature doesn't need us, we need mother nature. You can see what I mean here with Harrison Ford narrating The Ocean.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM6txLtoaoc

Earth to Paris

The #earthtoparis tag is trending, so is the desire for the human species to continue to exist on this planet. I recently saw a series of videos that draw a new perspective. Mother Nature doesn't need us, we need mother nature. You can see what I mean here
https://youtu.be/WmVLcj-XKnM

A literal explanation of how I got here today

I had an epiphany this week, a sudden realization about how I got myself into the Edgewood College Sustainability Leadership Masters program.

We have a lot of reading, as you can imagine. A feeling of familiarity with this week’s concepts started as I read through “Getting to Maybe:” (Westley, et al) with it’s opening message of “Assume hope, all who enter here.” It grew as I read through the very practical ideas and solutions in the “Sustainable World Sourcebook” (Sustainable World Coalition). But it was while reading through “Sustainability Design” (Van der Ryn, et al) that the epiphany erupted from subconscious and I realized why I’m in the program today.

Many of you know I grew up on a farm, but did you know that my parents and their parents were fully entrenched urban dwellers? Back in 1976, it was pretty much on a whim that my folks bought a farm “to raise you boys in the country” as my mother later explained their idea. They would never describe themselves as hippies, but they were “back to the landers” and my early childhood reading consisted of a steady diet of Mother Earth News, architecture books about Frank Lloyd Wright, design books by William Morris and Charles Rennie MacIntosh, and most importantly, the Whole Earth Catalog. http://www.wholeearth.com/index.php
 
I read the Whole Earth Catalog cover to cover (and if you’ve ever seen it, that was no small feat for a 12-year old). It was that AMAZING publication where I learned about the Peace Corps (and applied at age 14 not knowing the college graduate requirement), Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti https://arcosanti.org/ (where I first learned about natural building systems) and the concept of local economies (and immediately created a club with my cousins and brothers to create our own curency). This is also when I began collecting poems about rain, and today have a collection of more than 500 poems.

I now realize that it’s no surprise, and in fact, simply one more plot on a long-drawn trajectory, that I’m in the program - and glad to be here indeed.

What's with this (crab) apple tree?

I was at a meeting today and noticed a beautiful crab apple tree with apples on the ground under it.

Huh?

Had to take a closer look, and this is what I found.

Large apples on the same branches as small crabapples.

What's going on?

This does not appear to be grafting magic, because apples and crab apples were growing on hte same branches!

Can anyone shed some light on this wonder?