HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! We hope you all have had a great start to 2024! We have been spending our 2024 so far just resting up from the holidays, getting adjusted to new work schedules, cleaning up the Christmas decorations, and making plans for our homestead.
Lately, the weather has been rainy and gloomy, which has been perfect for getting some of our indoor projects done, like rearranging the living room furniture.
This year we have lots of projects we would love to accomplish but our main focus this year is our chicken coop. We have been wanting to remove our current coop for our layers and renovate it so we can use it to house some meat chickens and then completely rebuild the layer coop to be a bigger coop and house more birds plus have a storage section for all their feed.
But now we are also adding to this project making it more predator-proof. Within the last two weeks, we have lost three chickens from attacks. We finally found out the offender of these attacks was a hawk.
Normally we don’t worry about hawks considering we have never had a problem with any predator in the five and a half years we have had chickens, our chicken yard has lots of trees and foliage to protect the chickens from flying threats but with it being the winter months a lot of that is gone.
So now in our new coop plans, we are also incorporating plans to build little canopies and shelters throughout the chicken yard to give them more areas to hide. We are also looking at the possibility of including a livestock guardian animal, such as a guard goose, in our new batch of chicks this coming Spring/Summer.
So, 2024 will most certainly be a busy year for us, but truthfully it is very exciting. We will be redoing the chicken coop and building a new one. We want to repair some of our fencing and then build a lean-to type of structure to help keep our wood dry. We have the garden that we will keep expanding (I mean can you ever have too big of a garden?), and maybe even some new plants to try and grow.
But most importantly we will be doing it together, making memories to pass down for generations to come, laughing with each other, filling our hearts with love and stomachs with amazing food, and walking the path God is leading us on.
Take care now,
Jo Jo King
