between the treehouse movie theater, the finnish sauna ( building on left ), the fire pit, and The Girls ( chicken coop on right ), i bet when i finally build the hobbit house treehouse on top of the deck, it will have serious airbnb potential.
i think there are a lot of people who would like a weekend of treehouse movies, saunas and tending to The Girls with the freshest breakfast eggs you can imagine! just kidding. sort of.
Frida the Malamute leaves her toys at the gate of chicken run. she does it so often that i like to believe she’s trying to share her favorite things with The Girls.
since we downsized our flock from 8 birds to 4 and got out of the egg distribution business we have way more eggs on hand. before with a market in place, we’d sell or give most of the 56 eggs The Girls produced a week and found we were often short of eggs for our own use. now, without any regular customers – whoooweeee – 4 eggs a day can pile up fast!
in hindsight, 4 hens is the absolutely wrong size flock for us. too few eggs to make it worth the effort to set up regular customers and too many eggs for our weekly needs.
The Girls, er, egg frida on to help them escape from the chicken run. They “talk” to her and if we don’t catch her she’ll move the logs and dig under the run or gnaw at the metal mesh to create an opening big enough for them to escape. She never tries to eat them. She just wants them TO BE FREE!
We do let them out into the yard but not as much as they want 🙂
it’s a little hard to see but this is one spot in the mesh where frida is gnawed an opening that we’ve had to repair.
building the chicken coop next to the compost bin was an ace move. we don’t get much compost anymore because The Girls convert kitchen scraps to eggs first.