Firewood & Chickens

Since we are now burning wood, we are also chopping wood.  So far we have only had one incident with the wood chopping and that involved Fireball (the chicken).  Fireball is one of our freebie chickens but she is a black chicken with reddish gold around her head, hence the name Fireball.  She has always been very friendly and more bold at approaching us than the other chickens.  Unfortunately, because of that she was hanging around me when I was chopping wood, and she was picking up bugs from under the wood.  She was right next to the chopping block when I was splitting a large piece of wood, and I kind of just sheared off a small piece which sent the very large piece over the edge and landed on her head pinning her to the ground.    I pulled the wood off of her, and she staggered off a few feet and then sat down.  We ended up carrying her back down the hen house that evening, Praise the Lord, after a few days she was back to normal.  Maybe a slight concussion.

Here the chickens are wandering the yard on a nice winter day.

Here is a video tour of our hen house.

I consider the chickens somewhat of an investment, and we want to make sure we protect that investment, so we always lock them up at night to keep them safe.  We have had a few nights where we waited a little too late to herd them in and lock them up and have come up one short.  Luckily they always reappear the next day, so we can only guess they found another place to roost for the night.  Ethan is good about taking attendance in the evening's.

This last Friday night we had a 2nd cord of ash firewood delivered and dumped in our driveway.  We covered it with tarps for the night and then in the morning the kids and I moved it into our wood storage area on the end of the barn and stacked it.  Here the kids are loading up the two hand-trucks and then bringing it down to me in the barn for stacking.

Here Ethan, Evan, & Mia are done with the firewood.  We are hoping this will be enough to get us through this winter.  The firewood on the right edge of the picture, running the opposite direction is from our property and needs to dry for a year.  They were happy to be done, and went to jump on the trampoline.