Turkey Time!

Our 15 + 1 (just in case) baby bronze breasted turkey poults arrived early Wednesday AM after their 24 hr. plus journey from Ohio in a small box. I was happy to see they were all alive and well upon opening the box. They are quite comical as poultry babies go. Very curious and always come to check out your hands, and seem fine with being picked up and offer no resistance. From what I have been told and reading they are pretty fragile the first 2 weeks of their lives. We have made it 48 hrs. with no losses thus far. There are a couple little guys I am a bit worried about though. One seems on the weak side with an eye pasted shut, and another seems to like to sleep on his back, and then cannot figure out how to right himself when he wakes up, kind of like when you put a turtle on his back. The first time I discovered him on his back I thought we had our first casualty, but he seemd fine when I flipped him over. The next few days will be telling in regards to how things will go.

The meaties are doing OK. Sad to say we have lost 3/52 thus far. They seemed to have developed splayed legs and thus could not get to food and water well. I had to cull two, thankfully Mother Nature took care of the third. Ah, the joys of farm life. The rest look robust though, and I have my eyes on some big breasted hens! Ha!

Camping with Chickens...

We had a pretty crazy weekend. We finally got the chicken ark competed and moved the laying poults out to the land. They were quite happy to get out of the cinder block dungeon and wading pool at the rental and to get their first really taaste of sunshine and fresh air. It was a beautiful weekend weather wise and we planned a get together and campout at the land. It was in the 80's during the day, and a comfortable 60's at night. We had about 10 friends show up and had a nice evening and food around a bon fire. The kids really liked camping out.

One of only two tents in our backyard, kids playing boomerang catch with one of the adults...

The luxuary chicken ark... that weighs so much I am not sure how we are ever going to move it more then a few feet at time, which is luckily generally the idea. Roosts and nesting boxes are on second floor.



The meaties are doing pretty well. this was their first day out of the tractor they did not wander far. They like to stick around the food. We just found out the lady we rent the plucker from was booked for our planned harvest weekend of May 20th, we are tentatively bumping it back a week... I hope they can take the heat an extra week! They are just a little over 4 weeks old now. Baby turkeys arrive on Tuesday!

Chickens, tractors, and lots of rocks...

Thsi is going to need to be quick, as thnigs have been busy! If I was a good Blogger, and had the camera with me at all times I should have several amusing entries prior to this. Spring is a busy time. The meaties are growing well, crossing our fingers and knocking on wood, we have not lost any yet, and they are growing well. We had to move them out to the land and the big tractor, as the daily cleaning of the wading pool filled with wood shavings and chicken poop was getting to be a smelly, time consuming chore. It might be a little cool in the evenings, but they have got to be enjoying the fresh air and extra space of the big tractor. This is Shalo the chicken farmer keeping them company last night...

They have probably quadrupled in weight since they arrived 3 weeks ago.

This is my latest chicken tractor (ark) for the housing of our laying chickens until we get the big coop built this summer or fall. It got a bit bigger than anticipated, and is pretty heavy, even without the roof on it yet. It will be semi portable, and should be adequate size for the 11 chicks we have so far. When they reach maturity hopefully the main coop will be done. Still needs a roof. I am going to recycle some metal roofing from the barn as we dismantle it in the upcoming weeks.

And this is my current favorite part of the house... our stacked Tennessee field stone free standing fireplace and woodstove insert...

Meaties have arrived, it must be spring!

As a sure sign of spring, our 50 meaties arrived at the post office this morning. All appear to be in good health after their airplane ride from Mnt. Pleasant, Ohio. Our goal is no more then 3-5 losses. We are needing to house them on the back little porch of the rental. It is crowded, but will do fine. Now we can open the back door and eat and watch them from the kitchen table just three feet away.

We are hoping we move out to the land within four weeks but that might be optimistic. We will certainly be ready to get them in the chicken tractor by then. The house is nearing completion. They are painting this week inside. (Mark, your idea about the extended jambs turned out to look quite nice!) Next week the stone mason might start on the fireplace. Then it is flooring, cabinets, finish electrical, and a few things outside.

The turkeys are scheduled to arrive on April 26, right about when the meaties will be moving out to the tractor.

Our Green Home...

We wanted a "green" home, but this is not exactly how I had imagined it. I learned from now on to always try a sample on the house before you go ahead and paint the whole thing. The light green looked a lot more like sage than mint on the paint chip... but what's done is done, it is starting to grow on us.

Otherwise things are moving right along and by the end of this week I think the drywall will be finished. It has really changed the look of the inside of the house. Below are a couple sneek peeks.



This is looking almost from one end of the house down to the other.



This is a look down into the front of the house from up on the balcony under the clerestory above.


Last weekend we were blessed with an 80 degree day and we started working on the barn. Basically after we started we realized that we needed to actually tear down half of it, it truely was beyond repairing. We will try to save the siding and as much wood as possible for future chicken coop. The kids had fun making teeter totters from some of the wood. While Karen and Aki made a "bouncey" board...

Cool Whip !!

First it's gophers, and now it looks like someone came and blasted the inside of our house with Cool Whip! The kids, and Karen would like that, but actually it is our new icynene foam insulation. This was not the way we had planned to go with insulating the house originally, but after I had our Energy Star home rater take a pre-insulation look at the house, he thought it was the way to go to seal of any and all exterior penetrations.

In a rather unconventional approach here in the South, but not unheard of, and perhaps the "wave of the future," our attic and roof will not be ventilated. We have insulated and sealed off the entire exterior envelop of the house including the soffits and attic. Our attic will be be semi conditioned and the temperature there should be within about 10 degrees of the inside house temperature most of the time. This is a big advantage as we have almost all of our duct work running through the attic. So when the HVAC system is not running the duct work will not excessively heat up or cool down. That should prevent that initial blast of hot or cold air we had in our last house. I had some concerns about the asphalt shingles overheating with an unvented roof system, but studies have actually shown that such roofs only get about 10 degrees hotter then a vented roof. Our shingles are a light color and will still be covered under usual 30yr. warranty.

We had essentially every crack in the interior framing caulked to prevent any air leakage. The foam insulation goes in as a liquid and quickly expands to 100x its original thickness to fill in all of the cracks and voids that conventional FG insulation could not.( There are some pretty neat demo videos on line if you Google icynene videos , if your interested in seeing how they install it) Since the house is now so tightly sealed we were also told that we needed to install a ventilator system to exhaust some internal air from the house and bring in fresh air. So we installed a small unit called an ERV(Energy Recovery Ventilator) It will be set to run 20 minutes or so out of every hour. During that time it will exhaust air over an energy recovery core and preheat/cool the fresh incoming air(passively) and add to/remove moisture based on the time of year. Otherwise we would have no air exchange inside the house except for when we went in and outside. The fireplace does have it's own air intake duct from the outside so that will not be an issue. So, again, if all goes as planned we should see very reasonable heating and cooling costs and recover our investment in all of this technology in about 50 years! Ha! Not really that long, and to be honest it is more the thought of being proactive in reducing our energy consumption then recouping our costs. I would estimate that our annual heating/cooling/electric costs combined will be about what we just paid for natural gas only in our current rental house for just the past TWO months.

This week the house should be drywalled, at least the initial phase of hanging it. We still need to have our well drilled and septic system installed.

Otherwise we have ordered our meaties (50- late March arrival) and turkeys(15- late April arrival), a true sign that spring is just around the corner!!

Gopher Problem !??

So we had not been out to the land and house project for several days, ... when we arrived to see how the building progress was going we were shocked to see what appeared to be the invasion by some type of prehistoric sized gopher! To our surprise there was a five foot high mound of dirt all the way across the field!




On closer inspection we realized that it was really the beginning of the trench for the closed loop of the geothermal heat pump system we will be using for our main heating and cooling system for the house.

At the bottom of this 6-7 foot deep trench will run x2 ~ 2 inch diameter, 1000 feet long loops of polyethylene pipes in which an eco- friendly antifreeze like liquid will be circulated underground from the house through this loop to extract heat from the rather constant 55-60 degree earth at this depth. In the summer it will use this cool temperature for AC purposes. The actual heat pump unit including the blower is smaller then a regular sized refrigerator, and supposedly as loud as said refrigerator when operating. It is touted to be one of the most energy efficient ways to heat and cool. Coupled with our passive solar design, and hopefully well sealed and insulated housing envelope, it should mean minimal usage of fossil fuels in the years to come. Unlike our current rental house which just left us with a $500/ December natural gas bill! Which might be "OK" had we actually had a comfortably warm house, but that certainly was not the case.

The house is coming along, last week saw that the siding was mostly completed. This is not the color the house will be, but just that of the siding itself.

We are hoping to fix up a couple issues this week, have the HVAC install completed, and maybe electrical wiring started. If all goes well we may have the garage shed and barn wired for electricity as well by the same electrician . That is the quick update for the week.