Raising the Coop

The first step to building any backyard farm project (after waking up) is to put yourself in line at a reliably good restaurant for some tasty brunch viddles. As in the case of this Sunday, that restaurant would be the Country Cat and the viddles would be eggs, of course, with baked beans, collard greens and corn bread. This meal served as a reminder as to why anyone would go through the trouble of building a coop and raising chickens — good eggs.

With our freshly filled bellies and some surprisingly good weather, we were all set to begin building the much anticipated Fancy Acre Poultry Pavilion. OK, let's see. We need some pieces of wood of various sizes and some metal thingamajiggies to hold it together — oh, and some of that wire stuff with the hexagonal holes, and some — whoa! This sounds complicated.

Fortunately, just inside Nic's brain were the designs and materials list, and Topher is really good at using tools and building stuff — so it looked like this was going to come together really easily. Jenny really cracked the whip and together they got a lot of it done before it started to rain again. Check it out.

I'll admit. I wasn't as hand-on as I thought I would be. The three of them were working so well together — each one anticipating the needs of the other. It was really astonishing. Besides, I have really weak wrists and I would have just been in the way. There was some planting and a lot of thinning to do in the garden, so mainly stuck to that.