Sending on the coop.

One of the hard things about getting the house ready is how much we'd done to make it ours. Some of that is the chicken coops. Unfortunately when the chickens are gone I'm going to have to just disassemble the big coop in the back. Fortunately, the Lady of the House's father wants to get into chickens so I was able to offload the smaller red coop we used for so long back to him. He actually found that coop for us for free, and hauled it up in the first place. He came up on Saturday, and the two of us moved the coop onto the trailer he brought, took down the chicken run, and packed it up into his trailer. Once that was done we loaded up a lot of the Critters toys, and the electric fencing for the chickens and sent it off to his house. Once that's set up we're going to bring the chickens to his place to watch over until we have a place we can have chickens again.

On the subject of the GoFundMe, we are doing well, and with the donation matching we're getting close to the $5,500 point where we need to be to get the heat and hot water installation begun. Any help you can give before the 1st while the donation matching is still going on would be greatly appreciated. All of the help and sharing we've gotten has been amazing to us. Thank you all.

On the farm side of things, we still desperately need rain.

Yet another week of promises of rain, and strange weather. The ground is still parched and dry, which is getting unfortunate for the ground. On the up side, it's great for the garlic which should be coming out of the ground shortly. On the down side, on days like today where it's going to be very windy farmers with dry fields are going to lose a lot of topsoil. We are fortunate in that we have mulch on most of our garden beds, and in the fact that we have a lot of wind break cover from living in a clearing in the woods. Without the benefits of being sheltered by the trees around us we'd need to make absolutely sure before we left today that we soaked any loose dirt like on the garlic bed. I didn't do so this morning because the garlic should be dry when it is harvested, and if we're going to be doing that soon, may as well let them stay dry. Once we pull the garlic up that bed is going to probably become leafy greens, and flowers to make things look nice.

The other thing that got done this weekend is breaking down the pallets around the property that I'd been saving for use, or using for one thing or another. I am somewhat impressed with just how much of a pile a bunch of broken up pallets make. We're going to have a lot of wood to burn in our next couple bonfires as we do the final preparation to get the house on the market. Pallet wood burns fast, but it'll cook food just fine!