Cleaning out the Chicken Run

Tori has taken it upon herself to start cleaning out the weeds and overgrowth in the former chicken pen.

It's still a bit of a thorn in our side that we purchased a house with a built-in chicken coop and signs that chickens were recently kept there... only to discover that we were not allowed to keep chickens, at all. I put a lot of effort into renovating the space and "eagle proofing" it so the chickens could run around outside and not get eaten... and it was all for nothing.

I think Sarah and I both lost some of our enthusiasm and just let the space go to seed, after the chickens left to go live with Lesta. We talked briefly about using the wire "roof" as an arbor of sorts, to perhaps grow grapes but nothing really came of it.

Meanwhile, there was lots of seed from the chicken feed, and it combined with the richness of chicken poop and what was already good soil to create a total thicket where there once were chickens. To make things worse, a bunch of very invasive and prickly blackberry vines are starting to take over, from the border between the pen and the property line. Whereas it's nice to have some greenery as a buffer between us and the neighbors, it has mostly been "junk" that has done well there.

The good news is that I got the lawn mowed. Grass always looks so nice and "tidy" when it is freshly mowed.

Of course, one of the benefits of dry weather is that it is so much easier to mow... instead of a several hour odyssey of pain, it took me about 90 minutes (including breaks) to the everything back into shape. There are still a lot of weeds in the lawn... they seem to move around a lot. One year it's clover here, next year the clover is gone, but can be found in a different area.

Of course, we didn't do the whole "weed and feed" thing this year... still, not sure how much good it did, last year. I will say, though, that it got rid of quite a bit of the moss in the side yard.