Baked Chicken

As everyone in the country knows (except maybe those lucky enough to live in Seattle), it’s been hot!  I must say that when I hear the reporters squawking about it on the news, I find myself thinking, “That’s not a story – that’s just summer in Texas.”

I was hoping this year would be a little milder, but no such luck.  Our yard has certainly suffered.  Even though we have been diligent about watering, everything in our yard has struggled.  Our garden burned up to the point that we just tilled it up:

We are ready to give up summer vegetable gardening altogether and just try our hand at fall gardening.  Hopefully that will work for us.

Suffering even worse than our yard are our poor girls, Opal and Ruby.  I go out to check on them every chance that I get, hoping that I won’t find baked chicken.  At least they’ve been able to move into their new digs.  You may remember the “temporary” shelter that we made for them:

Robert did not build the new “chicken palace” from scratch.  We had a storage shed that had a greenhouse on the back of it that had fallen into disrepair.  He decided to do a three-for-one and fix up the shed and the greenhouse, making it one part storage shed, one part greenhouse, and one part chicken coop.  He replaced half of the clear roofing on the greenhouse with some colored roofing and placed a reflective tarp on the part of the roof that still has light coming through for good measure.  We don’t want them to roast!

The green part is the coop and the cream-and-brown part is a storage shed.  He also has another storage shed that he built (but we can talk about his hoarding tendencies some other time):

He made me a potting bench and placed it just outside the door.  I’ve always wanted a potting bench on which to stack my hoard!

He made a covered run directly behind the coop:

And he made a covered run that runs beside the coop:

Here is a picture taken from just inside the front door:

I was concerned about having too many things (such as cords and miscellaneous junk) that they could get into, and I nagged him a little (okay, a LOT) about it, but Robert reassured me that they would be safe.  Sure enough, so far they have no interest in anything but the floor, their food, their boxes, and their water.

He made a covered compartment in which to store some of his classic car parts:

He also made a little door for them (which can be closed up at night).  This little door allows them to enter the run whenever they wish:

Now, here’s where it really gets interesting.  I have been running a variety of fans in various locations in order to keep our girls from being totally miserable.  Robert (who was an engineer at heart before he ever went to school) decided to make a home-made swamp cooler.  It is made from two 5-gallon buckets, some tubing, plastic mesh, a water circulation pump, and an old blower from our fireplace (which he had hidden among his hoard in Storage Shed #2):

I don’t know how he did it, but this thing actually blows REALLY COOL air.  He put a metal hose on the vent so that we can direct the air to whatever area the girls seem to be hanging out.

He also mounted some kind of exhaust contraption near the top of the coop, designed to carry the really hot air that collects in the top of the coop to the outside:

We do all that we can to keep them from roasting (short of bringing them in the house – my preference).  Still, the girls say that nothing beats strutting and clucking in the yard, eating my blueberry and raspberry bushes:

May you and your feathered and furry friends survive this summer heat!