First off, on the subject of Fresh Squeezed, my new novel written with co-author Bonnie Biafore, I’d like to thank everyone who has written a review on Amazon or Goodreads. To the rest of you who have read the book but might be too busy to have left a review, I would ask request entreat plead beg, oh, damn it, grovel on my hands and knees in the humblest appeal that you go to one of those sites, that is Amazon or Goodreads, and leave a few words about the book. It doesn’t even have to be a good review because of the whole meat/poison interchangeability thing.

How does that work? You might ask.

It works like this.

You might write a favorable review and say something like: “When I got to the part about the SPOILER REMOVED I couldn’t stop laughing.”

Or you might write what appears at first glance to be an unfavorable review and say: “The part about SPOILER REMOVED made me throw up and I tossed the book into the trash.”

Now, when somebody who really likes the idea of SPOILER REMOVED reads your review, no matter which one, they will rush out and buy the book to get their SPOILER REMOVED fix. They will say “I agree” with the first reviewer and, “What an idiot,” about the second. If their tastes were the opposite, the “negative” review still wouldn’t affect sales because either review would confirm their distaste for SPOILER REMOVED. The potential reader would still think the second reviewer was an idiot, however, because books should not be thrown into the trash but, rather, donated to your local library.

Thank you in advance for your review, be it good, or bad.

On with the blog.

Those of you who have been reading here a while no doubt remember how plan-averse I am. I guess not really plan-averse but more along the lines of plan-impaired. I really like making plans, but tend to collapse when trying to follow them. Be it the plumbing-supply greenhouse, the free-range chicken raptor buffet, or even the micro-farm as a whole, plans, for me anyway, always seem to get in the way of getting things done.

Not that I’ve been to successful with getting things done either.

In any event I have always subscribed to the Lennonist warning that “life is what happens while you’re making plans” – or something – and have, so far, managed to avoid all the detailed step-by-step, this-long, this-wide, measure-twice-cut-once, nonsense that forces you to settle for something exactly like what you want by stifling the mid-stream-horse-change paradigm shift that would allow you to have exactly what you need.

For those of you who are too busy working on your review of Fresh Squeezed to go back and read the earlier blogs allow me to summarize: First, I get a picture in my head of what I want to build. Second, I go buy a bunch of stuff. Third, I build something that may or may not resemble the picture in my head, e.g. the eight-foot diameter hamster ball I ended up with on my first attempt at a greenhouse. Fourth, I go buy a bunch more stuff to correct the seemingly fatal flaws identified in Step Three. Steps Two through Four are repeated until the thing in the kitchen or carport looks like the picture in my head.

Thus it was in the case of the chicken coop, and I would like to share the process with you now.

Last winter we were sitting around the table talking about our ideas for the micro-farm when we got to the chickens.

“Where will they live?” was tossed out.

“They’ll be free-range, grass-fed, organically raised!” was the best thing I could think to say.

“But where will they live?”

I proceeded to describe in the vaguest possible terms my thoughts for a portable chicken coop/run combination enclosed by protective electric mesh that we could move from place to place assuring a constant supply of fresh grass and bugs for the chickens to eat.

“But what will it look like?”

Damn! I took pencil in hand and proceeded to draw out the chicken tractor with its nestable screened run; “draw” being something of a metaphor in this case. In any event, here’s the actual image I created.

“Ha!” was what I got back and is, I’m sure, your response as well.

But look at the chickens, see right there, running around in the covered run. Look at the wheels. It could be rolled anywhere. It was going to fold up – a feature, I sadly add here, I was never able to engineer and keep the total weight inside back-breaking limits.

But now I had something I usually don’t have; something that – in somebody’s psychotic dream – could be passed off as blueprints. So I went out and bought a bunch of stuff. You can see the bill of materials on the right side of the picture.

Luckily, I didn’t buy enough stuff – again – because I made some Major Changes to the Design – such as it was – along the way.

The image in my mind had three components. First, it had to be safe. No marauding predators could gain access to the inner sanctum. Second, it had to be lightweight. I needed to be able to move the thing around. Third, it had to be strong enough to support twelve chickens – seventy pounds more or less, a twelve pound feed hopper, and the marauding predators jumping up and down on the roof. All at the same time.

So I started cutting.

Then I stopped, thought a bit more, and went to buy some more stuff to replace what I cut up.

First thing I needed was a floor. And here it is, half-inch plywood stiffened with two-by-two stringers. (“Two-by-two” is a lumber metaphor, they actually measure in at one-and-a-half by one-and-a-half.) But then there was a new design requirement, in the months between when I sketched the “plans” and when I built the floor the chickens had let us know they like hiding under things. So the floor had to be elevated more – i.e. longer legs. I figured a foot would do it.

Then there needed to be a sloping roof to carry away the ceaseless precipitation the Pacific Northwest is famous for. However, due to actual climatic conditions, I decided to use white roofing material to better reflect the ceaseless sunshine the region actually swelters under.

Then there needed to be walls; with doors and windows and hatches and access to the endless dozens of eggs our chickens would be rolling out soon.

And then there would be a problem.

If you want to be truly “organic” you can’t build things out of toxic materials like treated lumber. Once the chickens start pecking things apart, pretty soon you will start getting green eggs – and not in a good way. So the coop was built with untreated lumber which is kind of a problem when you have the end-grain in contact with the ground. The chickens provided the solution by way of growing too tall to fit under the once-modified design. I bought some aluminum tube – which the “2x2s” would just fit inside of – slid them on the legs, and screwed them down. Now elevated a full eighteen inches the chickens could pass freely beneath their RV-Coop and rest in the shade. Plus the wooden parts of the coop legs were now a full six inches off the ground. Perfect.

I mounted some wheels on the thing, added some perches inside and a ramp to provide easy access, and voila! It was done.

It’s safe. Every door and window can be locked; the cage is double screened. It is light enough for me to pick up and push around the yard. It is so strong that I could do all the inside work on the coop from the inside of the coop. It turned out better than I could have hoped.

So I put it together – nested the cage section up against the coop section and there it was, the same thing I sketched out so many months before, now sitting in the yard surrounded by chickens. Sure I moved the wheels to the heavy end – Duh! – and raising it allowed me to add an extra window for light and air, but shee-it! Even the chickens love it.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?