Spring Prep Mistake #1: The Chicken Feeder

Last fall we didn’t do such a good job winterizing the chicken tractors that the girls had spent the summer in before becoming free rangers. (Since we were both working days at the time, we wanted to girls to not be locked in the coop all day, thus the chicken tractors.) With spring around the corner and broiler birds on the horizon, I decided I would start checking out the tractors and working on them little by little to prep them.

One of them is still frozen in the ground. I cleaned what shavings were left from last year, gave it a quick once over, and called it good. The larger of the two will need a bit of love. The door’s falling off and one of the boards is popping off the back, but it’s definitely fixable. I was able to prop it up on bricks to get it up off the ground as it wasn’t frozen in. Where things were wrong came next…

Apparently we left a feeder with a cup or two of food in it. As the tractor was closed up, squirrels weren’t able to take the food and empty the feeder for us. The food in the feeder had been there since about August of last year…

It was disgusting and rancid. I dunked the feeder in the stream to wash out as much as I could. Then I had what I thought would be a bright idea.

Finishing washing the rotting chicken feed out in the bathtub. Which is in our bathroom. Which is in our house. Which we still can’t open all the windows in yet because it’s not warm enough out.

Needless to say, but bathroom reeked afterwards. It smelled as though someone had decided to dump an entire pile of rotting chicken manure in the room. (By the way, I now understand why non-free-ranging chicken poo reeks.)

Thanks to the all natural shower cleaner we use, out home now smells like a giant thyme bush is growing in the bathroom.

It’s a much better smell.

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