I'm Covered in Ants

It's true. I just spent a good twenty minutes shaking ants off myself, and I still keep finding them. How did this happen, you might ask? Well, it's the first step in a new project we decided to whip together at the last minute.

See, this is the left half the chicken yard, with the compost piles. We are going to climb waaaaaay over the back pile there and put in a fancy-pants post. I figured this would be easier with the compost pile not in the way, so today I moved it.

At the very bottom of the pile was an ant nest. If you look closely you can see Liza there stuffing her face with ant larvae. Carole spent the whole time in the nest box having her egg, so she totally missed out on all the fine bugs and other interesting things turned up in the pile.

I'm not able to locate the soil sifter (I think we may have lent it to the neighbors), but there was some good compost at the bottom of the pile (among the ants) that I want to pull out and use. I'm going to let the chickens do their business back there for a while before doing any more digging.

It was a pretty big pile: about four and a half feet tall, and pretty dense, too.

Next up, we move the pallets out of the way, clear the ground some more (there's lots of compost stuff behind the pallets, too), and then it's time to go get a new post.

And now, because I'm anxiously checking them every day (and I'm sure you all would, too), our latest crop of Asian pears getting ready:

Technorati Tags: asian pears, chickens, compost

posted by ayse on 08/20/09