Baseball, Chickens, Baseball and Strawberries

Saturday was a wonderful day, stress on the "ful". 

The morning started out with Lance's 9am baseball game.  Lance had been working on some improvements to his swing and was eager to see how it would pan out in a game.  It panned out very well, he got his first triple with a line drive between third base and the short-stop.  As an extra bonus the team won the game.  But there was no time to sit around and celebrate we had to go see chickens!

Saturday was the Tour d' Coop, an event we had been looking forward to since the fall when we first heard about it.  Basically its a backyard chicken keeper parade of coops.  Even the girl was excited, when we got started she cheered with her hands in the air and yelled "We go see CHICKENS!".

Our first stop had an extra bonus, from the preview pictures, of an elaborate outdoor train set.  The children, I think, were more impressed with the train and miniature horses but either way it was a hit.

Time was limited though so we headed off to our second coop.  The appeal of this one was that the coop had been built adobe style.  We learned a lot about the process, cost saving of building such a coop and the boys may consider this design.  The only down side is its too heavy to be elevated.  This keeper was in downtown where predators are scare.

Our third stop was a coop that also boasted an orchard and bees.  After recently finding a way to protect my trees from the deer, they began to succumb to fire blight.  I was eager not only to talk chicken but also fruit trees.  To my delight we had a well informed host that was more than willing to talk.  There is definitely an advantage to having your own bees to assure pollination of your orchard and he is even looking into feeding them a pro-biotic to stop the spread of fire blight on his trees.  Another thing I liked was there use of sand in the coop instead of wood shavings; this is both economical and appeared to be cleaner.  They basically treat the coop like one big kitty littler box.

Next we were back to baseball, this time it was Jared's game.  Jared did great hitting every time he was up to bat and made a good play at third.  To everyone's delight his team won as well.  The boys then thought the day was over but I'd been planning while the girl took a nap in the car.  I calculated we could hit one more coop before the tour closed for the day.  To my delight I didn't get a bunch of "we're tired" but instead "Cool, lets go!" and of course "More Chickens!" from the girl.

This coop was on a more rural piece of property and they too had fruit trees.  But what was most exciting to the boys was that on our way we passed a U-Pick Strawberry Patch.  When we got back in the car the boys were begging, Chris was hesitant due to exhaustion but agreed to one more stop.  We all split up and ended up picking two big buckets.  I'd like to say they lasted all week but as this is only Monday, I'm sorry to say the locus (ie. my children) managed to eat them all in two days!  They were so sweet though who could blame them.

That was our wonderful, fun filled day of baseball, chickens and strawberries.