Digging out the Coop

This afternoon, wrapped up warm against the cold, I headed out to the allotment to start the huge task of digging out the main coop. It’s a long and difficult job which takes ages – and I have a tendency to leave it for as long as possible which doesn’t help!

First, I checked on the girls in both coops and topped up their food and got them fresh water. I had wanted to clean out the nest boxes however, I didn’t have enough water to do it. We’ve been bringing massive amounts of water down to the site to keep our girls in fresh water. Greta and Flo were the first to greet me and demanded treats before I could even finish getting through the coop door!

After mollifying those two, I went to the shed and found the shovel. The next problem was digging out the wheelbarrow which has stood on our plot for over a year without being used. Unsurprisingly, the wheel was completely flat. I refused to be beaten by a punctured tyre. So I set off to see if I could borrow someone else’s wheelbarrow. After ambling around the site for a bit, I managed it and trundled it back to the plot.

There’s an inherent challenge in digging out the coop. It’s not the volume of soil that needs digging out, nor lugging full wheelbarrows up the plot. It’s not even keeping the door open whilst shovelling soil into the waiting wheelbarrow. No. I could deal with any of these things. The real challenge was keeping the feathery menaces from constantly trying to escape through the open coop door! Greta was particularly fixated on escaping and I lost count of the number of times I had to stop digging and chase her back into the coop, away from the door.

I decided that the soil from the coop should be reused on the plot – the question was where? In the end, I chose the raised strawberry bed by the greenhouse. The level of the soil had been dripping over the past few seasons and I also needed to replace the plants. Five wheelbarrows went into the bed and it barely made any difference!

With the coop soil levelled around the door, I still needed to dig over the remaining three-quarters of the coop floor. By now, my arms and back were complaining so I decided to leave the rest for another day, when I could drag my long-suffering husband down to help me.