Our wild visitors

For a few days this week we have been having some wild visitors.  We wondered if our tom turkey would call any wild turkeys.  Well, apparently the answer is yes.
Monday evening my daughters found these visitors:

The two turkeys on the left are the wild ones.  There was a tom and a hen.  The tom and our tom were trying to fight through the fence.  My daughters went out to scare them away and got a few pictures. Here they are running away.

They've been back a few times and we have all seen them now.  Spring gobbler season is April 27-May 31.  It will be interesting to see what happens if we get a lot of hunters in the woods gobbling since our tom gobbles at every little noise.  Hopefully the hens won't try to go to the calling in the woods.  They now have 13 eggs in a nest that I am hoping they won't want to leave.

Our first turkey egg!

While we were outside in the snow yesterday moving the greenhouse, pruning the cherry tree and moving turkey run fence, one of the turkeys was hanging out in the doghouse I put in their pen as a nest box.  She was making weird noises and sounded like she was sliding all around on her feet.  The straw I had put in the box last week was now outside of the box so I put more straw and some small branches in the box.  She stayed in there a while while we worked pounding fence posts.  Eventually we realized that all three hens were in the pen, and this is what I found when I looked inside the box:

We were wondering when the hens would start laying eggs, since the turkey sex has been pretty frequent.We'll have to wait to see if the hens are capable of hatching out some poults and raising them up.  But, egg laying is the first step.

How to move raspberry bushes

Step 1: Buy a battery.  (Because you know you have to set up the electric netting for the chickens .)
Step 2: Set up the electric netting. (Because you must move the chickens and their coop so it/they don't get hurt when the tree is trimmed.)
Step 3: Move the chickens.

Step 4: Take down the fence around the old chicken run.  (Because you don't want to ruin the fencing when the tree limbs come down.)
Step 5: Drastically cut back the big Maple tree that casts a large amount of shade on the vegetable garden. (Because the big branches coming down will fall right where you want to move the raspberries.)

So the simple act of moving raspberries (which have taken over about 75% of the old veggie garden) turned into a multi-step process taking quite a few days. Hopefully, the tree trimming will be enough as we really didn't want to take down the old maple.  And the chickens love having a larger pen with lots of grass to eat.  Maybe my next post will be about the electric netting.
So step 6 will be removing the grass and adding compost to the new raspberry beds.  Then I only have about 100 raspberry bushes to move.  And those are just the ones I am keeping.  I am giving away quite a few bushes to various gardening friends (thank you so much!)