As the summer has come on full force the girls spend most of their time following the shade throughout the day. Their range has extended greatly -- yesterday morning I spotted them patrolling the treeline at the bottom of the yard. I find this particularly exciting because their consumption of feed has reduced by about half and I'm imagining they're making up the difference with fat, tasty bugs.

Their growth rate seems to have slowed -- perhaps because of the heat -- but the interesting item of the week (and quite surprising to me) was when Martha gave me a grownup 'cluck' one morning while I was weeding the garden.

The girls always come to see what's going on when I'm weeding the garden -- I suppose they assume that I eat bugs too and think I've found some when I'm out there pulling up stuff. Usually, there is a lot of 'cheep cheeping' and there was this time too then I heard the grownup cluck and looked up. Martha was looking at me as if she was just as surprised as me.

I didn't hear it again for a few more days but now Martha is clucking like a grownup almost all of the time. Abigail hasn't developed her voice yet but I expect to hear something from her in the next couple of weeks.

While not my first microcontroller this is my first Arduino. I've been playing with PIC controllers loaded with the PICAXE bootloader for a while, probably out of some sick sense of nostalgia for the assembler class I took on the Motorola 68000 back in college. I quickly grew tired of managing bytes, words and double words and doing decimal maths the long way so I wandered over to see what the Arduino was all about.

The Arduino is noticeable because it has received a lot of attention lately and for good reason. The Arduino platform has exposed microcontrollers to the masses and has made it cheap. Both economically and in terms of learning time. For about $40 you can be writing code for your microcontroller and turning on and off LEDs -- for $60 you can be up and experimenting with most of the Arduino's base functionality with Sparkfun's Starter Kit for Arduino (a great kit and a great timesaver).

Once you have your Arduino the only other piece that is required is the Arduino IDE and the drivers to make your USB connection look like a serial port. The IDE is a java application so it is pretty painless, the FTDI USB Drivers are included in the IDE distribution and your windows machine should be able to find and install them automatically when you plug in the Arduino for the first time -- the OS X install is almost as painless.

To continue you'll need your Arduino, a USB cable, the IDE and drivers installed and an LED. Open up the Arduino IDE, follow along and we'll create the microcontroller equivalent of a 'Hello World' program.

It has been a busy week -- for me, not the chickens. The chickens seem to be learning the extent of the yard and its boundaries. I don't have fence up everywhere and they still stray a bit but when they see me coming they know to run back into our yard. This beats seeing me, with sticks in both hands, ambling around behind them like a zombie scarecrow trying to herd them home.

The girls have adult tail feathers in and strut around the yard like they own it. They're about half or three-quarters full size and every morning when I open their coop I'm pretty sure they've grown a little bit overnight.

As a special treat we have a communique from Spencer the owner of the other half of this chicken family:

Tell your ladies (lay-dees?) that their 5 sisters say hello: Fussex (a.k.a. Jackie Brown), Glamour Chicken, Shelly (Glamour Chicken's twin sister), Chickenbutt (whose tail feathers are now grown back in) and Peckerhead (literally peck-her-head). Most of these gals pretty much named themselves. Oh, and they LOVE rose petals and chopped up apples.

It's good to see that the other half of the original flock is well and that someone else is far more creative with chicken names than I am.

Another week has passed and the girls are getting along famously. Neither seems to be on the edge of panic any longer and both have taken to following me around and unpiling my piles of grass clippings shortly after I make them.

Martha seems to be taking on the alpha hen role; one can see where the phrase 'mother hen' originates watching these two.

They've been living exclusively out of the chicken tractor for about two weeks now and have learned all the ins and outs of their new lifestyle. They've learned where food and water is and where to settle in for the night. The chicken tractor isn't complete yet but it lacks mostly external wire -- chickens get really confused when you put up new chicken wire where there was none before.

With prices for benchtop power supplies hovering around $150 for an entry level unit most electronics hobbyists, such as myself, tend to rely on a multitude of wall warts and USB powered serial breakout boards for supplying power to our projects during development. When I saw the Benchtop Power Board Kit last week while browsing the Sparkfun site my nether region was all a tingle -- a benchtop power supply that uses an ATX power unit from a PC. For $15!

I can't say I was a bundle of anticipation waiting for my package from Sparkfun. With Spring quickly moving into Summer and the garden planting half finished my electronics to-do list has been collecting dust. However, the notion was growing that this kit (once completed) would solve a lot of my project slow downs and I began soldering as soon as it arrived.

The board itself is well laid out and there are only a handful of parts so the kit doesn't require much in the way of thought to assemble. You will need to provide your own solid core wire to connect the binding posts to the board. I completed the kit in about 15 minutes, dusted off an old ATX power supply, plugged it in and fired the thing up. Voltages measured almost right on the money on each rail. This is a pretty slick unit -- now I only need some time to get back to that electronics to-do list.

[Some discussion has been made about static minimum loads on ATX power supplies and that a lack of static loads may make your PSU go *poof* with the requisite amount of smoke and sparks. See some additional discussion here.]

This is what happens when you don't put foundation in the frames counting on your bees to do the right thing.

Also, more bee pics:

Martha spent a few lonely days following me around the yard and hiding whenever I would disappear into the house. There was a steady undercurrent of near panic in her actions. No longer did she patrol the fence row or turn the compost pile seeking insects, her existence had become two extremes -- hiding or seeking reassurance from me.

The afternoon she climbed the stairs to the deck and perched herself on my forearm cooing with calm I contacted Spencer -- my partner in the chicken buy -- and asked him if I could buy one of the chickens back from him. Considering Martha's lonely state he was delighted to sell a chicken back to me and the following evening he delivered a Speckled Sussex. With the addition of Abigail, Martha is once again a member of a flock.

For the next few days I began to fear that Martha's paranoia was contagious. The two of them spent a lot of time hiding under the bushes at the end of the garden and Martha still required a lot of reassurance from me (with Abigail trailing along certainly puzzled by all this attention paid to a human) but the last two days has seen the pair ranging through the garden once again doing their scratch, scratch, peck, peck dance.

Through the early morning mist and my sleep shrouded eyes the scene of devastation was apparent. Chickens strewn about the yard, unmoving feet and wings in disarray. An impossible state for any living chicken. Still in my skivvies I rushed into the yard blinking furiously to clear the sleep from my eyes.

The chickens had been living outdoors in the cage for almost two weeks under the roof of the incomplete chicken tractor. There hadn't been any problems. The chickens had greeted me with unbounded eagerness to be let out to begin the chicken busy work that chickens do. Rushing to the garden and climbing the unturned portions of the compost pile to begin their endless scratch, scratch, peck, peck dance.

The moisture in the air was close, almost fog. It would probably rain soon. I cursorily surveyed the carnage. One. Two. Three. Dead. I approached the cage hoping it still contained the remaining five. I searched my memory, did I leave the cage unlatched last night? The cage sat haphazardly askew, wedged between the two by fours that formed the tractor's floor. Empty. The heavy cardboard wired to two sides, providing wind protection, shredded, pieces scattered about. Where were the others?

As I began to survey the edges of the yard a black shape came charging towards me from the bushes about 75 feet away. One of the Wyandottes trailing frightened chicken chirps paused about ten feet away and began excitedly calling for the rest of the flock. Expectantly I shifted my vision to the tree line hoping to see them emerge running full tilt velociraptor style towards us. Heather called from the kitchen door, "I think I see something in the street."

Four. It was lying on the asphalt at the edge of the street wings splayed out head apparently chewed. I looked both ways down the street half expecting to see more bodies. I grasped the dead one by a cold foot and carried it to the back, the Wyandotte trailed me still calling for the flock. I began searching the periphery of the yard, calling every once and again. The Wyandotte seemed to have given up and was just following me now.

Five. I was weeding the garden and checking for sprouting seeds. It was lying just beyond the edge, I almost stepped on it. It was sometime after noon. The Wyandotte -- now named Martha after the first First Lady -- seemed to view me as the only remaining member of her flock. She panics when I am not in view and if she can't find me hides in the bushes that I saw her emerge from that morning. I wonder if it is possible for a chicken to die of loneliness. The two missing chickens have not appeared so I may have an opportunity to find out.

[with apologies to Ogden Edsel]

When it comes to chicken housing one has many design and style decisions to make and aside from some very basic needs -- todays chicken can thrive almost anywhere -- your chicken house can be as whimsical or as functional as you like.

I've looked at hundreds of chicken housing designs on the intarweb and in books but the single greatest source of ideas while designing my own chicken housing has been Chicken Coops: 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock. Aimed at the urban chicken owner the book reaches far beyond this arena to bring working designs from the down right temporary to housing for 700 broiler chickens on working farms. I find that this is a great approach because it reinforces the basic requirements of food, water, protection and shade and illustrates the different ways other owners have implemented them.

Plans in the book are by no means complete but each design includes several sketches with measurements, a bit of background on the builders' requirements and sketches of interesting design details. The final section of the book includes color pictures of most of the designs featured in the book. I found the measurements to be helpful to give an idea of scale, I think the single most voiced question by a new chicken owner is, "How big [or how small] does my chicken coop need to be?" A valid and important question. It was my first question and while this book doesn't explore the more technical details* it gives an excellent idea of the possibilities.

Be sure to spend plenty of time designing your structure, I found that my design changed through mock-up and implementation (and I've even found a couple of design changes I'd like to make if I only had a time machine).

*[For a concise discussion of technical space requirements you should check out Building Chicken Coops: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-224]

I think grits, so-called polenta by my more refined cousins, is the forgotten staple in the backpack pantry. It is quick to prepare, filling and is a great boost on a chilly morning. I grew up on the stuff on cold winter mornings always spiked with copious amounts of brown sugar or maple syrup.

I individually pack:

• 1/4 cup grits (I prefer Bob's Red Mill Corn Grits)
• 1 tblsp. sugar
• pinch of salt

Then to prepare I add the contents to a small cook-in bag, add 3/4 cup boiling water and wait a couple of minutes. Taste can be improved by adding a tablespoon of butter (or the appropriate amount of butter powder) but you'll need soap for the cleanup.

One can substitute brown sugar or maple syrup for the sugar -- and it really adds to the flavor -- but these items would require separate packaging and thus more weight.