Those of you who check the Chicken Feed regularly have no doubt been wondering what happened to the chickens. It's been two weeks now, and they've not been outside.

Well, the fact is that the chickens have gone. The Pirate and I have been thinking about the next step in the Co-Prosperity Sphere's evolution, and we've decided that what we really need is more vegetables and fewer chickens. Makes sense, right? But the problem is that our little acre (and that's almost exactly what we've got here) has only one area that gets enough sun to grow anything - the chicken yard.

In the past, we've attempted to grow vegetables up on the deck, and it's always been more or less a disaster. Either we don't water enough (that's the norm), or it gets too cold, or deer come onto our deck and bite all the leaves off the plants (I lost two loquat seedlings that way). We tried small pots and large pots and wine barrels, and it just hasn't been what I had hoped for.

This year, we've decided to get serious. We're going to be taking out one side of the railing that goes around the deck and making some stairs that will go down to a terraced garden. We'll be tearing down the old chicken coop and taking out the posts that we dug for it, torching a lot of the periwinkle that took over all the ground outside the perimeter of the chicken yard and otherwise completely re-imagining the footprint of our non-deck landscape.

Once the new garden (which will be devoted to vegetables, as I don't think it's really fair to devote a lot of space to flowers in a drought-plagued area) is put in, we'll build a new chicken coop and an area for them to scratch in. In future it's unlikely we'll have more than three hens at a time, but that isn't going to happen until we get the new garden in. In the meantime, it's likely that the Chicken Feed will be staring at my other favorites, our dogs!