Preparing for the coop

We spent the day in the yard today preparing the site for the coop. We stripped all the sod away and took away enough topsoil to try to level the ground up a bit. Then we added a layer of gravel to improve the drainage, to hopefully prevent the cement blocks from sinking, and to make an inhospitable environment for rodents. The sod was deposited in a pile to use in the next compost pile. This all may seem silly bit of extra work, but even if the rest of it doesn't work out to be useful we got a bunch of decent loam for the compost pile this way from a location where it wouldn't have provided any benefit otherwise.

Very gratifying to get the gravel on Friday and actually have it in place the very next day!

Before we started the "excavation" work

Finishing up removing the sod and doing some smoothing

Almost done with the gravel