What Came First?

I have been accumulating greenhouses as long as the chickens have been running around loose. Or, I have been accumulating greenhouses for longer than the chickens have been running loose. Or, the chickens have been running loose ….
My latest greenhouse acquisition came with bona fide greenhouse tables. Aluminum tables with grates on the top. Rust-proof. Don’t rot. Water flows through. Plenty of air circulation. My days of grabbing pallets out of dumpsters are over.
The greenhouse came with, ah, a lot of tables. More than I need. More than anyone needs.
Put end to end, these tables would serve a nice Thanksgiving dinner for everyone on Spring Creek. Twice. Lots of tables.
My dilemma is where to store them. Greenhouses are full of tables already. Barns full of other junk. Already have a table in the house.
So: I surrounded the chicken coop with greenhouse tables. Perfect. They’re way taller than a chicken and they have an escape proof roof. Light and rain can get in; chickens can’t get out. Walls? Many of the tables I managed to acquire had legs broken off them. They were just, sort of, table tops. So I stood them up on their sides and wired them to the already there table legs. Instant walls. Light and rain get in ….
Now, here’s where we learn a little something: The tables I used for the walls, they’re of a different dimension than the other tables. In a word, they’re two feet shorter. So after I stood them up to act as walls, I had to patch the remaining two feet. I built little patches out of old chicken wire and tobacco stakes. (And fence staples. Never be without fence staples.) The patches took about half and hour each to build. After I found the saw. The entire greenhouse table enclosure, meaning all of the greenhouse tables that I loaded off a wagon and put next to the chicken coop, took twenty minutes. Start to finish.
It was a modular design. All the tables were the same size. The all fit up against each other perfectly. The enclosure went together like an, um, assembly line. The patches, being hand made, took forever. They required measuring and cutting and, well, thought. And were a lot more fun to build.
So: what I have in my back yard, full of chickens, is a demonstration as to why the industrial world expands exponentially and the pre-industrial world cannot possibly compete. It’s all right there, right in front of you when you look at it. Come on by and see it if you don’t believe me. And get yourself a few eggs.