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Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
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9:42a - Chickens!
The story of our chickens.
April of 2007 we decide we want a few chickens. They poop which makes good fertilizer and they give us eggs, which we like. We started out with six. We wanted 2 dozen or so eggs a week, so we got six babies. Three Golden Sex links and three Red Sex links. Then my father, oh so helpfully points out that half of them will not survive to adulthood. Okay, so we go out and get four more, these are Black Australorps.
Surprise, surprise, all ten live. So now we have ten chickens.
Well, then a teacher I work with got a surprise order of chicks she'd cancelled and would we like any more? I talk to Smeg and we can take three. So three more babies come to our home. Now we have thirteen. All three of these chicks turn out to be Turken Roosters, not that we know this at first .
Now...another woman in my department has three fully grown hens, a Rhode Island Red, a Black Star and a Silver Wydonette. Her husband won't pen them they're driving her nuts...would I take them? I talk to Smeg again and really? What's the big deal from 13 to 16? So we take them. These are already laying and ours are only 18 weeks old.
So, sixteen chickens and we have a coop and all is well. Until we realize we have three roosters who at six months old started trying to out crow each other. At Three AM. Clearly-two have to go. We study up and finally one rainy day, we kill our first two birds, plucked, cleaned and duly cooked them. They were scrawny. Way too scrawny to eat. We now have fourteen chickens.
Now comes the decision that hey...we can sell eggs at the farmer's market, but woe, we do not have enough chickens to supply us with enough eggs to actually sell although we get more than we can eat and are giving them away. Our experience with chickens thus far has shown us that the Black Australorps are smarter, gentler and mellower birds. Also, they are "dual purpose" Which means when they are done laying, you've got some nicely dressed out stewing birds. We research and find there is another dual purpose breed, the Buff Orpington. We crunch the numbers and decide to get 25 Australorps and 25 Buff Orpingtons and hey...let's get 5 Americaunas because they lay blue or green or purple eggs and won't that be cool? Oh and hey...they'll throw in a free rare bird! Fabulous. That means 56 more birds right? Except they sent us 6 Americaunas and 27 Buffs. Oh well...the more the merrier.
Surprise, once again all the babies live to be juveniles in the two brooder boxes in the garage. We transfer them to an outside pen in November and our grand total of chickens is 72. We are happy, happy farmer want to be's, yes we are.
Then in December one evening we heard a huge ruckus outside. An injured owl got into our pen not once, but twice resulting in emergency repairs in our pajamas at 2 am in 20 degree weather. We lost nineteen babies including one of our Americaunas. We didn't count the distribution of the rest.
We are down to 53.
This is not enough for the farmer's market idea, so in February, (which is the soonest we could) we got 25 more babies to replace them (because at 25 the price drops. 25 more Australorps and of course the free rare chick! This would have brought us to 79!
They arrived and the second day we had them I came home to find a strange dog in our yard and three dead hens. Our lovely Americauna rooster, a black australorp and a golden sex link. Then I went inside to find that we'd lost four of our babies as well.
We're back down to 71. 50 adults and 21 babies
The next day another dead chicken and two more dead chicks including our rare chick.
We're down to 68. 49 adults and 19 babies.
One of the babies is tiny and weak and even though we know better, laws of nature and such, Mara doesn't and she's heart broken about the dead babies. So against our better judgement, she takes the tiny one and we separate it and keep it inside, force feed it food mixed with warm water. Against all odds, it survives and moves into the brooder box in the garage with is mates.
We buy a BB gun and shoot at the dog that's jumping our 5.5' tall fence. And we stop seeing it. We notice we aren't getting as many eggs and figure they're hiding their nests, but we can't find them. However...we notice our juveniles are starting to lay! YAY!!
Being how it's spring time, we're outside more and I'm noticing piles of feathers...and hey, where's our Wydonette? And...wow...aren't we missing some chickens? We attempt a count and come up with 11 Buffs, 20 Australorps, 2 Golden Sex links, 3 Red sex links, a Rhode Island Red, a black Star and 2 Americaunas and our first rare bird which ended up being a Red Cap and our Turken Rooster. And hey...that Red Cap has spurs...it's a rooser and look at that Buff Orpington....they gave us a rooster there too! We only have 42 adult birds left....and there haven't been any bodies. Most of the missing are our adult birds, meaning the orginal 13. A couple of times the coop was open in the morning, but we figured Mara just hadn't latched it back when she'd gotten the eggs.
So we install an electric fence around the yard, but we didn't get a grounding rod, so it's not turned on. That night at four am, Smeg woke up and heard the chickens fussing. I don't know how I slept through it, but I did and she ran out to find two raccoons and more dead chickens. We lost another Golden Sex link and our Rhode Island Red and have another seriously injured Red Sex link.
Apparently they were flipping the latch on the coop and helping themselves to The Peacock Ranch All You Can Eat Chicken Buffet complete with eggs as a side dish.
That was Saturday night/Sunday Morning. Sunday we started building the new coop which will have pad locks to keep Coons out. Sunday and Monday we waited until after dark then took all the chickens out of the coop and put them in with the juveniles because they had a more raccoon proof cage. We haven't lost anymore in the last two nights.
Our current count:
Roosters:
1-Turken
1- Red Cap (who is tiny and has no tail feather due to an unfortunate feather picking incident as a juvenile)
1-Buff Orpington
Total: 3 Roosters...again.
Hens:
1-Black Star
1-Golden Sex Link
2-Americauanas
3-Red Sex Links
11-Buff Orpingtons
20-Black Australorps
Total: 38 hens
Chicks:
19 Black Australorps
By the end of the summer we'll have 57 hens laying.
And that...is the story of our chickens so far.
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10:56a - Vegetables!
Sorry for the all caps, but I didn't want to retype the whole order. Here's what we're planting this year. I get almost all our seeds from Heirloom Seeds( Artichoke )
( Bean )
( Beet )
( Broccoli )
( Carrot )
( Cauliflower )
( Herb )
( Lettuce )
( Onion )
( Pea )
( Pepper )
( Radish )
( Squash )
( Tomato )
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3:18p - *blinks* I'm already behind...
This year I have been congratulating myself on how I'm thinking ahead! I ordered all my seeds on March 5th. I've got my vegetable beds planned out in Excel no less. Today I was happily plugging all my seeds into my spread sheets so that I can track our production levels and I'm doing my schedule for when to start the various seeds etc. Sadly, I found out I should have planted the artichokes, cauliflower and broccoli last weekend. I won't get my seeds for another week. Demmit.
In other farm news, we've got our incubator and our quail egg trays and our hygrometer. Tonight I'm going to set it all up and then? We're ordering our quail eggs. Yeeaaah baby. We'll be chicken AND quail farmers then. *does a snoopy dance*
Also, we're thinking of getting the girl child involved in 4-H. She really, really loves our chickens and since we already have a Redcap rooster, we're thinking of getting her a Redcap hen and letting her try her hand at breeding and showing them, since they're listed as Critical on the ALBC list. (American Livestock Breeds Conservancy).
And now, I go get Smeg and we head out for dinner with Chris.
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