Ameraucana Eggs in the 'Bator

I have another batch of eggs going in the incubator, hatch date set for Wednesday, July 8, 2020. These are Ameraucana eggs, a mix of self-blue lavender, cuckoo and black. 

My husband says I don't need anymore chickens. I told him I'm selling some Silkies to make room for more! 🤣 I will even come out ahead.

I am thinking I will cross these with my Easter Eggers to bring up their blue. 

Blue is my favorite color. 😍

Trimming rooster spurs with a Dremel

As I was putting leg bands on my older Silkies the other day, I noticed one of the spurs on my painted rooster, Rocky, had curved backward and begun to impale itself into his leg. My husband was working in the garage, so I brought the rooster up and we immediately got it trimmed. 

I have seen another method where they put a hot baked potato on a rooster's spurs to loosen them and then twist them off. Leaving the quick exposed like that looks more painful to me. I thought I'd show you how it works to trim them with a Dremel rotary tool.

We get the little brown cutting wheels. I'm not sure the specs or part number, but see the photo below. It works like a tiny angle grinder.

You can wrap the rooster in a towel if you wish, but I just hold him tightly with his head under my arm and restrain the leg. My husband uses his free hand to hold the foot as well. It is important that the rooster holds still so you can make an accurate cut.

You want to leave about a half of an inch stub. You don't want to cut too close or flush with the leg. The main goal is to take the sharp tip down so that the rooster won't hurt the hens or himself when he walks or worse, stab someone or another rooster by flogging. It will slowly regrow. I find it sufficient to trim them once a year in the spring before breeding season hits full swing.

The great thing about this method is that it is very quick, minimally painful for the rooster and the speed of the wheel cauterizes the quick and you should have little to no bleeding. Recovery is quicker than the other methods of twisting them off and there is no need to apply medicine or isolate the bird for time to heal.

You can see from the picture below how clean the cut is.

You can see from this angle how the spur had curved back toward the leg. It made a complete U-turn. I've never seen this happen before in my 12 years of chicken keeping. Perhaps he had injured it. The other spur was normal.

All done and no worse for wear. Rocky's ready to go back to his girls. 

Chickens in the Garden

I wanted to brag on my chickens a little and show you what good garden helpers they are. 😊

This upper quadrant of the garden is a perfectly bare square of dirt since I put my bantams on it this past winter. I have 6 silkies and 2 other bantams in that coop and they have been way more aggressive getting after every green and growing thing in their area. The smaller fenced area was to keep them out of the asparagus patch. 

The big chickens further over have done a lot to keep the weeds down in their area too. They had a big pile of compost they decimated for me. I've taken to making a pile in one corner of the garden each year of all manure, clippings and scraps. I don't want to waste any of the good stuff. 

I'll lime, till and plant the top half of the garden just as soon as it ever quits raining long enough. 

I've been working with these Poultry Net electric fences from Premier1 for about 6 years now. They are amazingly effective and I can't say enough good things about them. They're super easy for me to move by myself and I've had no losses to dogs, opossums, coons, etc. since I started using them. I have lost a couple to hawks, but that was while allowing the chickens to range outside the fence. The fences are strong and haven't degraded in that time either. I have three of them now for rotating their pasture and keeping different flocks separated. Occasionally I will get some stubborn girl who wants to fly out, but I just clip the flight feathers on one wing and that puts an end to that.

So anyway, this has been an easy way for me to cultivate and fertilize my garden and I highly recommend it. Those accursed weeds can be very discouraging for me otherwise. The droppings are incorporated quickly and thoroughly enough that it doesn't get "hot".

Day 19

Ok, we're in lockdown...the silkie eggs, that is. 😬 Candling on day 14 had me worrying that the air cells weren't large enough. I ran the humidity low as possible from then until now and made good progress. I hope it was enough. It has been awhile since I've hatched eggs and I haven't done banty eggs before. I kind of flew into it without thinking and forgot to weigh the eggs before setting. We'll see how it goes.

Keeping Busy

I hope you all are staying well and getting along alright during this pandemic. What a surreal event it has been. It seems it will be a long time before things get back to any semblance of normal.

Ordinarily, I am a homebody and an introvert anyway. I could never run out of interesting things to do or means of keeping myself busy. But the thought that you cannot do something makes it oddly more desirable. I have started a lot of different little projects around here and it seems there's always something I'd like to run to Tractor Supply or the hardware store for. I try to bundle all those things into one trip as much as possible or make do.

We have gotten a good bit of tidying up done out on the farm lately. There are many pressing projects that need attended to out there. My husband has been blessed to be able to work from home, but mediating the chaos of everyone else working from home has kept him very busy in the IT department (which he technically isn't in anymore!!) He is set up with a desk in the basement and we really don't see much of him during the day. There are lots of things I wish he had time to help me with, but this has been no vacation for him.

Here are a few pics of things I am doing lately. None of which yet have included spring cleaning, ha.

Wintersowing.

 And starting flats...tomatoes, flowers, peppers, cauliflower, head lettuce, herbs, etc. I'm going to plant a LOT of tomatoes this year and do a lot of canning. I didn't plant up all of the garden space I have available the past couple of years since I was so busy. I plan to can lots of tomato sauce so I can make it keto. 

 Planted early spring veggies in the front raised bed so far.

 Pruned my roses and working on putting down new mulch on all of my beds. I know, these are two different colors! I ran out of the mocha brown and haven't been back to Ohio to get more so I had to settle for black. Not exactly a "necessary" purchase, but if I don't get it done now, I will be fighting weeds all summer.

We bought my Dad's bass boat out of the estate and my husband has been working on the old motor which wasn't running. He bought a big, thick manual on it and cleaned and rebuilt both carburetors. It sounds pretty good, but has some electrical thing wrong with it. He bypassed the kill-switch and that got it starting for now. This is has been his quarantine project and stress reliever. I don't think he would have gotten to it yet if it hadn't been for the COVID-19 shut down. Hopefully, we'll get to spend lots of time out on the water this summer. I bought a new 12-person tent too.

We're on day 13 of 21 hatching a batch of silkie chicks. After candling and removing 6 duds, I have 19 viable eggs at present.

These are some of the parents. (The Polish hen and the Mille Fleur hen's eggs were excluded, of course.) I would love to get some more Mille Fleur D'Uccles. They are the sweetest, prettiest little banties. Our silkies are very cute and friendly too. Just the right size for the kids to cuddle.

 Raising some replacement layers. These are all female Easter Eggers. The EE's will always be my favorite for layers. They have a nice temperament and I just think blue eggs taste better. 😉 I wanted to add some Cuckoo Marans this year, but I'll have to order them. I haven't found any locally.

I am totally obsessed with goats nowadays. I got my first Nigerian Dwarf does in January 2019 and spend a lot of my time studying all about good goat husbandry. The white doe farthest left is Katie and the other two are her doelings from last spring, Heather and Astrid. Lazy ol' Juji is in the barn hiding somewhere.

These are my new registered boys, both carrying milk stars from their dams. They are looking forward to having a job to do this fall. Katie is 11, so I'm retiring her. I plan to breed Rebel (black, in back) to my 2 first fresheners. He is a slightly smaller built buck than Snapdragon (in front.)

Snappy says "Hi"! Who knew you could love something so dang stinky? 😄 Both boys have wonderful personalities and can be so cute and affectionate. Everyone got their hooves trimmed yesterday and the boys stood for me much nicer than the girls do. I'm going to give them a spring shave here as soon as the weather warms a bit more.

I've been working on building them a run. They just go out in it for the day now and sleep at night in the barn until I can finish their little shed. We're putting up a privacy fence around that side of the yard too, as extra protection against loose dogs. I also have electric run around the pen.

When I can, I try to get away for a hike and some foraging as much as possible.

 

Morels are in season right now. I've been out a couple times. So far I have only found this one tiny Tulip Morel, M. diminutiva. 

 

Naturalized daffodils scattered around an old home site. My honey hole was logged 2 years ago. I don't know how long it will take to recover. The machinery spread the daffodils everywhere when they came through.

And we've been digging ramps.

 And playing in the creek.

And Savannah is really into learning to shoot a bow lately. She's pretty good too!

Things are blooming and this is my favorite time of year. I am so thankful for spring as it makes living in the twilight zone much easier to bear. So long as I stay outside and stay busy and don't turn on the news, everything is seems wonderful here in my little corner of the world. My heart goes out to those who are sick or have lost loved ones. It is hard to believe they could let something like this get so out of control in this day and age we live. 

I hope you have a blessed Easter this Sunday, in whatever form that may be.

Broody Banty, Part Deux!

Banties are so small and so good at hiding!

The bantam Golden Seabright from my previous post gave up immediately when I took her eggs away from her, but the three of them continue to fly over the fence and hide their eggs each day.

When broody banty number 2 disappeared about 2-3 weeks ago, I immediately assumed she had gone broody, but a search of our property turned up nothing. If she had made her way over to the neighbor's big barn, there wasn't anything I could do about it, so it was wait and see.

Two days ago she finally made an appearance, popping out briefly to find something to eat. She was very impatient and nervous and demanded that I bring her food right away. She then threatened to whoop the cat if he didn't get out of her way and proceeded to eat from the cats' dish. As she briskly made her way back to her hiding spot, I was able to trail her and saw her duck in here:

A small recess in the bottom of my husband's wood pile. He has been working on splitting this wood every few days and it's a wonder she wasn't squashed by the unstable pile of logs! She never came running out, never made a peep, just laid low, waiting and hoping not to be noticed. 

The weather here has been hitting record highs for the month of December with the strong El Nino going through. Many days have been in the 60's and 70's. We've scarcely burned any firewood this year so far. But tomorrow night is forecast to go below freezing, so I made the decision to move her and her eggs to a safer, warmer location.

 

Chicken solitary confinement.

I didn't want to risk finding frozen peeps or worse yet, a frozen mama banty.

She was a little peeved with me and very agitated at first, but after she ate, drank, relieved herself and preened her feathers, she finally did settle back down on her eggs. Of the 14 eggs I removed from the nest, 5 were warm and viable. I candled the others to verify their demise. We even saw these 5 WIGGLE a couple of times. Yay! :D If I remember correctly, she has been gone at least 2 weeks, or perhaps nigh unto three. We may have some new peeps here very soon!

I have no idea what I'm going to do with them. As broody and sneaky as these banties are and given how chicken math works they could multiply quite rapidly come summertime. These little girls have a major advantage over the standard size pullets in hiding their nests from me. :\

Broody Banty

If you've kept chickens for awhile, then you know that most missing chicken stories don't have happy endings.  We were so glad this one did!  We've become very attached to our three banties.  They are so sweet and gentle and just the right size for the children to cuddle.

One night she didn't turn up on the roost with the others, although I had last seen her about an hour before closing the pen when I tossed them their daily ration of scratch grains.  After a brief search of the backyard the next day, this is where we found her:

What else to do with a hoard of 16 eggs, but to set them?  

This little girl seems to have her seasons mixed up.  It has been an unusually warm November this year, so that is understandable.  Maybe in the spring I will allow her to set some.  I felt really bad taking them from her and even worse scrambling them up later!

If these were fertile, they would have been a cross between our white Easter Egger cockerel and bantam Golden Seabright.  The banties have discovered they can squeeze between the gaps in the electric poultry netting when it's off and he usually flies over daily to escape our other Easter Egger cockerel who is the top dog.  So they have formed their own little band, although the banties get along with all of my other chickens and can mingle at will.

I just bought an incubator this fall.  I can't wait to hatch some eggs!  I will post pics and stories about that when the time comes.  Chicken math...you know how that goes!  :)

Meat Bird Tractor Update

I had another member of BYC ask a few good questions about my tractor, so I figured I should add that information here as well.

He wanted to know about coyotes, coons and the cost to build.  Here is my reply:

Opossums, hawks and dogs are the only predators I've had to deal with at my location in the past 7 years I've lived and raised chickens here, so those are what I planned for.

A coyote couldn't lift this tractor.  It's too heavy.  It's only movable by skidding it along with the pull rope.  I can move it by myself on dry days, but in mud it takes DH and I both to do it.  It did flip in 70 mph storm winds on Halloween, but that was because a freak storm blew through the N.E. unannounced and I didn't have time to hammer in the storm anchors (rebar) and I unfortunately had it turned facing into the wind.

Coons... I have the bottom half of the tractor outside of the cattle panels (and underneath the tarp) also covered with 2x4 welded wire fencing.  Front and back arch of the tractor are completely covered with it, top to bottom.  If you have a lot of trouble with coons in your area, you could cover the rest of the top and door with it too.  Or maybe even go with something smaller like 1x2 cage wire.

I can't say exactly what the total cost would be since I used mostly salvaged/leftover materials.  Two cattle panels would probably run you $40-$50.  The tarp I paid about $20 for.  Eight 2x4s...about $2.50 each.  32 foot of 3' high 2x4 welded wire, maybe $30.  The door was salvaged off of my old coop and made with scrap lumber to begin with.  Small galvanized staples, a box of wood screws, door hinges/latch and some zip ties...about $15.  It comes to around $135.  After having two of my layer flocks wiped out by stray dogs, it was a necessary investment for me.  I've had no invaders or losses after that.

All good questions, thanks for your interest.

Some of you probably recall the storm I am talking about from Halloween night.  A cold front moved in quickly after a couple of 70 degree days and caused quite a stir.  I had the stomach flu that day and awoke at 4:30am burning up after my fever broke and when I went to open the window to let in some cool air, I spied my 31 meaties all out in front by the road, huddled in a ditch.  So out into the rainy, dark night I went to fetch them, two by two.  They spent a day in my chainlink fenced front yard until I could construct another enclosure.  The tractor took some damage and needs repaired.  They were roughly two weeks from processing day, so they finished out in a stationary fenced area over one of my garden plots.  I did lose one when the tractor flipped, but the rest were fine.  I am just glad I found them before my neighbors had to come knocking on my door!

A note on how my meaties turned out overall this year:  The tractor system was a wonderful success and very ideal for their health and my chicken-keeping pleasure...ha.  I am not sure that the hatchery sent me Cornish Cross though.  They may have been Cornish Roasters instead, which are nearly identical in appearance, but are from a different, slower growing strain.  These birds were very active and ate bugs and grass, scratched, roosted and dirt-bathed in addition to eating their feed.  I've NEVER had CX do that before.  They had no leg problems or unexplained, sudden deaths.  I usually lose 1-3 out of about 40 chicks in the first two weeks.  These grew out about 2 weeks slower as well.

I also tried a new, locally sourced feed mix this year formulated by a pastured CX producer in my area.  It contained cracked corn and whole grains of wheat in addition to soybean meal and some other things.  It was much more cost effective for me since I could buy it in bulk.  I can get it at $26 for 100 lbs., whereas the Dumor 24% chick feed would have cost me around $20 per 50 lb. bag.  She said hers still grew out at 7-8 weeks on it, but mine did not.  There were too many variables for my flock this year...the storm, the feed, possibly not CX...so I did not bother to extrapolate my feed conversion rate or costs.  It wouldn't tell me much of anything useful for comparison anyway.

Most of my birds averaged around 5 pounds dressed weight (I did not weigh them all though.)  I kept a couple a little longer and they were huge.  I have one 9 pound (dressed) bird in the freezer that I will look forward to cooking in the turkey fryer for a special occasion or summer barbeque.  :)

My Rockin' New Chicken Tractor

I apologize that my posts are so rare and sporadic anymore. That is the nature of my life these days. I am super busy!

But anyhow, I wanted to show you my new chicken tractor...the chicken tractor I have dreamed about for the past year or so and only now had time or reason to build.

My next batch of Cornish X meat birds will come in August, but for now I have some 8 week old Easter Eggers hanging out in there until I can finish building my new coop.

I tried to put this up as a slideshow from my Photobucket account, but it won't embed for some reason. But if you click through on the picture below, you can go through each picture one-by-one and all the specs are given in the description below the pic.

Click on the image to see all the pics (11 total.)

Two things I learned on this project:  1) Wood screws with star drive bit heads rock!  And 2) Holding onto fence staples with a pair of needle nose pliers is much kinder to your thumbs.

This new tractor is going to make my life so much easier! Raising those CX might even become fun. I love the self-enclosed automatic watering bucket with chicken drinker nipples because the water will never get poopy. That means healthier birds--a substantially lowered risk for E-coli or cocci. And everything moves along WITH the tractor. No stepping into poo to take out the feeder and waterer prior to moving it.

Despite its size, this tractor is very easy for me to move by myself. Note though, it is necessary to pound on the far side of the tractor with your hand prior to pulling it along so that the birds will move out of the way and not get their feet squashed under the frame.

I took my time and really thought this one through. I think this design will serve me well for years to come.

(Read about how my 2013 batch of CX turned out in my tractor update here.)

So, you can dye brown eggs afterall...

Normally I'll pick up two 18-packs of the old store-bought white eggs for Easter.  This year I have eggs coming out my ears as my thirty laying hens have started picking up the pace.  A quick search on www.backyardchickens.com turned up evidence that you indeed can dye your own homegrown brown eggs and that the results are wonderful!


I used three dye tablets for each cup and increased the white vinegar to equal about half of the liquid.  I think now that two tablets would have been enough.  It helps to let the eggs sit just a bit longer, for a couple of minutes or so.

Brown eggs will render a variety of deep, jewel tones.  Very pretty!  I especially like the varying shades of emerald, sapphire and violet.  Yellow will come out a beautiful, glowing shade of goldenrod.  Red comes out a warm, dark coral.  Depending on how long you leave them in the cup and how light or dark your brown eggs were to begin with, you will get a much greater variety of colors than you would with the plain white eggs.

Another benefit is that eggs from your own chickens, which are fed much better than factory-farm chickens, will have harder shells and be less likely to crack when your young children drop them quickly and unceremoniously into the cup.

I had quite a surplus of eggs this time and held back several dozen for a couple weeks on purpose to let them age so they'd peel easier.  We did up eight dozen eggs altogether.  Can you believe the kids actually got tired of dyeing eggs?  They told me they needed to take a break.  Sounds like work, huh?

I hope you all have a wonderful Easter Sunday with your loved ones and may you rejoice every day in the new life we have in Christ Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us.

I've A Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore...

Wow.  How about this weird weather?

Sunday was in the 80's and muggy.  Monday we were under Tornado Watch and the wind picked up my chicken tractor and tried to blow my dinner away.  Today, Tuesday, it's in the mid-forties and I've had to fire up the woodstove one...more...time (crossin' my fingers.)

Here's the meaties hanging out after I got the chicken tractor set back up.  A little bit redneck, but it does the job.  It takes two of us to move this tractor (not really happy with the design, but I'll have to work on that next year.)  I had the tarp covering it all the way across the top and had it attached so well with bungees that the wind picked it up and tossed it like a frisbee.  It's over 100 pounds!

I couldn't flip it back over or move it by myself, so I had to completely disassemble it and reassemble it. 

The birds didn't go anywhere.  They just sat huddled around the feeder looking a little stunned.  It took me two hours to put everything back together and round up all 36 chickens.  (You don't want to chase them too hard or give them a heart attack.)

Cornish X are tasty, but they're rather unnatural and not very chicken-like in their mannerisms.  This will probably be the last year I raise them for the freezer.  I want to work on developing a good dual-purpose homestead flock next year, possibly Light Sussex or Black Copper Marans.

Anyhow, while I'm bemoaning my bad luck with the weather, check out my swamp. This is my garden today, April 12, 2011.

And THIS is my garden last year, April 7, 2010...

I am so far behind right now.  I've just had to toss my ag extension garden calendar.  It's giving me nervous fits.  No tilling until the swamp dries out.  The only things I have planted right now are peas, onions (in a raised bed) and a little bit of spinach that was left over from my winter low tunnel experiment.  The renegade chickens ate all of my early lettuce.  Their days are numbered...

This is my lilac bush last year, same date as above.

This year, a week later than that, it still has not yet bloomed.

I am so ready for sunshine, warm breezes and flowers.  Where did spring go?

We've had a lot of unsettled weather this spring and a lot of high winds and a few tornado watches.  My neighbor, Charlie, got tired of picking up all the branches on his maple trees, so he hired some fellas to come give them a drastic haircut.  They'll eventually bush back up again, but they really do look funny right now!

Sorry for the low quality of these pictures.  There was a drizzly rain all day and I didn't want to get my good camera wet, so I took my pocket-sized point-and-click with me instead.  Such a dismal day as it was, there wasn't much the good camera could have done to make it look any better anyway.  :P