Journal 30 April

Took chicken eggs from hen and replaced with five waterfowl eggs. They all look about the same, so no telling if they are goose or duck. I plan to candle them for viability in eight days, and also add some chicken eggs to the clutch at that time.

Catch Up

Things that have changed since the last time I blogged:

We bought four started White Embden goslings. One has slipped wings and will be Christmas dinner. Of the remaining three, hopefully both genders are represented so that we can raise more goslings next year. They certainly keep the grass mowed down well!

The female Pekin duck with leg problems has recovered. I'm contemplating hatching a few ducklings next spring, since I have so many broody hens. The final remaining runner duck disappeared. I really liked the runner ducks, but they seem to be entirely too fragile for our farm.

Speaking of fragile, we're getting out of meat goats. All of the kids born this year died. I think it was stomach worms, even though we dewormed them, because with the new baby we weren't able to rotate them through the forest so they were just in the main pasture for most of the summer. There are two does left (because we sold three troublemakers earlier in the summer), and I need to get pictures of them and list them for sale.

However! In July we bought two Saanen does, with one of them in milk. She's dried off now, because she was producing so little, but during the summer we were getting nearly a gallon a day. The younger one is looking very round, so I'm beginning to wonder if she was bred before we bought her. It's not ideal to have young kids in autumn (although better than the depths of winter!), but if it turns out to be the case it will be nice to have milk through the winter. I still need to find a buck, preferably Saanen but other dairy is acceptable, to breed the other doe this winter. We're going to be focusing on dairy goats, with meat simply as a side product.




There are a bunch of new chicks. The two broody hens I wrote about before hatched out 14 chicks between them, and we also bought 50 Rhode Island Red pullet chicks from the hatchery. There was still one more broody hen last month, so I let her sit on another dozen eggs. She only hatched four, but is otherwise a good mother. One of the chicks has blue feathers and looks like it will be gorgeous. I'm hoping it's a pullet, but even if it's a cockerel I might still keep it. At this point there aren't any more broodies, which is good because the weather has gotten cold.


We have boarders at our farm. An acquaintance needed space for her animals, so in exchange for lumber and supplies to build shelters, we now have two sheep and a whole bunch of pygmy goats living in our pasture. She also brought her two rabbits and their hutches, but decided to give them to Cerra after Cerra said how much she loved them. So now we have rabbits. I believe that they are male and female, so we'll see about breeding some bunnies here soon. We'll want another hutch first, though, to house the young rabbits while they grow.

I've still got lots of work to do to get ready for winter. I've gotten a good start on the chicken shelter; I can probably finish it in a couple of hours at this point. I've started a shelter for hay for the goats. I'm pretty confidant in my ability to build the frame, but I'm a little bit anxious about the roof. I've never really built a roof before. The ducks and geese are set; they have our old truck shell for a shelter. We've gotten about seven years of use out of it, but it's finally gotten to the point where it's not safe to have on the truck anymore. I don't want the water fowl in with the chickens because they'll eat too much grain and get too fat. Finally, I haven't even started the run-in shed for the goats and sheep. I think I'll need to get the boarders to help me with that one in order to get it done reasonably soon. The weather was cold and wet for several weeks, and Paul was working at the post office, so that left me very little time to work on things at the farm. It's warm and dry now, so I need to take advantage of the weather and get things taken care of.

My garden didn't do all that well, what with the cool weather all summer. The corn was the only thing that really thrived. The tomato was planted much too late, but I was hoping to get at least a few fruits before winter. However, we had an extremely early first frost in September which killed the plant before any of the tomatoes were big enough to pick. The beans would have been great if they had been snap beans, but they're soup beans and I was growing them for seed. Only maybe half of the pods got mature enough to harvest before the weather got really cold. Oh, and the poor okra didn't tolerate the cool weather at all. The one month of hot weather in August got them growing well, but it had cooled off by the time they started setting fruit, and they all just rotted instead of developing.

When I get a chance, I'll post the egg tallies for the latest months and update the farm production in the sidebar.

Brooding

Two of the Australorps have been broody for about two months, but I've been much too busy to mess with them. I finally had a chance to set up nesting cages for them in the basement, in dog crates. Broody hens make a funny trilling sound if you move them, and raise their neck feathers to try to look intimidating. They trilled at me when I started arranging the hay they were sitting on into a nest, but as soon as I started putting eggs into it the angry sounds turned into a satisfied clucking. The hens seemed to be a bit surprised by the unprecedented event of the human putting eggs into the the nest, instead of taking them away. When I was done they used their beaks to rearrange the eggs more to their liking and then settled down, happy at last. I gave each of them a dozen fresh eggs, so hopefully we'll have some chicks by the end of the month.

Don't Count Your Chickens...

...until they've grown up. I think the cats found where Buffy was keeping her chicks, since in one night eight of them disappeared. The next night another one was lost, leaving only one. She kept that one safe for a few days, but last night I noticed that Buffy was roosting on top of the chicken house with the other chickens while her chick was running around the yard peeping frantically. I guess she decided she'd had enough of motherhood. The chick is only about two weeks old and is a little bit too young to be out in the chilly (for a chick) night without any chickens to cuddle against, so I caught it and brought it home. It's in a bird cage, and it is not amused. At least it is alive. I'll take it back out to the farm once it has grown some more feathers.

Peeps

Today I finally got to see the chicks that our banty hatched. They were foraging in the tall grass at one end of Paul's garden.

This is Buffy, the banty. She's normally very wild and nervous around people, but today she actually let me approach and take pictures of her and the chicks. I counted 10, but I don't know if one died or if it was just hidden in the grass. At any rate, she's doing a very good job at taking care of them so far.

Speaking of Hidden Nests...

Today one of our banty hens showed up with eleven chicks in tow: eight yellow, two black, and one buff-colored. The two black ones are most likely from Australorp eggs, but most of the others are probably banties. It will be interesting to see how they turn out when they grow up.

Chicken Pictures

Australorps on Pasture

It's a Tough Life, Being a Duck

Compost Pile == Smorgasbord

Jack

New Rooster: Ameraucana?

Check Out Those Spurs!

Tentatively Named Jacques


New Bantam Rooster

Scarce Chicks?

Until Mary Cate blogged about it, I hadn't realized that hatcheries have been selling out of chicks this year. She wrote,

"Poultry chicks of all kinds are selling like hotcakes with the economy screwed up like it is. All the hatcheries aren't taking personal orders till May, and the ones arriving at the McMinnville store are being snatched up the day they come in."

I checked my hatchery's website, and sure enough they don't seem to have any chicks available through online ordering. We ordered this year's pullets last summer instead of waiting until spring, a decision we've been happy with so far. Now I'm really glad we did it that way, so that we weren't competing with all the people trying to buy chicks this spring. I had planned to order another batch of Rhode Island Reds this summer, but if the frenzy keeps up I'll just breed my own replacement layers. They'll be mixed breed, and I'll no longer be able to tell the age of the chickens by their color, but at least they'll be layers. I'll probably put leg bands on them instead, if it comes to that. I guess it's time to set up some breeding pens.

Newcomers

Today the chickens were foraging about the pasture, and I saw what I thought was one of the Wyandotte roosters hiding under the picnic table. It looked a little strange, though, so I shooed it out for a better look. It was a rooster all right, but not one of ours! Moments later, there were sounds of a panicked chicken from the goat pen, and I wondered why Jenny, the white bantam, was so excited. Then I realized that the little white chicken had a black tail and a big red comb, meaning it was not Jenny. Sure enough, it was another strange rooster.

Apparently someone dumped these two roosters at our farm this afternoon. Paul is pretty sure that they weren't there when he stopped to let our poultry out, so there was only about a three hour window.

Both birds are pretty boys, but we have plenty of roosters already. I plan to keep the two biggest to breed for the beginnings of a meat breed, but the others are destined for the stew pot. Actually, I kind of like the larger of the two new roosters. He's heavier than any of the Wyandottes, and has a mellower personality. I might keep him instead, and cull all of the Wyandotte roosters. Unfortunately, I have absolutely no use for a bantam rooster. The bantam hens are fine because they mostly get their own feed and they provide us with small eggs, but I don't intend to breed any more of them. So unless there's someone who wants a mongrel bantam rooster, he will probably end up in a very small stew pot.

The larger rooster has a beard, so I think he might be part Ameraucana. His markings are similar to my Silver Laced Wyandottes, except that he has a lot of red feathers mixed in with the black and white. I'll have to get a picture, since he is quite striking.

Speaking of striking, things are pretty restless in the poultry yard with two new roosters around, making a total of six. The bantam's strategy was to hide amongst the hens on the roost, which seemed to work since he was completely ignored up there. The big one didn't start any fights, but he pretty much held his own when the others challenged him. He and Jack quickly reached an agreement that Jack was king, but the Wyandottes kept pushing the fight even when he tried to surrender. They're always very flashy and aggressive, which is why I probably won't use any of them for breeding. It's kind of funny that the two chickens I most want to propagate are both mongrels of unknown origins.

Layer Feed Recipe

I'm putting this up so that I don't have to keep recalculating it every time I order more. This works out to about 16% protein, and the birds have access to oyster shells so that the layers can get their calcium. They also have free choice kelp for trace minerals.

corn, cracked...500 lbs
oats, whole......250 lbs
soy, roasted.....200 lbs
limestone..........50 lbs
--------------------------------------
Total.............1000 lbs

Pullet Eggs

The Australorp pullets are really starting to lay now. They make such cute little eggs, hardly bigger than banty eggs. They'll get bigger, of course, and in the meantime it frees up the larger eggs to be sold. Between the banties and the pullets, we're now getting enough eggs for our own use.

A few days ago, I thought that Buffy (one of the banties) was going broody. She's normally the wildest chicken we have, the sort to run away squawking murder if a person so much as looks at her, but that day she was just sitting on the nest even though I was only a few feet away. I stuck a couple of duck eggs on the nest for her to hatch. It turns out that she was just in the middle of laying an egg when I saw her, because a little while later she was back out in the pasture like normal and there was an extra egg in the nest. So I took my duck eggs back. I need to test out my incubator, and if it still works, order an egg turner for it so that I can hatch some eggs this spring.

Getting in Shape

This afternoon I doubled the size of the dug area in my garden. It had taken three days of work to accomplish the previous amount. Part of the increase was because I am now far enough away from the chicken pen that it was becoming more difficult to throw the sod clumps to them, so now I am just turning them over into the already dug area. But I definitely feel more able to do the work, after just a week of practice. I could have dug more today, but it was getting late and the chickens needed to be brought in after their first day out on the pasture. I'll do more tomorrow.

New Garden Plot

Eventually, the pond pasture will be completely converted to a permaculture forest garden, but the first step is removing most of the grass so that it doesn't compete with the new fruit trees. I also need nursery space for the osage orange and apple trees that I intend to grow from seed, and room to experiment with open pollinated varieties away from Paul's garden. I really dislike using motorized equipment, so I am tackling this area with nothing more than shovel, rake, and hoe. I'm finding Steve Solomon's book Gardening When it Counts to be very useful with regards to tool use and maintenance. It's amazing how much easier it is to use a sharpened shovel, compared to a blunt one straight from the store.

I'm not following all of his advice for preparing a garden plot from sod. He says to dig deeply and turn the sod clumps over to expose the roots, and then dig them again in a week to further kill the grass. I'm sure that works, but since the pond pasture is immediately adjacent to the chicken pen, I have been digging shallowly, just underneath the grass roots, and tossing the sod to the birds. It's still too early to allow them out on the pasture, so they are loving the worms, grass, and other goodies in the clumps. I lose a little bit of soil this way, but I will replace it with compost (and the chicken bedding will eventually go to make more compost as well), so I think I come out ahead. Once the sod is removed, I'll go back and dig more deeply to prepare the seedbed.

Since I'm out of shape from a long winter of inactivity (and, oh yes, seven months pregnant), I've been doing my digging at a slow, steady pace and only a little bit at a time. With a sharpened shovel it's really no strain at all, and I feel great. Honestly, I think it would be more dangerous for me to operate the tiller than to dig with a shovel.

In addition to the tree seedlings, I also intend to plant some sort of bush beans, sweet potatoes (more on that in the next post), bushel gourds to make containers out of, and the first of the grafted apple trees and blackberries. I also want to transplant a young oak to one corner of the pond pasture to eventually provide shade to the chicken pen.

I have a couple more little plots I want to work on. There are several spots in the main pasture where the goats spent a lot of time this winter, so there's way too much nitrogen and compaction for the grass to come back easily. I intend to dig those areas up and experiment with "three sisters" planting: corn, vine beans, and squash all grown together. The beans grow up the corn stalks and the squash shades out weeds and helps keep raccoons away from the ripening corn, or so I've read. I look forward to trying it out in practice. After the three sisters are harvested, I'll let those spots go back to grass for the following year.

At Last, An Egg

The hens have been on laying strike with all the cold weather we've been having. The last two eggs were from January 14, and I've actually had to buy a dozen eggs from the store. Today, though, there was one egg in the nest box. Hopefully, with the days getting longer, they'll continue to produce. I'm sure looking forward to when the Australorps start laying, which should be about mid-March.

Geodesic Chicken House

I've been pondering different building methods for the eventual permanent poultry house. Joel Salatin uses hoop houses, which come in kits and are relatively inexpensive for the amount of space you get. They're still a bit pricey for the amount of chickens and space we have, though. You can build hoop houses out of pvc (which is how I built the roof to the brooder house), but I don't think I can make that strong enough for snow loads and occasional high winds.

So I started thinking about geodesic domes. In Arizona, the woman that we bought our goats from lived in a dome house, and several of her animal shelters were built the same way. I know that these types of structures are very strong and resist being overturned, and don't require a lot of materials. Googling for "geodesic chicken house" brought up this blog, which showed something very similar to what I was imagining. My poultry wouldn't be confined to such a house; it would simply be a place for them to roost and get out of the weather.

One annoyance I see with domes is that there isn't any way to increase floor space without increasing height. Once it's more than about six feet tall, any further height increases are just wasted space. I suppose you can get some extra use by building a storage loft, or you could build multiple smaller domes. Actually, I guess that several domes built next to each other and then connected with a ridge post would be pretty similar to a hoop house.

Because the domes are constructed out of triangles, they can be built with lightweight materials and still be very strong. Many of the domes I've run across on the web have been built with EMT electrical conduit. This is what I used for the roof supports on the current chicken house. I could build a 17-foot diameter dome with 35 lengths of 3/4" EMT, which would cost around $168. 1/2" EMT would cost about half as much, but I don't know if it would be strong enough. Obviously, there are additional costs, such as nuts, bolts, washers, chicken wire, and plastic or tarps for the top. For that cost you get about 225 sq ft of floor space, which is only enough for 45 chickens if that is their only space, but if they have access to an outside yard then it is enough for 150 chickens. That's not bad, for about $250 worth of materials. I could probably house all the poultry that will fit on our land in two or three such domes, although I would only be building one to start. That should be plenty of space for a few years of growth.

I haven't definitely decided to build one of these, but it's something that bears further research.

Morning Sounds

Snow below, clouds above, and the pre-dawn light wavers between them. Only the occasional passing car breaks the stillness.

The Wyandotte roosters are the first animals to notice my approach. First one, and then all of them challenge me with their strident crowing. Then a new voice joins in with a deeper and hoarser crow than the others. That must be Jack, the big, white rooster-of-uncertain-lineage. I have never heard him crow before. Although he is the youngest rooster, he bears himself with a quiet confidence, unlike the strutting, flashy, vocal Wyandottes. Nobody messes with Jack, king of the chicken yard.

Before long the crowing wakes the ducks, and their sleepy quacks echo across the hollow. A few goats bleat greetings, but otherwise prefer to stay bedded down in their warm hay. Balto is silent, because he knows the sound of my car and recognizes my step. He meets me at the goat fence and escorts me to the poultry pen. The ducks panic and run laps around the chicken house, perturbed by the change in their routine. They're not used to seeing people until feeding time in the afternoon.

The nest box opened, and the goat trough cleared of ice, and it's time to go home. Banshee follows me back to my car, trotting at my side like a dog. As soon as I'm safely inside, she heads back to the warm haystack and her kittens, and I head for my warm home.

Chickens; and Ice Removal

Last night was the first night the hens spent without access to their nest box. I didn't have to get up as early as on a weekday, since Paul doesn't work on the weekends. Balto was so deeply asleep when I got there that he didn't even hear me walk right past him to the chicken pen. Morning is off-shift time for him, so I didn't bother him. The hens didn't seem particularly agitated, and there weren't any eggs on the ground, so I guess I got there before any of them needed to lay an egg.

I also broke up the ice in the goat trough and scooped it out. After grabbing a couple of pieces with bare hands, I figured there had to be a better way. The garden rake worked pretty well, although longer tines would have been nice. We'll probably get one of these to remove rocks from the garden; I expect that it would also work very well for removing chunks of ice from troughs. This rake also looks very useful. I could spend a lot of money at Lee Valley Hardware, if I had the opportunity.

Nest Box Woes

I was willing to wait until spring to deal with the three Rhode Island Red hens that like to roost in the nest box. We plan to camp at the farm when the weather is nice, and that would make it easy to remove the nest box each night. However, now some of the Australorps are following their lead, and last night I had to kick seven chickens out of a 25-gallon Rubbermaid container. It was like a clown car in there. So, much as I hate getting up early in the morning, from now on I have to get up at 5am and drive out to the farm to set up the nest box before Paul leaves for work in the morning. He'll remove it every afternoon/evening when he gathers the eggs. Chickens are creatures of habit, so I may be able to start leaving the nest box in at night after they establish a new place to sleep.

Work Day

Since Paul has taken over the daily farm chores, I only get out there every few weeks or so to work on occasional projects. Today the plan was to move the goat fences so that their pen no longer surrounds the chicken pen. However, some of the screws on the goat house have come loose and I can't move it anymore. It will have to stay where it is until next spring or summer, when I can repair it. So the only options were to leave things as they were or move all the poultry to a new spot. There are over 50 chickens and around 10 ducks, so it really was not going to be feasible to move them. We would have spent hours rounding up the strays, and they really don't like changes to their routine, anyhow. So I just tidied up and tensioned the goat fences to keep them better contained. We worked with Balto a little bit today by tossing one of the Australorps out into the goat pen and growling at him any time he made a move towards it. It didn't take long for him to start turning his back on the loose chicken any time it ran near him, so he was a good boy. I want to try to get out there tomorrow, as well, to reinforce the training. I want it firmly established in his mind that the birds belong to the humans, and are not to be messed with.

I also worked on the chicken house. It has a tarp for a roof, necessary to keep the weight down on a movable building. It worked really well until I got the bantams, which are light enough to fly up and perch on the roof to roost. They taught the Wyandottes to do the same, and probably the Australorps will also join in when they get bigger*. All of those claws don't take long to rip through a tarp, even a heavy duty one. I had just put a brand new tarp on a few weeks ago, since the cold weather and precipitation really made it necessary to have a roof on the house. The ducks and the chicks sleep in there, even if the other chickens don't. Anyhow, several big windstorms came through soon after I put the tarp on, and broke the string holding it to the roof. Those were just supposed to be temporary, until I can put zip ties on to really hold it down. So I tied down the tarp again today, and then I went looking in the woods for a long piece of wood to attach to the apex of the house for the birds to perch on, to protect the tarp. It needed to be about 13 feet long, mostly straight, and not too heavy to lift up. At first I had little luck finding anything like that, but then I remembered that last summer I had cut down a dead walnut sapling, and that turned out to be perfect. It was a little bit on the heavy side, but with Paul's help it was no difficulty to lift it up and attach it. It is just tied on right now, but I'll probably get some long, skinny bolts to attach it more securely.

*The Rhode Island Reds never learned how to perch. One sleeps in the house, the other three insist on sleeping in the nest box. It's not feasible at this point to get out there early every morning to open up the nest box for them, so we just change the bedding in there anytime it starts to get too soiled. One night I was out there, and kicked them out of the nest box and then turned it so that the opening faced the opposite way. Chickens aren't very good at problem-solving, especially after dark, so three very confused hens just stood there looking at where the door used to be. It was pretty funny, and I wish I had thought to take my camera with me that night.

Bad Dog

Paul caught Balto in the act of chasing and catching a chicken this afternoon. It was one of the young Australorp pullets, which are still small enough to fit through the fence. It's electrified, but feathers are pretty good insulation and it only takes a moment to get through. Anyhow, Paul tackled Balto and he dropped the chicken, and it didn't appear to be harmed. It couldn't be checked thoroughly because it ran back into the rest of the flock, and all 44 of them look about the same. Hopefully, Balto found the experience startling and unpleasant, and will leave the chickens alone in the future. Tomorrow we will be reconfiguring the pens to make it less likely that a chicken will wander into the goat pen with him. It would be nice to have a livestock guard dog that was trustworthy with all of our animals, but since we got him as a two-year-old we didn't have any control over his puppyhood. It makes me want even more to someday raise and breed quality LGDs, that have the wonderful temperament and sense of responsibility that Phantom had without the massive health problems.