Spring is here!

Spring is here and eggs are coming!  If anyone is interested in eggs, please stop by and pick some up!  Not as many as mid summer, but the fridge is filling up!  First come, first serve!


Lots of interesting things happened this winter.  The biggest of these is that the truck is has sides on it!  Shortly after Christmas, Lindsey and Keith finished it for me!  The chickens were almost more excited about warm living quarters than I was!  I now need to put in some quality time in filling the cracks, calking it and painting it a nice bright red color!  Stop by and check it out and I'll try to add a picture of it here.

Since the disappearance of the snow in the last couple weeks, the chickens now spend little time in the coop.  They sleep there and lay eggs, but otherwise they're scratching around in the yard looking for tasty morsels of some variety or another!  They don't care to walk around in snow much, but they certainly love warm and sunny, and sometimes muddy spring days!

Of the 7 peachicks we had last August, now only 2 are left.  It appears that one is male and one is female, so that works out well!  They seem to get along marvelously, which is also great.  Hopefully they can keep each other alive until adulthood (about age 3).  I'm in the process as I write of making them an outside coop so that they can enjoy the fresh air and sunshine of spring too!  Peachicks don't seem to have the same inborn traits that the chickens do to come back to a familiar roost at night, so they will definitely need a run and coop so they stay with us instead of meeting their demise who knows where.  I need to paint it and put on the wire and tarps and it should be ready to go!  This one is much smaller than the other summer coop I made for the chickens last summer and it's also taken me oodles less time to make it as well!  I'm not a natural construction person, so I'm just copying the first design to make it easier and faster for myself. :-)

The runner ducks are out and about too.  Enjoying the fresh air and sun and especially the puddles, as all good ducks do!  I still have no idea if I have mixed gender, so thus I have no idea if I'll have little ones from them.  There are also some Muscovies running around with them (that don't belong to me) and because Muscovies get marvelously broody, we'll probably have some baby ducks of some variety in the upcoming months. :-)

Exciting times here!  Stay tuned for more that happens by the day! :-)

The cold days are upon us...

Well, it's officially winter now and the egg laying and fresh grass are slim to none.  Time to settle in for the winter and keep warm!
A note about eggs:
As there is very little grass, what is here is covered in snow, and the chickens are being fed all corn and other feed, the nutritiousness of the eggs is at a low.  There are also fewer eggs at this time of year because of the lack of warm sunny days.  Please watch this blog or your email (if I'm in regular contact with you) and I'll let you know when everything's back to normal again and eggs will be for sale again.  From me and all my hen friends, we thank you for your business this past year and we look forward to connecting with and meeting you all again in Spring 2010!  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The grass is greener on the other side...

Because the hens are now no longer in the vineyard and the coop isn't moving to fresh grass everyday, they spend the morning inside "cooped" up (so I can find their eggs and they don't bother the neighbors) and then around noon, I let them out so they can forage to their hearts' content all over the front yard and through the dirt work behind the house.  They have water and corn in the morning, but it is rather humorous to see them in there.  They stand there longing for the green grass and freedom on the other side and counting down the minutes until noon.  Kind of like an impatient 3rd grader a half an hour before the end of the school day! :-)  Now, don't get me wrong...they're not suffering in there...they spend the morning laying eggs, running laps back and forth, taking dustbaths, scratching for corn I've thrown in for them to find and doing other chicken things.  But it's pretty hard to be patient when the grass is literally greener on the other side of the fence and it's pretty tasty yet besides!! :-)

And there wasn't light...

A couple weeks ago, after seeing it grow dark by 6pm and watching the daily egg count take a dive, I decided to get out the extension cord, the timer and the small LED nightlight.  That's right - it's time for some fake sunlight.  I had read sometime last year about someone who had noticed an improvement on winter laying possibly stemming from a simple candle*.  I don't think I want to take the chances of an unguarded, open flame so I opted for electric....  But I also didn't want something that was going to cost a fortune in energy, so I found a small LED nightlight that supposedly costs only pennies a year to run and I also bought a small timer so that I can program when the light is on during the day.  14 hours of daylight is supposed to make the best production.  After hooking it up, I did notice a rise in egg count - yeah!  I really notice it now that for the last two days it hasn't been working and the egg count has dropped again.  I have to do a little testing...our outside plug-in is a little touchy anyway (flips the breaker sporadically) but so far the breaker hasn't flipped and nothing still works.  I plugged in something else directly into the plug-in and that works, so my guess is that the extension cord must have gone crazy.  Ah well...I'd best get to it so I can still keep having tasty eggs for breakfast in the morning... :-) 

*By the way, I can't remember exactly which issue it came from, but the "reading" I mentioned above was from the Backyard Poultry magazine I subscribe to.  SUPER magazine!!  Would highly recommend it to anyone who has poultry...

Drop in laying...

For all you who are interested in buying eggs or have bought eggs from me in the past - sad to say, but the hens' egg count has dropped considerably in the last few weeks!  Each egg is extra precious now!  The 17 older hens are at various stages of molting and as I said in another post, they spend more time losing feathers than laying eggs!  So 17 down.  That leaves the 26 spring hens as the main layers.  Those ladies are trying to do a fine job, except that with the shorter days for this time of year, their body clock tells them not to lay as many eggs.  Apparently laying eggs and bright sunny days go hand in hand!  With all this to consider, you may not be able to buy as many eggs at one time as you did a couple weeks ago.  It's a first come first serve thing now and if you'd like any substantial amount, let me know as soon as possible and even then I may not be able to fill your needs at this time.  As sad as this is, there's a positive side - in a few months when the days get longer and the older ones are back in their prime (and barring no illness or small hen stealing varmint!), I will have eggs filling the fridge and looking to get rid of them!  Your patience will be rewarded! :-)

Check for freshness!

I found this cool link to tell how fresh your eggs are!  http://www.helpwithcooking.com/egg-guide/fresh-egg-test.html

The prodical peachicks are back...

Today Keith found two more of the brown baby chicks and then the big white peachick appeared on the front lawn as well.  So that brings my total back up to 4 of the 7 birds back where they belong.  Tomorrow night after they've found a place to roost, I'm going to go look back on the other side of the yard and see if the missing 3 are around or if I can't find them and can assume that they have met an untimely end at the teeth of some wild critter from the corn field...  :-(  We'll see!!  But 4 out of 7 isn't bad either and hopefully they can stay nice and cozy in the calf hut until Sandy comes next and then she can see them... :-)