Today we put our older batch of chicks (this year’s “teenagers”) outside, into one half of the coop. They are still a little leery – they went from a cardboard box with a screen on top (to keep them from flying out) to a large open pen and half of a building. So they are a little overwhelmed. Plus on the other side of the fence are some large creatures that look similar, but are a little scary – the adult chickens. Everyone is settling in ok though. We’ll be moving the smaller chicks in a couple weeks, when they are big enough and have all their feathers. For now, here are the teens in their new home.
Here they are, meeting the neighborsSo small compared to the adultsThey have a lot of room.They settled in a bit and started playing, jumping around and sparring with each otherHere are the scary neighbors checking them out. And my husband posing in the background.Checking out their new home
There has been a lot going on lately around here. After my last post, no more chicks hatched. We ended up with 22 hatched out of 42 for that batch. I candled the remaining eggs – 10 were empty, and 10 just didn’t hatch. And then a day or so later one of the chicks who had hatched died. So we now have 21 small chicks, and 4 larger chicks. I’m done with hatching for the year – we now have 43 chickens including our adults.
Here is one of our larger chicks, Escape Artist’s daughter:
Looks like her mama. Also tries to jump out of the box just like mama did.
We vaccinated the chicks for Marek’s last weekend. The older chicks were given it at the same time – may be a little late but it’s better than nothing. We only had the one vial and didn’t want to try to split it up, especially since this was the first time we’ve ever given it. My chickens from last year were all vaccinated at the hatchery. I don’t know if my 2-year-old chickens were vaccinated. Either they were or we don’t have Marek’s disease here, but I have heard that it is all over the place. I’ve read that it takes 2 weeks for the chicks to build up any immunity after being vaccinated, so next weekend we might move the older chicks outside. We were going to add another little chicken house for the youngsters, but we’ve decided we will do a split coop again – we have the room in the chicken house, with two separate rooms, and fenced runs on both sides, so we can keep them separate but all safe and comfortable. The smaller chicks will have to go out later – they are still too small. I’ll have to integrate them with the larger chicks when they do get moved, but there are so many smaller ones I think they’ll be able to hold their own against the 4 larger chicks then. Here is one of the smaller chicks:
I think she’s one of the Marans (or came out of one of those eggs), but she is black with a red head. I noticed her feathers growing in stick out a little bit, like a frizzle chicken. We’ll have to see what she ends up looking like. She’s one of my favorites from this batch.Here you can see some of the feathers on the top part of her wing stick out, away from her body. I’ve never seen that before, but hers are doing that symmetrically on both sides of her body so it must be what she is supposed to have happen.
We lost one of our ducks this week. We had a male (we think) who had some trouble with his feet – he wasn’t really able to keep up with the group when they were moving around, we had noticed. In their pen that didn’t matter so much, but earlier this week I was outside and noticed he seemed to be stuck in the pool. I don’t know if he got sick, or just got stuck in the pool and got too cold. I took him out and set him on the grass in the sunshine, and dried him off a little with a towel. I hoped he would get better, but he died a little while later. Here are our remaining 11 ducks:
It looks like someone had a pillow fight in our back yard, with all the duck feather dander everywhere.
The ducks always run away when you get near them. The chickens, much smarter, come running because they know people=food. Here are my chickens out today:
“Did you bring us some snacks?”
Our trees are starting to fill in. Springtime is in full swing, except we are in the U.P. So we got snow flurries today, and it didn’t even get in the 40s. It’s supposed to warm up in the next few days though. Here is our cherry tree in bloom:
Our cherry tree. My son’s pool and Slip’n’Slide are under the tree – we really haven’t had warm enough temperatures for either of those, aside from a couple days here and there.
Since spring is here, I’ve been planning the garden. We are using the same spaces as last year, and I’m making a new space for my son. He had a little flower-bed area last year but it didn’t get enough sunshine. I gave him a big square, about 8×8 or so, that used to have weeds and asparagus, and some old rhubarb. The rhubarb and weeds were the only things that really grew there. So he’s helping me clean it up. And we started our garden plans:
This year’s garden plan
And we started seeds last weekend:
Here is one of our two trays. I figured out we don’t need to start as much in the house as I used to. Last year a lot of things did great just sown directly in the ground.
My strawberry patch is doing well. I put some new plants in this year. The old ones are growing well and spreading, and the new ones are doing ok. I need to make a cover in the next few weeks or so, to keep tiny creatures from stealing my berries this year.
This whole mulched area is strawberry patch, except right against the house is for raspberry bushes. I only have one in the ground right now; a few others that I just bought this year are in pots waiting to go in.
My son and I were taking a walk last weekend and came across something extra delicious. I have been telling him and my husband about morels since we moved up to the U.P. and have not been able to find any. We found 4 in the woods last weekend. Not many, but it’s enough to show them what I was talking about, and let them have a taste. We haven’t had much rain this year, but now we know where we might be able to find them – I have been checking in that area again but haven’t seen much else, either because of the lack of rain, or because forest creatures are finding them first. Here are the morels we found:
The four morels we found this year. They were delicious.
I counted our baby rabbits tonight. Wind (our white Californian) had 10 live babies! Fire, our black Rex, had 7 total – 2 died the other day, but we counted 5 alive this evening. Wind’s babies are all different colors. Some are naked pink, some are black, and some are spotted.
For the chicks – we are still mid-hatch, and we are up to 22 hatched out of 42. I don’t see any more pipping at the moment, but from how this hatch has been going I’m not worried. Today was their due date, and they started hatching 2 days ago so I’m going to give any stragglers until Saturday night. So far we’ve gotten 11 Marans, 5 Easter/olive eggers, three bantams and three from our home grown eggs. Here are some updated pictures of our newest fuzzballs:
I was out collecting eggs tonight found the smallest egg in one of the nesting boxes. It’s smaller than any starter egg I’ve ever found. My hens shouldn’t be laying starter eggs now anyway; they should all have been laying somewhat regularly by now. My youngest hens are just over a year old. The shell is normal, the egg is a little oblong, but otherwise it seems like a normal egg. Just very tiny. We don’t have any bantam hens. I hope it’s a one-time thing, but it is pretty interesting. My son asked if he can eat it (once it’s clean, if I crack it and determine it’s edible, then I told him yes, he could have it). Here are some pictures of the strange tiny egg:
Here the tiny egg is next to two of my normal sized eggs.Here it is again next to a normal sized egg, in my not very large hands. I think this picture shows the scale a little better, though it’s a bit blurry.
What an interesting find. I’ll update you on what happens when I open it.
*** 5/3 Update! My son wanted me to hard boil the egg, instead of just cracking it into a pan. We hard boiled it, and then cut it in half lengthwise. Here is what we found:
There was no yolk. The egg is shown on a small teaplate here. I showed my son, and he didn’t want to eat it after seeing it. I’m glad. I don’t think I would eat that either.
We have not had any more small eggs, but we’ve found a couple that were the same color and are somewhat lopsided – normal sized eggs, but flatter on one side, like they were squished while forming. So we may have a hen who is either starting to lay, starting to re-lay (maybe stopped over winter?) or getting ready to stop. My oldest hens are only 2 so that shouldn’t be happening yet.
Our test hatch (or batch 1) chicks turned two weeks old today. They are doing well, and getting bigger. They are a little skittish. Also, one of them is Escape Artist’s child. Just like mom, this one, at less than 2 weeks old, figured out he can fly and perch on the brooder box. I have now been using a window screen to cover the box. We have to cover/uncover pretty slowly so the chicks don’t freak out when we go to clean out the brooder or feed/water them.
I attempted to take some pictures today – when I say I attempted, I mean that I was able to take them, but the pictures are not very good. The chicks did not want to cooperate very much, and I think they were a bit close up, since I had to hold the chicks so I didn’t have to go find them if I set them down. The brooder is in our spare bedroom and I can just imagine them taking off somewhere under the bed and us not being able to get them before they poop everywhere. Here are some (somewhat fuzzy) pictures of our chicks:
This is one of my (probably) Australorp mix chicks – she was the first to hatch in this batch. There is another one (the 4th one) that looks very similar to her. She is larger than the other one though. (the window screen behind her is resting on a different box, NOT the brooder box. Just in case you were wondering)Here is another picture of her. She is black with some gray, and orange legs (not black legs like the adult australorps.) I figure they are australorps because I don’t have any other adult black hens that lay brown eggs. Escape artist is the only other black hen and she lays white eggs (she’s my only white egg layer).Here is Escape Artist’s (Esky’s) daughter. She can fly out of her box just like mama. I believe Esky is an Andalusian. So this one is part Andalusian, part whatever-her-daddy-is.Another picture of Esky2. She looks a lot like mom but she has a lot more white / yellow in her feathering. We’ll have to wait and see.Here is my lighter chick, some kind of speckled chicken. I have a speckled sussex, a barred rock, and a cornish that could be mama – I also have a speckled rooster. So I’m not sure. But this one is very pretty – almost has some eyeliner bits near his eyes.It’s quite a bit early to tell, but I’m suspicious this one is a rooster. Seems a little assertive compared to the other chicks, but that may not indicate anything. Time will tell.Here is one more picture of the speckled chick.Here is Chick 4. (4th chick to hatch). Another Australorp mix. She did not want to perch, just wanted to try to get back with her buddies. I was worried she’d fall so I had to hold a little more tightly than the others.This chick is getting some pretty white in her wings.
I love watching them grow up – it’s fun to speculate about what they will look like as adults, but with mixed breeds there is not really any way to know until their feathers are all in. I like having a bunch of different colors/looks of chicken. It helps us tell them apart also.
We had an extremely busy day (well, evening). First I worked all day at my job. Then I drove for an hour to meet with this lady to buy some hatching eggs! For our large hatch we are using some from our own chickens, but I saw an ad on craigslist for hatching eggs of Black Copper Marans and Olive/Easter Eggers. I went and met with her today and got a bunch of hatching eggs. She threw in some Bantam eggs. I’m not sure how that will go, since bantams are so small. Their eggs are very tiny. She said they should do fine mixed with regular sized chickens though. Here are the cool hatching eggs – you will see why I wanted them:
See how dark brown the Maran eggs are? The larger carton is not full. You can see the small whitish eggs are VERY small – those are the bantam eggs. She labeled the eggs- I guess the marans have two varieties. Some with feathered legs, and some without.This top carton has the olive egger and easter egger eggs. Easter eggers (usually Auracauna chickens) can lay blue or green eggs. If you cross them with a maran, the next generation will lay dark olive eggs. You can see some of these eggs are more green than blue.
I got home after my egg-adventure, and the ducks, who are STILL in the house for tonight, needed a bath very badly. We are planning on getting them outside tomorrow – my hubby is off so he said he’d start getting their temporary outside housing set up, and I’ll help get them in there tomorrow when I get home. But with this bathtime, I finally got some pictures of the blow-drying ducks:
Look how massive they are – we’ve had them 3 weeks now. They are the size of full grown chickens, I swear. They are getting most of their feathers and starting to sometimes quack.Ducks getting blow dried, and preening while they dry off. I keep telling them, while blow drying, that this is how we get fluffy eggs. Another duck picture.
One other thing, actually kind of frustrating, that happened today – I ordered a bunch of trees and fruit plants this year (raspberries, strawberries, elderberries, etc) – I got a notice that they already shipped last week – We still have snow here, although it is supposed to warm up this week and stay warmer (fingers crossed). My plants came today. Which means I had to figure out what to do with them/get them set up. I’ve been saving milk jugs for most of the winter, so that I didn’t have to buy buckets or large pots. I plan on keeping most things in pots for a year or two, so we can keep them safe from deer and the lawn mower. Some things were dormant but most said to plant right away. Here are my new plants, all dressed up and nowhere really to go yet:
Larger trees in milk jugs.Poppies (on the right) and a peony on the left – I got the peony for free. I will leave them in pots till I know it’s safe to put them outside. I got a bunch of bareroot strawberry plants too – just behind the pots in this picture. I think I will put them out this weekend and cover them with mulch to keep them safe. If the snow melts off my strawberry patch, that is.Here is my “Henry Lauder’s Walking Stick” – also called a Gnarled Filbert. I’m very excited to have one of these. They are really cool trees, with gnarled branches.
Oh, and also – an update on my test hatch. It turned out that of the last 4 eggs, 2 were duds (I candled last night finally, and they were completely empty). The other two had chicks that never came out. I opened them tonight and they were dead. I gave them till tonight to start pipping but there was nothing. So, of the actual fertile eggs, I ended up with about a 2/3 hatch success – 4 out of 6 eggs hatched. Those 4 chicks are doing very well. I cleaned and disinfected the incubator and set it to dry. I am not sure if I will start the “real” hatch tomorrow or Friday night. I will have to see how much work moving the ducks tomorrow night is.
We have had a warmup lately, and most of our snow is now gone. We still have some swaths of it in the yard, and the snowbanks are still there, but it’s mostly melted. It is only March, so we could still get a huge snowstorm, but it feels like Spring. Temps have been at least in the 30s during the day for the last week, and today it’s currently 63 degrees and sunny. Today was a good day to clean out animal housing. I cleaned out the rabbit cages and the chicken coop. Here are some pictures of our melty, muddy yard, and of the chickens enjoying the warm weather.
Our side yard. It’s hard to tell here but it’s very wet. It will turn to mud for awhile as the ground thaws and we start getting rain.Some of our remaining snowbanks.Our back yard. We are starting to see the garden here on the right.The chickens out scratching in the yard.Here they are scratching through their old bedding that I put out in the yard. They have to check out any piles to make sure they didn’t miss anything yummy.Here they are taking a dust bath in the old bedding pile. They were taking a dust bath in it when it was inside as well, before I could shovel it outside.I had most of their coop stuff outside here, while I was cleaning inside. The big stick is a perch, and the sawhorse is another one that is usually inside the coop. They are enjoying hanging around outside.The rooster right in front here is Splash, my Splash Maran.Here is Splash crowing at me for taking pictures.Here is Dorko, my Dorking rooster. (You can tell I’m not the best at coming up with names for them). He is now larger than the other two roosters. Very handsome.
I don’t know if this warm weather will stick around for good yet, but I’m going to enjoy it while it’s here.
The chickens venturing outside, waiting for me to come in and feed them.
We’ve had a couple of decently warm days. Yesterday they were calling for a high of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, but we got to 48. Today we were at least in the high 30s most of the day. The days have been getting longer, and my chickens have been laying more eggs. Their production had dropped way down in December, but it’s gone up now. We were getting 3-5 eggs daily earlier this month, it’s now up to about 7-9 a day.
The chickens decided to venture out today a little. We also cleaned out the coop – it was easier with the warm temperatures. I had tried a couple weeks ago with highs in the 20s and their poop was frozen to the floor, so I just had to add bedding. Today I was able to actually scrape everything out before adding new bedding. Getting the old stuff over to the compost bin wasn’t happening though; we have a huge snowbank in the way, from plowing our driveway. I have the old coop mess over to the side in a bin, and will move it once I can get over there.
I wash eggs on Sundays -we collect through the week and put them in the fridge until we can wash them up all at once. I have noticed my “Escape Artist” chicken is laying again, we’ve had quite a few white eggs this past week. She’s the only white-egg layer.
The week’s eggs.
I’m glad the days are getting longer. I can’t wait for spring.
My hens have not been producing much lately. Egg production can go down in winter, and I think that may be what is going on, but it’s really down. I’ve kept track of the eggs we receive from them since we first started getting eggs. Last December (2014) we got 195 eggs, this December we got 170. We have more hens this year than last year – last year we had 9 at this time, and right now we have 15. I know one hen for sure isn’t laying, our “escape artist” hen – she lays white eggs, and is the only one that does. She’s one of our newer hens from this year. We have not gotten a white egg in at least 3 weeks. The chickens all seem healthy, and I have a heat lamp on them, but maybe the heat lamp isn’t enough to keep them producing with the cold. We’re down by 70 eggs from November – In November we got 239. Our temperatures are down from November, but not as cold as last winter, luckily. We’ve only gotten down into the teens at the coldest, maybe 17 degrees Fahrenheit. I think last year I may have had a white heat lamp in the coop, this year it’s red. Either way, it’s kind of depressing. I’ll just keep an eye on them, I guess, and hope for spring.
Some of the freeloaders. They don’t come out into the snow much. We open the coop door for them in the daytime.
We’ve been very busy this month. In my last post, I said I would get some pictures of snow… well, then it melted. But on Thanksgiving, which was a couple days ago, we got about 4-5 inches. So we have snow again.
Here is Nova. We got her about a month ago, from our coworker. Nova was her son’s dog, when he was in the Air force in Georgia. Now he moved back to town and is going to college, and couldn’t keep her, and my coworker felt bad that Nova was home alone during the day. So we took her in. She gets along great with our other dogs and she is a sweetheart.
Our NovaThe three dogs on the back porch. Nova likes to eat snow.Another picture of Nova
The chickens aren’t minding the snow so much. I have heat lamps in the two rooms of their coop, so they can go in and warm up their feet if they get cold. Our batch last year (which we still have the hens from) didn’t like to go out in the snow. I’m not sure why they don’t mind this year, but they don’t.
The chickens don’t seem to mind the snow at all.Snow chickens. The dirt spot here is where we took away their old roost that was out there. We had to steal the sawhorses that held it up, for the rabbit hutch, which you will see below.Yesterday they found the dirt spot, and they were taking dirt baths in it. The ground is not frozen yet, luckily.
Last weekend we went up to my cousin’s to get the original hutch that I got with the rabbits. We have set it up near our other rabbit hutch, so it’s now Rabbit Row:
Rabbit row. On the left are the rabbits in the hutch we built, and on the right is the one that came with the bunnies. We’re getting it set up for the baby bunnies when they get bigger. The garbage bags in the picture are straw and hay – I have them outside, but covered for easy access.Here is the hutch that came with the rabbits. It had a roof which we removed in order to get it in the back of the truck. We are just planning on using one side for the winter, so we have closed that side in with wood.The inside of the new (old) hutch. It has a wire bottom, but I will cover it with straw to try to keep the babies’ feet more comfortable. I need to look it up, but I believe it will be a couple more weeks before they go in there. Hopefully we’ll get the snow out of there before then. We brushed what we could out, but it may melt a little too.
And here are the little baby bunnies:
They are starting to munch on food – this one is eating hay.Here they are – they are all brown. But some are darker brown, and one has a little lighter fur. I’m assuming they change color as they get older, but I could be wrong. I’m still new at this. The mom is black and the dad is gray, so I don’t know how the brown comes in.They like to pile up on top of each other, outside of the nest box. I think there are 8 of them. I’ve tried to count without taking them all out, and they jump around too much so I have not gotten a good count. I will be able to get an accurate count soon when I need to move them.
The rabbits have been doing ok with the cold so far. We’re going to add a tarp to the front of the hutches to block wind from the inside. That’s one reason I positioned the hutches into “Rabbit Row.” – I figure it will help block wind somewhat. I’m already planning on a new setup once spring comes – more of a rabbit shed, I think. I’d like to add a run of some sort so they can hang out in the grass also.
We’ve also decided on names for the adults. They are Earth, Wind, and Fire. (my husband came up with it) – The gray buck is Earth (since he’s on the left), the white doe is Wind, and the black doe is Fire.
My husband built nest boxes for the other two rabbits, and they are lined with straw, so they can stay out of the wind when it gets very cold. They like to sit on top of them sometimes, as you can see Wind do here.
The farm is pretty much ready for winter. It’s a nice time to just cozy up inside – we don’t have a lot of projects we can do outside in winter, except reinforcing animal housing and doing normal feeding chores each morning and night. I like that it’s kind of a relaxation time. Of course I’m already planning in my head what we’ll do when spring comes.
My tiny u.p. farm 