Chicken Update

Only the Barred Rock hen avoided this shot

My chickens are 21 weeks old!  It has been a long haul with these ladies - they are pretty unlucky chickens.  They were delivered unceremoniously to my doorstep while I was at work.  One of them became tangled in the netting I used to cover the brooder and almost strangled to death.  Five got wiped out by the opossum.   And then this long, cold winter with the water in their coop and run constantly freezing.  They've been through a lot.  I've been hoping they would start laying some eggs soon so I could be reassured that they were not scarred for life.  And then...this morning...bam!  An egg.  A pretty big one, too.  The last batch laid only small eggs at first, but whichever of these lovely ladies produced this morning's beauty is at the head of the class!

(Side note: Last Sunday I spotted a raccoon in the yard in the middle of the afternoon.  I chased him off, but of course he came back.  After last Thursday's snowstorm I came out to find tracks all around the chicken coop, looping crazily a couple times around the backyard, and then right back over the fence again.  But he didn't get into the new-and-improved chicken run!)

I'll have to sell a couple of these hens soon.  There are too many of them for the space they're in, and I honestly could never use six chickens' worth of eggs anyway.

This Red Star is my favorite candidate for laying the first egg.  She's always been the biggest of the bunch, and the feed store owner says Red Stars are "egg-laying machines"

New Chicken Waterer

I added a new crazy garden project to my list - a new, diy chicken waterer  The old one was starting to crack in places and the water in the basin at the bottom froze a couple of times last month, making me think this might not be the most convenient part of my chicken-keeping system.  A quick internet search for diy chicken waterer and I came up with lots of pictures of waterers you can make yourself for about the same cost as the cheap plastic one I'm replacing.

The waterer is basically a bucket with little nipples in the bottom that work sort of like those upside-down bottles you put on the side of a hamster cage, except the chickens have a little lever they can nudge instead of having to push in a little ball bearing.*

I drilled two holes on opposite sides of the bucket, in the bottom, wrapped some teflon tape around the threaded parts of the nipples, and screwed them into the bottom of the bucket.  The entire project was finished in less than ten minutes. 

I was a little worried the hens wouldn't know what to do with it, but their instincts served them well - they quickly started pecking at the new, shiny metal things in their run, then gulped in surprise when water came out.  Boom!  Lesson learned.  This morning when I went out to open the coop they can running out and went right to the waterer.

That little red thing she's pecking at is where the water comes out.

We already owned the bucket, purchased during our water supply outage back in 2011, and the cinder block came from some trash that was dumped at the end of our street last year.  The only things I had to buy were the bucket lid and the nipples, and so far this super-cheap solution is one of my favorite crazy garden projects.  I'm pretty hopeful that it will resist freezing, since it can hold a lot of water and any ice that forms should float to the top.  I'll let you know how it works out.

I would like to find a way to make it look a little nicer, so if you have any suggestions, let me know!

Regret

Last night N and I went out for dinner with another couple.  Our babysitter showed up 10 minutes early and didn't have to call us once, the dinner was delicious, and afterwards we played a cooperative game at their home, during which I apparently acquitted myself well.  When we came home I actually made the mistake of saying, "Tonight could not have gone more smoothly!" 

And then I went out to close the chicken coop.  For some reason, N decided to come out with me ("I like you!" he said later, when I asked him what had inspired this extremely fortunate decision on his part.)  It was about 9pm, well past dark and much later than I usually close the coop, but I'd been reluctant to shut them all up before we left at 4pm. 

Now, many of you can already imagine what I'm going to write next.  It's not like I didn't know better.  I remember once several years ago, before I wanted chickens, someone telling me "Oh, yeah, we used to have five chickens, but-" and then I interrupted knowingly, "-but there was a hawk, or a racoon, or a dog, or a..."  So yeah, I know better.  When we got outside, we found six chicks huddled in the freezing cold at the far end of the run - very bizarre behavior - and inside the coop we found the rest of the chickens, dead, and a possum, very much alive.

So what did we do?  We killed the possum as quickly as possible, removed the worst part of the mess, and put the remaining chicks back in.  One of them was shaking so badly I was sure we would lose it, either from stress or exposure, but this morning the survivors all seem to be doing okay.  N and I have cancelled our plans for the day and will be building a new, more secure run.  I'm hopeful that killing the possum, building a better run, and being more diligent about closing the coop door will prevent such a tragedy from happening again. 

Regretting the whole thing won't do me, the chickens, or the possum any good at all, but I do anyway.

Finishing Up Some Projects

The other day my community garden friend M asked me where I've been the last two months.  The answer: building a fence!  Thankfully, that very afternoon we finished putting the pickets on this last stretch of fence, and late last week N took most of a day off of work to build the three gates.  Here's what it looks like from the outside:

And from the inside:

We built the fence ourselves, because we are crazy, masochistic, overly picky optimists, and we had no idea how much extra time and suffering it would cause.  The fence is about 250 feet long and encloses our entire backyard.  It is clearly custom-built, with the rails cut into the posts (okay, okay, joined) and many of the pickets cut to length to fit in place with just the right amount of gap beneath them. 

Pros to doing it ourselves:

1. custom features
2. lower cost?
3. no contractors traipsing through our yard and our neighbors' yards
4. met some neighbors
5. hung out with some friends
6. R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Cons to doing it ourselves:

1. hospital bills
2. lost work time
3. too many take-out meals
4. sunburns
5. poison ivy scars (yes! scars!)
6.  visits to the county and city permits offices

 All in all, I'm glad we built it, and I think I'm glad we did it ourselves.  The fence has some unexpected benefits.  It actually makes our yard look a lot bigger.  Also, the ability to access the back 40, the slope behind the back of the yard which I previously had to walk all the way around the block to mow. And the appreciation of some community members who (it turns out) have to drive by the back 40 every day and didn't really appreciate our old see-no-evil attitude of benign neglect.

And of course, there are the expected benefits: letting my kids play in the yard without watching who's watching them, being able to hang up my laundry without the neighbors "people-watching" me, and of course...

These little ladies got to leave my bathtub and see the outside world.  (And now you see why N was willing to take a day off work to get the gates finished!)  I ordered 18 of them and they arrived the day after Columbus Day.  Shortly after I moved them outside I sold 8 to a family in Gaithersburg, and the remaining ten are in the coop/run.  We have quite a variety: Red Stars, Delawares (?), Black Australorps, a Turkens, a Golden Campine, and some other black variety that I can't identify.  I ordered a mixed-breed lot of brown egg-layers.  The Campine is very pretty, but it is also the only one that might be a male, so I'm trying not to get too attached. 

"A" cannot wait to let them out in the yard, but I still a little nervous about that.  For one thing, there are a lot of them and I worry I will spend all afternoon catching them and putting them away.  And what if I lost one?  Also, I've been feeding a stray cat off of our back steps (Manly, who I originally named Mandy but...well, she has testes!) and I worry that if they were loose he might attack one.  I have heard that cats rarely attack full-grown chickens but will sometimes go after young ones.

Hello Again

Once again it has been a long time since my last post.  I actually can't even remember excuses going that far back, only that lately life been rather full of big projects.

There is a post that should be on here, but I can't make my smart phone (clearly we know who is smarter!) give it up.  It was about the sad, sad loss of my chickens to suburban ideals.  Our county forbids the keeping of farm animals like cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens.  Personally, I tend to think that one of those things is not at all like the others, but I recognize that that's a rather unusual perspective.  In August the city animal control officer dropped by and gave us a notice to get rid of the chickens, or else.  After N's original impulse to move and rent our house out to slobs "Just to show 'em!" blew over, we decided to sell our three beautiful, just-started-laying hens.  And build a privacy fence.

The perfect backyard flock, enjoying some clover

Good news about this: I sold the hens for $25 apiece on craigslist and had my pick of buyers.  It turns out there are many people in our area with privacy fences, and no good sources of backyard chicken flocks.  This is more than enough money to...err...not replace our chickens six months later.

Without the old fences our yard feels really open

Bad news about this: the fence has turned out to be one of those really big projects that we just can't seem to get done.  We are totally enclosing the backyard, with a total of more than 200 feet of fence.  For some reason, I thought we could get most of this done in one weekend, with the help of seven good friends and neighbors who came over to help.  After several hours and several inches of rain, we had managed to tear down two of the three existing fences that needed to come out, trim back the weeds growing at the top of the back 40, distribute the fence lumber all over the backyard, dig four good holes and three bad ones, and all get completely filthy in the drizzly rain and resulting mud.

Also, sometime that day or the next, despite our best efforts to keep him away from it, N got a nasty case of poison ivy that eventually became seriously infected.  However, he is finally on the mend and we are really close to finishing the replacements for the two fences we removed.  Once that is done our yard will be at least as private as it was before.  With less and less daylight each day, we are in quite a hurry to tear down the third (and final) chain-link and finish the job.  In the meantime, the kids think our totally non-OSHA approved yard is fantastic!

The boys climbing on the wood piles

 I'll publish photos of the finished fence when it the second side is finished.  It is going to be quite handsome, if I do say so myself.

A Week of Firsts

N and the boys and I spent the week of the June 23rd with is family in a rental cottage north of Baltimore.  It was a hard-earned vacation, coming on the heels of N's trip to Pennsylvania for a week-long conference.  By the time we came back I was much more relaxed - enough to spontaneously invite over K and family.  And, while showing off features of my chicken coop to K's husband C, guess what I found?

TWO eggs!  I wasn't letting myself expect eggs until July, and I was so distracted in the vacation haze that I didn't realize how close that was.  We've had one egg every day since then.  They're great!  They're perfect!  They're brown!  They're...really small.  My chickens are supposed to lay large eggs, so I'm assuming that they'll get bigger with time.  I still don't know which of the lovely ladies is laying them, but I'm hoping to figure it out this weekend while I'm home and can keep an eye on them.  On weekdays they lay after I've left for the day.

Another first in the garden this week - wheat!  Last fall I planted wheat, peas, and oats as a cover crop in the side yard.  I pulled out the oats when they started to make seed.  (In retrospect this seems foolish, but it is what they tell you to do for green manures.  Pulling it at the seed-forming stage leaves the most nitrogen in your soil.)  The peas winter-killed on their own, and then in the spring, something came up.  I kind of thought it was the oats coming back, but...dun, da-da-dun!  It was wheat, and it started forming heads.  I had planned to plant some zucchini in that side yard, but at the last minute I decided to make room for it at the community garden.  So I just let the wheat keep growing.

I pulled the plants out by the roots, then snipped off the dirty roots and dropped them in the chicken run (the hens like searching through roots for insects).  Then I snipped off the grain heads and spent -oh- about 6 hours removing the grains from the heads.  Traditionally this is done by banging the stalks against the inside of a barrel, or beating them on the floor with bats/clubs, but it was such a small quantity that I thought surely I could just sit in front of the TV and pretend I was shelling peas.  But...the thing is...I don't plant shelling peas anymore for a reason.  If I had it to do again, I would plant a lot more wheat, and buy/build a threshing machine.  And I have to agree with the lady on the YouTube video - it is ridiculous that this grain is the foundation of western civilizaition.  Ridiculous.  From my six hours of labor I got just under one cup of threshed and winnowed wheat.  But, I will say that it is crazy tasty, like tiny little nuts that you would probably eat all the time if they weren't so hard to get at.

There were also a couple more firsts this week, though less exciting.  My new currant bush has ripe (?) berries on it.  Incredibly tart, ripe (?) berries.)  I'll have to see if they get any sweeter before they fall off.  Also, I had the most unusual harvest Wednesday night.  The long, cool, moist spring that we had is resulting in an unusually long spring harvest, coupled with an unexpectedly early summer harvest.  I picked: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, blackberries, snap peas (the last), onions, and kale.  What a strange year 2014 is shaping up to be.

And Then There Were Four

If you've been following my chicken drama this spring, you'll know that I've had one main problem throughout: too many chickens.  First, I had to build an annex onto my brooder when the chicks outgrew it before it got warm enough for them to move outside.  Then, when they outgrew even the brooder annex, I moved them outside in spite of the weather.  When even the outside space started looking cramped, we butchered the three meat chicks.  Two weeks ago, when it was getting crowded again, I put an ad on Craigslist and sold three of the hens.

The trouble with chickens is, they just keep growing!  Plus, the boys were getting a bit rowdy and loud.  Our most Manly rooster had taken to perching on the chain link fence between our house and the neighbor's, terrorizing poor Mrs. A.  So this afternoon N and I dispatched two of the roosters.  We'd originally intended to do all three of them in, figuring that roosters are not really suited for suburban life, but I have decided to hang onto one of them for a little while.  He doesn't seem to be crowing yet, and I have it in my head that I'd like to try letting one of my hens raise a brood of chicks.

Our coop and run are designed for 3-4 chickens, depending on what source you check and how big the chickens are.  We are now down to four: three hens and a rooster.  If one of the hens does decide to raise a brood I might have to build something else - a brood nest for her to sit on her eggs while the other hens continue using the nesting box.  I wonder if I will ever be done building housing for these chickens?



A little bit of trivia that came up while I was eviscerating the roosters: I found the kidneys, and the lungs.  And I found two additional cream-colored organs.  "What else does a chicken have two of?" I asked Nick, curiously.
I'll give you a hint: the ones that belonged to the Manly rooster were 3 times bigger than those of the more timid buff.

Yard Chickens

My chickens roaming around the yard

Lately I've been letting the chickens out of their yard for an hour or so most afternoons.  They love it.  When I come out the back door in the afternoon they let out a round of chicken noises, and when I let them out the gate they fly out into the yard.  They look so happy and joyful.

But it does have it's downsides.  For one, I've had to put a protective fence around my new currant bush.  (That's it behind the adirondack chair.)  The chickens have taken serious bites out of several other plants around the yard.  Also, while they never try to fly over the chain-link fence, they do wander around to the front yard and I worry about them becoming a nuisance or visiting a neighbor's yard.  Or being attacked by a dog.  Also, I feel so bad for them on the days when I can't let them out - they look so disappointed.  And...I don't really like to let the boys walk around barefoot in the yard anymore.

I think it might help if there were fewer of them.  I'm hoping to sell a few soon, and we will probably have to kill the roosters soon.  The other day one of them (the barred rock, easily the most Manly of the roosters) tried to crow at me while I was filling the water dish.  I wish I could capture the sound, because it was hilarious!  Sort of like a really squeaky playground swing.

It's Done

I won't be including any graphic pictures in this post, but I will discuss killing chickens, so if you don't want to even imagine me doing such a thing, look away now!



Thursday afternoon N and his brother J helped me kill and process our three meat chicks.  They were well past their six-week maturity age, and quite sizable.  They were also becoming kind of a nuisance, because they eat a lot and have to be lifted in and out of the coop each day.  Also, I worried about them more than the other chicks because they couldn't escape from rain or bright sun by going into the coop.

There are a lot of posts out there about how to kill your own homegrown chickens - this isn't that.  Instead I just thought I'd post some of my thoughts about it afterwards.

• It was surprisingly difficult and time consuming.  From reading books and watching videos it seems like such a seamless process.  So how did it end up taking an entire afternoon to do three chickens?
• How the heck do serial killers do what they do?  We just killed chickens, and we were trying to be sneaky - I hung sheets and put up a sheet of plywood to hide the killing area from the neighbors - and still multiple neighbors ended up standing in their yards watching us.
• I did not feel all that bad for the chickens.  I kind of liked one of them, and admired another, but they were always food-to-be.  I didn't want them to suffer, but it was never a possibility that we would just change our minds and keep them around.
• Blood is funny stuff.  It is literally hard to get those spots off of your hands.

That's it.  Those were my thoughts.  And now it's done.

Winter is pretty....long.

"Maybe we could wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap?" N said to me last night, as we were mulling over the impending cold weather and the utterly repulsive prospect of bringing in the chickens for yet another night in the guest bedroom.  "No," I said firmly.  "I'm putting a lamp in there and they're going to be fine."  This morning I woke up to such a pretty sight:

Backyard covered in snow

and couldn't help but wonder if I had been a cruel, thoughtless fool.  At four and a half weeks old they are technically old enough to be outside, but in weather this cold it is probably ill advised.

But the chickens were utterly fine, happily peeping and gobbling down food.

Happy, warm chicks crowding around the door of the coop

 I think they're a little tired of being cooped up (ha!), but otherwise doing really well.  A few of them have even figured out how to use the roosting bar and have been roosting up there well away from the heater.  They're all grown up!

Moving Day

In the last post I mentioned that our chicken coop was "almost" finished.  That has been the eternal refrain since...oh, about last November.  (Before that the plans for the chicken coop were almost finished.)  There has always just been one or two supposedly little things that need to be finished - cutting the holes for the door and the nesting box, building the door, painting it, roofing it, building the yard, putting the yard together, etc, etc.  The chicks have been out in it a few times for a few hours, but today - today they moved in!

The nearly completed chicken yard (note the clamps in the foreground, holding it together).

They are sooo happy to be outside.  Recently they are just so large that they have been tipping their water dispenser over regularly, which wets the bedding in the brooder.  Then the chick feed in the bedding starts to ferment and smell awful, not to mention that they are even more crowded because no one wants to stand in the wet spot and now they have no water to drink...they have just outgrown the brooder.

Two Buff Orpington chicks, 4 weeks old

The coop is 2'x4', and the yard is 4'x8', which already seems almost too small for this many chickens.  The broiler chicks already look like chickens and kind of feel like a chicken when I lift them up.  They are truly a modern scientific marvel.  They are particularly happy to be outside because they were having a really hard time moving between the two sections of the brooder (I cut the hole too small) and outside they have little logs to roost on, whereas inside they were too big to get up on the only thing in the brooder to roost on - the heater.  When I was researching the chicks I read that you didn't need to bother putting in something for broilers to roost on because they won't be able to get up on to it, but I can tell they really like being able to climb up on the logs and take a little nap.  

These chickens probably run/walk/fly about 10 miles/day just in this little 4x8 space.

I'll try to post more details and pictures of the coop soon.

Chickies!

I thought I would share some pictures of the most recent addition to my "garden". 

A. overlooking our "baby" chicks in their recently expanded brooder

Yes, we finally got chickens.  I know, I know, I've been swearing for years and years that I was never going to be one of those crazy ladies on the internet who gets chickens and keeps them in her house and thinks they're soooooo cute and ... and you know what?  They are cute!  Look at this face:

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of the Barred Rock chicks (1.5 wks old) sneaking over to check out the camera.

Altogether we have 12, including 3 broilers (chicks raised just for meat) and 9 potential egg layers (at least three of them are supposed to be females).  To give you some idea of how fast they're growing, here is a picture of two of them standing in a baby's snack cup the night that they arrived:

Possibly the same two Barred Rocks, about one day old.

 Questions people ask me about the chicks:

1) How long will they take to grow up?
The broiler chicks are specially bred to grow extremely fast - they're already about twice as big as the others, and should be good to eat between 6-12 weeks old.  The others will grow more slowly; the females won't start laying eggs for about 5 months, so mid-July.  When the males start crowing (I hear about 8 weeks?) their days will be numbered.

2) 12 chicks???!  Where are you to keep them?!
Our hope is to eventually have 3 or 4 laying hens, eat the broilers and the males and sell any extra hens on craigslist.  Since I tried for several months to buy local laying hens on craigslist before conceding that I was just going to have to raise some, I'm hopeful that there is at least one other person out there looking for healthy, happy hens for their backyard.  We have a darn cute little chicken coop in the backyard, nearly ready to go.

3) How long do they live?
The laying hens will start becoming less productive between 18 and 24 months, at which point we'll cull them.

4) Are they hard to take care of?
They regularly throw poop and bedding into their food and water.  They poop everywhere, all the time.  I check on them 3-5 times a day, probably refill the water three times a day and the food once or twice.  It is less work (and slightly less entertaining and much less aggravating) than getting a kitten or puppy.  Of course, if you add in the trouble of building their housing...that's another story.

5) Are you going to kill them yourself?
We're in a tight spot there.  We live on a small house in a suburban area.  Chickens are - ahem - questionably legal here.  My neighbors are not the complaining type, but if one of them looked over the fence and saw us slaughtering a chicken...that might test the bounds of neighborly understanding.  In other words, I'm still working on the exit strategy, but I am willing to kill them myself.  They're pretty cute, though.

A bunch of chickies crowd around the feeder, trying to escape the crazy lady and her flashing light.