The mystery of the lack of eggs from the lil’ coop has been solved.
Too many roosters!!!
We have discovered that there were six roosters in there. Outta 12 chickens, 6 are roosters. Yeah. That really does cut down on egg production. And those poor six hens. So we went in and selected 4 of them to come out. Hopefully that will help the situation considerably!
Problem is, the four that we took out, are all beautiful roosters, all our homegrown, gentle and wonderful boys. We put them out in the big barn, in our little special holding pen we now call the rooster coop. They get lots of attention there, a big crock of food and water and in a nice sunshiney area. Lots of sweet hay to lay on and scratch through.
It was tough, but we have made our decision as to who gets to stay and who must go to auction. We’re keeping Flipper… our beautiful white splash Marans rooster. (get it… splash? Flipper the dolphin? ahhahah….) And we are keeping Silver’s brother Argent. He is another of the barred rock/blue Marans son of Bucka Roo. Just beautiful in his coloring and all. We are going to take the blue cochin rooster and a lovely Cuckoo Marans boy in for sale. Flipper and Argent are going to be the leaders of our new laying flock that we’re going to get for the poultry barn. Since they are brothers and raised together, they should do a great job and we get to keep them!
This is Argent, he’s a beautiful blue colored roo, still in that gangly teenager look, but filling out every day. He loves to be held and is just as gentle as you can imagine, but he knows too, how to take care of the ladies and protect them. I wondered why we were hearing a ton of crowing from the lil coop in the mornings… haha… 6 roosters will do that for ya.
We have to get some more hens! Maggie’s egg business is going nuts. We actually have NO eggs at the moment, not even for us! The ladies are still not quite up to normal production, we’re getting only about a dozen a day right now. They had a little stint where they were doing 3 or 4 dozen a day, but then it stopped and slowed. I hope that the lovely weather we are having right now is going to help to stimulate that again. But in the meanwhile, since we have a waiting list now of customers, we made the decision to go ahead and on Saturday, we’re going to try and score about a dozen new laying hens at auction.
We have about a dozen chicks in the house, but they won’t be layers for another 6 months. And we have 5 pullets that SHOULD start laying soon, but they will only lay teeny eggs for a month or two. So. I guess it means more mature hens!
Maggie and I worked all afternoon, cleaning out the big table in the poultry barn. It’s a project that we’ve been working on here and there through the winter. The poultry barn is this big 20 foot wide by 50 foot long building we have on the farm. It’s connected at the north end with Cody’s barn. Cody’s barn is two stories tall, but the poultry barn is just one story. Last fall, we knocked all the side tables of concrete down as they were failing and pushing out the side walls. Thankfully, that has stopped and the building is no longer slowly failing in that manner. Inside there is a huge 8 foot by 32 foot long suspected concrete table. This is where we will be putting our two brooders, one for chicks, one for turkeys and also a big long coop in the middle, for our new laying flock.
(If you look past me raking… you can see the long poultry barn, with Codys’ tall barn at the end of it. It’s really a huge building and a shame it’s just empty. Has junk in it.)
This picture shows the raised table, it’s 32 feet long, 8 feet wide and very solid. It has cement blocks underneath just in case any section should fall. It just had a bunch of old junk on it, and the cut wood from an old dead apple tree, stuff like that. Maggie and I carted it all out, and swept off the whole table, and then cleaned off the little sidewalks on either side. Now, there is still a bunch of wood and rubble from the sides that we tore out, but they won’t interfere with the coops on the table and we plan to get rid of that stuff one wheelbarrow at a time! The wood is over 45 years old and rotten, so we will probably just be burning it in our campfire over the summer. I thought we might be able to salvage it, but aside from rustic old signs from some of it, most of it crumbles in your hand. And it’s got tons of nails and junk through out it. It’s pretty nasty. There is also a ton of broken concrete rubble… I have two ideas for that. One is to cart it out and use it along fences as borders, and the other is to use it for filler material for new concrete floors on either side. I suspect that we will first get rid of all the wood and other trash junk and then level it out and see what is left. A summer project for many weeks, I suspect!
I wanted to take new pictures but we got to working and then it got too dark! I’ll take some tomorrow, when we start to build the new coop. But if you could imagine, that whole wall where the fan is? We took down the fiberglass sheeting and opened it all up to the weather. And the sunlight. The fiberglass as falling off anyway. We’ll repurpose it later on as roofing for the turkey roost that Maggie is going to build in the back. I hope to rebuild the supports in that back wall (they are all rotted out) and then put up a couple sheets of clear green house siding. I think that would be really nice. Would let in the nice warm southern sunshine, but also keep out the rain and wind from the chickies.
We plan to build a little habit-trail tube over to the western wall and to an opening where the chickens will have a nice big outside run. That is stage two of the build. Something that we can shut to keep them inside, and open to let them out to play.
Now, you might wonder… why not let them free range, like the others? Well. We have come to the conclusion that we love having the flock that ranges all over. However, we want to keep it to 20 birds or less. Because they just have a habit of getting into trouble. They poop all over and they get hit by cars. Okay, only two have been hit by a car, but still, that is two too many in my book. I don’t want them getting hurt! So we decided that our new flock will have to be sequestered a bit, but still, they will have a huge amount of space available to them, including a big run on the side of the poultry barn. 50 feet long by probably 6 feet or so wide. They will be very spoiled indeed. And we will probably let them out now and then to do clean up and such in the garden, that sort of thing. We will be selecting a few of the free range birds to join the new poultry barn flock, just to whittle the free rangers down to about 20 birds. Right now, we have 30 in that flock and it’s just a little too many! You live and you learn this new life. I absolutely love having them follow us around and greet us in the morning and they do a fantastic job of keeping the bugs at a nice level. We just want to make sure they are safe and that they are not overcrowding the area and messing it up too much. Chickens do poop… and while it’s great fertilizer for the yard and such, it’s not as fun to sit in it or step in it all the time when they decide to poop all over the sidewalks or the chairs and benches. Of course, it’s way way better in the summer because the grass is growing and it rains and such, so I suppose that we are seeing a higher percentage of poop all over because we just haven’t had those things going on for 6 months. But still, it seems like a sound idea.
All our little chicks are doing great! We have another set of eggs due to hatch in the next couple days, but I’m not sure how well they are doing. We had a great hatch at first and then had a set of about 8 eggs that failed to hatch. This last batch is so so. I candled them and they are looking okay, but just not great. Hard to know why or what is going on, but I suspect it’s the incubator. As I understand, the styrofoam inexpensive incubators are great for a hatch or three, but then they just start to fail and their percentages drop considerably. Just not sure why. I have my suspicions… I think as the chicks first start to hatch, the sytrofoam is getting contaminated from the broken eggs and messy situation of the first hatching chicks. It’s so sad to see them grow and get close and then die in the shell. I know that even under a hen, you rarely have 100% hatch, but still, I think I’m too tender hearted, it hurts me that they don’t all make it!
I think that I’m going to save up my banjo money and get one of these Brinsea incubators. They have super good recommendations, do smaller hatches, but with super nice rates of incubation. They are all automated, with humidity and temperature and rotation. And they know when to stop rotating and such, even with timers and such. And they are all plastic, so they are easy to clean and keep clean. I believe they have an 8 egg and 12 egg model. Nice small unit as well, and with a air fan to circulate air and such. They are a little pricey, $140 to $160 dollars, but if they can hatch out a nice group of special eggs with a high success, I believe the unit would pay for itself after a few hatchings.
But right now, after these last ones… I think I’m done for awhile. Just a little discouraged the last two hatches.
The good thing is that it’s chick days at the Tractor Supply and we’ve been having great success with that! Apparently each of the TSC’s gets a weekly shipment of chicks from the hatchery. They get the cornish rock for meat, and they get your basic leghorns and Isa reds for egg production. But, the neat thing is that they get an assortment of heritage birds, whatever the hatchery has extra that week! One time they had beautiful Amerucanas! And this last week, they had barred rocks. And they were 50% off because they were getting older! So we got four of them and two isa browns to add to our little gang in the living room. They are cheaper a bit then the hatchery and no shipping charges. I think that is pretty cool. We’re going to call around tomorrow and see what our three TSCs in the area have gotten. We’re hoping for a few buff orphinghams and maybe some Amerucanas… who knows?
Yeah, I think we’re not going to be happy until we hit the 100 chicken mark. It will be soon, because we’re going to be ordering our meat chicks soon. I went to order them this weekend and our hatchery is out until May! May! I’m trying to decide, do we try another hatchery or go with some TSC meat chicks and then order the rest for May? I just don’t know for sure. Guess it depends on what heritage birds they have at the local ones… We’ll be sure to post our final decisions as soon as we know them!!!
Well, I’m happy that Windhaven is becoming a little poultry farm. After all, the Armbrusters had a chicken farm here for over 80 years! It’s in the ground here, in the lifeblood of the place. We love chickens, even Jessy. She loves to baby the chicks and all and admires the hens from afar. She can handle them in the coops a lot better than the free range ones. There is something about the adults and their flapping that bothers her. She’s not sure why, but we don’t want to torture her, so we choose to keep it to a low level for her, so she can enjoy her farm too!
Sheep, chickens, bunnies and gardens! That is going to be our specialties! And hopefully by this weekend, we’ll have more hens to help with our egg production and to satisfy those of our local friends and customers! A dozen new hens should give us about 5 to 6 dozen more a week. It’s probably not enough, but well, we can only add so many girls at once! If our main flock starts to get a little more regular, we should be able to produce about 20 dozen a week, something like that. That should help!
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