Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Chicken Rotation


Ok, Urbanites, so alot has happened on the farm.  I will discuss just the chickens on this post.

First, I had to take the bird netting off of the top of  our chicken run because the leaves from the Maple Tree in middle of the run was weighing it down.  Well, this was a mistake.  We had 3 of our chickens get out of the run and get killed by our beagle.  I now have a modified version of this covering the location that they were getting out of (the old duck house - new feed house).

The fourth one we lost when I was working for a week or two straight.  It got a little sick and died in the coop.  I think that the others pecked it to death (poor thing).  We gave all of them a proper burial.

Since then we got hens that were already laying to replace them.  Two red hens that we got were Rhode Island Red, White Rock mixes.  We call them our Rhode Island Rocks.  They are supposed to be jumbo egg layers.  They sure are!  Their eggs are huge compared to the other chickens.

The other two hens are Americanas.  One is black, the other white.  They are easter egg layers.

We had some bickering from the old hens.  They were NOT happy with us.  We seperated the new ones from the old ones at night, but allow them all to be together during day.  Soon, they will all be forced together (once they are aclimated to one another.)

We also had to get antibiotics to keep them from getting sick from the other hens.  Each place has it own germs, so they all have to be able to endure the new germs introduced to them.  We just add to their water.

We are now getting 6 eggs a day.  We will be expecting 8-10 a day soon.  We wont know what to do with them soon.

Trying to figure out how much to sell our duck eggs for... that is until we get some that are fertilized!

In future posts, we may copy/paste some facebook posts on here since they are real-time.  What do you think about this?

*Side Note:  Ducks love when we change their pool water!*


Later Urbanites!