Poultry Post

Last year we took the leap from raising chickens to raising turkeys.  From shipping problems in the beginning to a pair of foxes decimating half of our tiny flock one night last summer, it's been a bumpy ride.  Even still it has been a great learning experience.  We've maybe crossed the line from homestead to farmstead.

Our hefty Bourbon Reds

This spring we brought in new laying hens to replace the chickens we've lost and traded away over the past four years. My uncles were in the market for new hens as well and were kind enough order eight more chicks for us.

We needed more room than our Eglu could provide so we had to make some choices around housing the new flock.  Inspired by the new line of Williams-Sonoma coops, I bought a $35 hand held jigsaw and started drawing up plans (I know, I know... but they look really cool).

Sidewalk chalk was the secret to planning the Gothic arch  

The Barred Rock pullets have been in their new home for a week and are taking to the overhead roosting like pros.

We built it over the 4th of July weekend,
hence the colonial color scheme

Cannibalism in the Coop

We've got a problem: our chickens have turned cannibal. First, the Barred Rocks started hen pecking the Reds, pulling out the feathers on their heads. Obviously, cannibalism in this case is a bit of an overstatement, but that's what the text books call it. There was never any blood, just pecking to establish the social order. And now, they're eating the eggs. Just this past weekend we started to notice a decrease in the eggs we were getting, and when Gardener was outside he heard one of the hens making a loud banging noise in the coop. He looked inside to see one of the Reds eating a broken egg in the nest box. We're not sure what started it, but yesterday we got no eggs, and this morning there was evidence of more broken yolks.

This weekend we also ended up building an isolation coop for one of the henpecked Reds. We noticed she was spending a lot of time hiding from the others, and then we noticed that she also has a swollen toe which she's limping on. We built this temporary "chicken hospital" to get her away from the others so that she can get plenty to eat and some rest.




I've been spending some time researching tips to stop the egg eating, but I'm really not sure what to do. A lot of what I'm hearing is that once they get the taste for eggs, it's nearly impossible to stop them. We'd be more than happy to hear from anyone who might have any suggestions. (Please!)

Busy Birds

In the past 10 days we've collected over 40 eggs from our 8 hens.

They're coming in all sizes. The large one here is so big we can't close the egg carton properly.

Now we just need to find a souffle pan!

Where Eggs Come From

It's only been two months since the little baby chicks showed up at the post office but it might as well have been two years (in chicken time). The fuzzy little chicks have been growing almost faster than the weeds in our garden and now are fully feathered grass mowing machines. Despite their appetites we still have two months left until we can start to expect eggs.



Speaking of grub, we recently found a great source for organic chicken feed practically in our backyard. After a few phone calls, a kind gentleman from McGeary Organics offered to meet us halfway to their mill in Lancaster with a bag of organic layer developer feed. The feed is top notch and we really feel fortunate to have such a local source for affordable organic feed. In addition to various organic livestock feeds they also mill organic flour.



But the biggest news on the chicken front has been that the chickens we able to finally move into their new house! We built our Eglu Cube on the day we went to settlement and the soon-to-be-egg-machines have been scracthing up the grass and eating pretty much everything in sight ever since. We make sure to move the Cube to new grass every night after the girls have snuggled up in the coop for bed. Now we just need to pick out a few good omlette recipes.