Life with Chickens, S1, E8: Spring Has Finally Sprung

I know, in other parts of my state, that there is still a foot or more of snow (some of it from May 1st) on the ground, but here, today, the grass is green, the birds are singing, and the chickens are roaming the yard.

It was a hard winter, in a number of ways. In February I was very ill from a huge (6.5mm) kidney stone. About a week after my surgery, I went out to feed, water, and check on the chickens, and only counted four. When I looked under the roost, I saw Buffy partly frozen to the floor. No idea what happened, but we have not had any other problems with the others.

Problems with my back have also escalated, making it hard to do much of anything physical. Or mental, given that Percocet makes my brain feel like it’s been dipped in molasses. I’ve had several injections and radio frequency ablation (nerve block) but it’s not helping much. This means that the bulk of the bull work has been taken up by Tony, and I feel guilty, since the gardening and the chickens are my idea but he ends up doing the tilling and the weeding.

All that aside, it’s sunny and warm here now, and I can do my grading in a chair on the deck, pausing to watch my chickens wander around the yard.

 

Pretty Bleak

Reblogged from marniere:

UPDATE! ENG 203 students helped me revise.  We put in "bleeding" instead of "blue-gray" in line five, AND we're contemplating using a verb/gerund in the last line, something along the lines of dancing/prancing like a gas (based on the heaving and skipping preceding it).

_____

for Alayne

PRETTY BLEAK

Unremittingly gray and beige and white,

The forecast should have called for headache weather.

Read more… 167 more words

As I head to surgery tomorrow to remove a kidney stone, I give you this wonderful poem that perfectly captures how I am feeling.

Life with Chickens, S1 E7 “Winter”

First snow of the season blankets the smithy at the Wade House

So it has been a while since the last post. The fall semester got away from me, and I just kept letting the blog drop to the bottom of my priorities.

By way of catching up, in short: Life is good, if frickin’ freezing.

We had a bit of a scare in October when a red-tailed hawk made an attempt on Willow, and the chickens have been confined to the run or the coop pretty much since then. Just a few days ago, I saw the hawk again, pouncing on something under the snow. It missed, which makes me think it’s a young hawk.

We started getting eggs in late October. These are the first 10, with the last of the store-bought eggs for comparison.

Winter fell on us, hard. We got a couple of really big snowstorms, one of which knocked our power out for 18 hours just a few days before Christmas.

Blizzard conditions blanketed the garden in 22″ of new snow.

The run stays pretty dry unless the wind switches and comes out of the east.

The girls remained unfazed by the snow, especially since we wrapped the run in a classy blue tarp to keep out the wind, rain, and snow we get in this area during the winter months. It’s working pretty well so far.

Four out of the five birds are laying consistently. Both Buff Orpingtons (Buffy and Willow), the Ameraucana (Prissy), and one Silver Wyandotte (Laverne) are producing. Shirley (the other Wyandotte) wasn’t mature enough when the weather turned, so I expect her to start laying in spring.

The grey-green speckled eggs are Prissy’s. The others are from Buffy, Willow, and Laverne

Since hubby wired the henhouse, we’re able to run a 40-watt bulb on a timer that comes on at 4:00 am. Another HUGE help is the fact that I can wrap their waterer (1-gal from Fleet Farm) with heat tape, which keeps the water from freezing. Since it has been in the single digits here, that’s a big plus.

All in all, I am really enjoying this adventure. While not a lot of fun to schlep water out to the coop every few days in the bitter cold (that automatic waterer setup only works when the temp stays above freezing), I enjoy taking care of my girls. They’re always happy to see me (because it means FOOD!) and I’m happy to have fresh eggs regularly. It’s win/win for everyone (including our feed mill guy). I spend $16/month on high-quality chicken feed, and in return I get 4 eggs a day. Not bad.

Life with Chickenz, S1 E6 “Winter Is Coming…”

Life has been pretty good here in Cheeseheadland, though a frost two weeks ago did take out our second crop of tomatoes.

The ladies are coming into their full adult weight, and a pecking order has been established–with Willow at the top, and Prissy at the bottom. We should be getting eggs in a few weeks, but winter is coming, and the days are getting shorter.

Hubby added some upgrades to the coop this week.

Electricity:

Timer for the light and plug for the water heater.

And from our now-defunct refrigerator, a 20-watt bulb to run in the evenings, in the hope of fooling them into thinking the days aren’t really getting shorter:

Low-watt bulb

Hubby also installed groundbreaker–fiberglass-reinforced plastic used in new-home construction to protect foundation insulation. This has a two-fold purpose–to keep the ladies from shoving sand out of their run, and to act as a wind-break, since there is no protection from the west wind.

Hubby installing groundbreaker.

We bought a bale of hay from our neighbors up the road (which turned out to have quite a bit of alfalfa, to the delight of the ladies) to use in the nest boxes. From the Backyard Chickens forums, Hubby discovered that placing a golf ball in the nest box shows them where to lay.

Nest boxes are ready to go!

So now we are waiting. Their feed is a mix of grower mash and layer crumbles from Pfeiffer’s feed mill up the road, and we give them cracked corn, sunflower seeds, and oats (mixed myself) and tomatoes and other things that didn’t make it from the garden as treats.

Here are the ladies in their favorite hangout in the yard: under the overturned aluminum fishing boat.

The last thing we plan to do is make visquine panels for the run to keep the wind and snow out, so that they are not confined to the henhouse all winter long.

So, winter is coming, and we are getting ready for it. In the meantime, it’s a beautiful sunny fall day here in Wisconsin.

A view of the Kettle Moraine (northern unit)

Adventures with Chickenz, S1 E5 “Coop: Now with More Roof!”

Greetings.

I confess that I have  been lax in my updating of this blog. I plead heat exhaustion: It’s all I can do to move from the couch to the refrigerator and back in +100 degree heat. Imagine how the chickens must feel.

Two weeks ago, our roofing finally came in, and Tony proceeded to swear colorfully when he realized that he didn’t order enough pieces. In his defense, he’d assumed that the order would come sandwiched between two “throw-away” pieces (like most orders did when he worked for The-Company-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named). So he installed what we did have, and scavenged for a piece to fit over the end of the run until the new order comes in some time in early August.

Almost done!

We also want to give a shout-out to BackYard Chickens, and to the original designer of the Wichita Cabin coop from which we adapted our design. Great resources!!

SHINY!

Yes, that is foil-backed Johns-Mannville foam-core insulation. We have a tiny Habitat ReStore in town, and they sold us 2 sheets for $4. Score!

Happy at Home

We stopped weighing the chickens a couple of weeks ago–they wouldn’t stay on the scale, and insisted on flying around the living room, to the delight of our three cats. They’re still travel-sized (my guess is that they’re weighing in at about a pound a piece, since their weight gain was a steady half ounce daily for the first month we kept track).

Here they are today, at 8 weeks:

The Ladies at home. Note the wallow: Paver sand is great for dust baths!

One addition Tony made: a water catchment system. The gutter is piped into a blue 5-liter rennet jug (free from Gibbsville Cheese), run through a home-made sand filter (the tall PVC pipe), and piped into the run. We’ll dismantle it when it gets cold, but for now, it’s working great.

Metal roof, with the gutter (with guard) running into the rennet jug.

Tony has promised to do a post on the making of the system. If enough people are interested, I’ll dragoon him into doing it sooner rather than later. Let us know in the comments.

Filter (pea gravel, pool sand, and activated charcoal, about $8) and PVC (FleetFarm for about $8) with poultry nipples ($2 on eBay).

I’m really proud of how much salvage went into the making of this coop. The framing 2x4s we had to get from Menard’s, but every other piece of wood on this coop came from an older salvaged building.The windows are poured glass–seriously. Tony found crates of it in the attic of his workshop. If we’d been able to salvage enough of the metal roofing, we would have, but the buildings on the property are still very much using it, and I don’t think our landlady would have liked to come in and find her shed dismantled and remade into a chicken coop. I think she’ll like the eggs, though.

So yes, the adventure continues…it’s just a lot more sedate. They’re still chicks yet (though every once in a while I get a hen-sized cackle out of one of them, usually when they’re startled). They still peep charmingly as the wander around the yard under our watchful eyes. I’m glad we got them.

And FYI, the thermometer on the back of the house reads 106.2 at 3:15 pm.

UGH.

Adventures with Chickenz, S1 E4 “Coop Continued”

Chicks are growing. Laverne now weighs in at over 10 oz at 25 days old.

Work on the coop/henhouse continues apace, despite the ungodly, unseasonable (for Wisconsin) heat. Tony works all day, every day. I help when I can, but mostly I make Gatorade and stand around taking pictures. The first series in this post was taken at 10:00 am yesterday (6/28).

Ramp and door frame for the hen house.

Reclaimed door hardware for the big hen house door (the one we open so we can clean it).

The door has a chicken wire screen, and Tony will build a window for it.

My hubby has put a lot of work into this coop. The weather here has been hot and sunny. Nice that it’s dry, since not much building can happen if it’s raining all the time, but the heat has been pretty miserable lately, and I’m grateful that I have a mate who will work like this.

You can’t see it from here, but the sweat is pouring down his back. I am a lucky, lucky woman.

Tony spent much of yesterday –in 95 degree heat– fabricating a mechanism for the big run door (the people-sized one). He got the idea to use an old garage door handle, and figured out how to make it work with a regular (reclaimed) door knob.

Garage door mechanism (found in the shed and refabricated to be a door lock).

The finished product has an old enameled knob that takes a bit of twisting. When it’s closed, it’s like having a bolt shot through at the top and the bottom of the door, so I’m reasonably certain that no raccoon is going to be able to pry it open.

People door!

Today (6/29), we put a coat of Flood’s oil stain on the hen house. As the wood darkened, we could see clear differences in the types of siding. The back and sides are old-growth Douglas fir. The front and the nesting boxes are old-growth redwood, and the front door is old-growth cedar.

What a difference the oil makes. The stain is as close to clear as we could get, so that’s what the wood really looks like.

It is amazing to see the differences–and the natural beauty of the wood grain. It’s also really cool to make something old new again. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.

You can see the difference between the darker redwood siding and the lighter red of the cedar door.

I stained the inside of the coop, too. If you’re gonna do it, might as well do it right, and it only took me about an hour.

Beautiful inside and out!

So that part is done…Next up, we need to put porch paint on the floor of the coop, caulk the seams, and … put the roof on. The roofing should be here by the end of next week, as it’s shipping from Colorado, and they’re having a bit of bother with some wildfires. Tony’s also working on his design for a watering system, so once that’s going together I will take more pics and post them.

I’ll take the girls out this afternoon so that they can get some exercise in the run–they can’t go in the hen house yet because there’s no floor or roof on the nesting box. Plenty of pics to come!

Adventures with Chickenz, S1 E3: “Growing Up”

The ladies are really growing fast–the table-top brooder is starting to seem really small with them in it–and it’s even stranger to think that factory-raised chickens at full size only have a space the size of a sheet of paper to move around in.

When we got them on June 4 (19 days ago), they were so teeny that all five fit in the cardboard oval:

Here they are in their box on the way home on Day 1.

Personalities were present on the very first day. Laverne (Silver-laced Wyandotte #1) was the one pecking at my fingers through the holes in the box, and the first one to flap her way out of the cardboard Cone of Warmth.

Little balls of fuzz, out exploring the world on Day 3. Laverne is the one in the foreground.

The kids have been enjoying the chicks. K is going to be a mini-mama–the chicks like to huddle up around her when she sits on the ground.

Willow seems to like K.

The X-man is only 3 1/2, so we have to watch him vigilantly, lest he inadvertently injure one of the chicks in his enthusiasm. I got him to sit quietly next to one of the birch trees in the yard, and the chicks clustered around him.

“One finger, OK.”

We take them out into the yard at least once a day to get them used to being handled. They seem to enjoy learning to scratch, and they are growingvery quickly. Prissy (the sole Ameraucana) especially–she went from fuzz to feathers far more quickly than the others, though both Buffy and Willow (Buff Orpingtons) are also getting big-girl feathers.

Day 13: Big-girl feathers are coming in on Buffy and Willow.

Prissy’s starting to look like a regular, if travel-sized, chicken.

Of the five, Prissy and Laverne are the biggest. They have been trading the #1 spot for weight-gain. Shirley (the other Silver-laced Wyandotte) is the smallest–very petite. We have been tracking them with a kitchen scale and an Excel spreadsheet–Tony is a big fan of data sets, and it might one day make a cool science project for K.

Here they are in the brooder today:

Day 19

Day 19: Shirley’s silver-laced black feathers are really starting to come in.

Laverne broke 8 oz today–8.1 oz. She has gained 7 oz. in 19 days. She’s the biggest, and may end up at the top by virtue of that and the fact that she’s a total badass. She’s the only one who still complains and struggles when I pick her up. Willow, on the other hand, waited until the X-man got out of my lap, then came over and hopped up on my knee:

Willow having a bit of a sit down.

And I think Prissy may turn out to be my pirate chicken:

Yaar, it’s Prissy the Pirate Chicken

Coop building continues apace. We picked up a clear oil stain for the siding today, and hopefully the roofing will be here by the end of this coming week.