Recent content by OldSchoolBackyard

At risk of sounding like a real "trash to table" kind of guy, I share this story. I work at a school and twice a month they are required to feed the students apples. I saw so many apples being thrown away it made me sick! So I set out an empty box with a sign that said "Eat your Fruits and...

Quote: I thought about that because it is really just hit and miss if you don't know when they are tossing it out. The produce manager told me to call ahead when I knew I was coming through and they hold it for me up to two days. I go to a smaller economy store and I still load up my truck...

I don't know if you are like me and your chickens are cooped up all winter long as it seems that they consider snow "White Death." Normally my chickens free range my backyard all summer long. One of my egg customers commented that she loves how dark and rich colored the yolks are in "my" eggs...

I lost my Buff Polish girl last fall to a hawk and want to "replace" her. I am in the Des Moines area.... do any of you fellow Iowans know of anyone that has one they are interested in finding a new home for? I have another polish that is lonely as she is close to the bottom of the pecking...

We had our first nice 50something degree day here in Iowa last Saturday so I did some end of winter/early spring cleaning in my coop. I was finally able to clean all the poop boards off! That was a relief as I had to practically use a hatchet during the winter time to break off small chips of...

Quote: If this is a sharp shinned hawk, perhaps it got the shin splits (splints) Har... har...

I ended up converting an old garden shed into my coop and their popdoor comes out right in the middle of a mint patch that WAS about 3' by 6' That was mid summer. By fall, all that was left was mint stalks with tufts of mint leaves just beyond their reach. I had an herb garden they like to...

I knew how much they love digging through my mulch pile, so I deliberately filled their "chicken run" with about 10 inches of woodchips, leaves and other yard debris. And yet they still like to paw through the crushed red brick that I have surrounding the house. Then I get to rake brick chips...

I enjoy having all sorts of projects to build, modify etc so building my own coop struck my fancy. But as many of other BYCers have discovered and stated on here, always build for more chickens then you currently have. I had it set in my mind that I only wanted "3-5 hens... NEVER any roosters"...

Chicken wire will rust quickly and almost dissolve into the ground. Then you have little bits of rusted wire laying around and that ain't good! From experience, I would look into other options.

This thread caught my attention as I was wondering the same thing! After reading everyone's responces, I went right home and fed my girls a a turkey carcus that I had left over from Canadian Thanksgiving. We humans had picked as clean as we could but the chickens went nuts over the amount that...

I used the folding metal dog crate once my chicks got too big for the recycling bin they started in. I had them in there for close to 2 weeks until I picked up a little kid swimming pool at the annual "trash day" where you can toss anything (great way to get coop materials too! I got several...

I had the same problem with mine. I had thirty eggs and only 4 hatched. It was my first batch so I'm sure there was human errors throughout the process. But curiosity got the best of my after 26 days and I found that close to a dozen were almost completely developed. It broke my heart...