Recent content by rlkern

If you have "regular" customers or even new ones and you won't be in violation of state laws, ask them to "recycle" their "used' cartons back to you. I live in Kansas and it's perfectly acceptable to "reuse" cartons so long as you cross off any references to other producers (i.e. logos...

I've just been watching but this has been extremely interesting. Can't wait to hear how things eventually turn out. Wish I could loan you my broody girl. I'm not wanting new chicks this year but one of my newbies has decided she wants to be a mama (buff orpington). And I had one of my...

I have wondered if the adversity to walking in snow has to do with not necessarily the exposure to predators but the fact that they can't see the dark terra firma that they are used to walking on. Maybe they think the ground is gone and it's not safe.

I use heated dog dishes (we have electricity available). I fill them up with fresh water everyday but the water stays melted and I don't have to break ice. This saves me time in the long run and the water dishes have their own thermo control in them. They come on when it reaches to just above...

My girls prefer crumbles and if they get wet first, that's even better!! I don't really have a problem with waste much as the feeders I use are long and slender, have a lip that goes in, are suspended off the ground so they can't dump them out and aren't filled up very high so that if they do...

I guess I'll let them out for a bit this evening. They get pretty intense around the run door when I head back there and I don't let them out!

Quote: Okay, it's actuall nitrogen - phosphate (no phosphorus) - potash - in that order. And iron.

It's a general turf fertilizer - 24-0-11 - phosphorus-nitrogen-potash (I think in that order) plust iron. Doesn't look like it has any weed control in it.

My husband recently put down some fertilizer on our lawn. I'm hesitant to let the chickens out to free-range as these are little very small pellets. The package doesn't say the fertilizer is harmful to pets, etc. but it does say "harmful" if swallowed. Being the food hounds that chickens are...

I have two newer buff orpingtons that looked so much alike I couldn't come up with names for them. Most of the others had them but these 2 eluded me. I was calling them the cream puffs just for reference. Then my two neighbor girls came over to see the chicks a few months back and one of them...

If it was heat, what else can I do to help the rest of the girls? I just added 11 more hens this spring and one of my older girls has a baby chick of her own. I have 3 fans going in the coop itself: one pulling hot air out and the other two facing each end of the coop. I found her under the...

Both of them were about 1.25 years old so relatively young. They have shade all over the chicken pen (which is outside, fenced area of a relatively decent size, and there are like 8 watering containers throughout the pen as well as one in the coop itself. 3 of those were refilled this morning...

Hi all. I just went out to feed the girls their dinner and found my favorite barred rock dead in the coop. I lost a black sex link about 4 weeks ago. What should I do next? We just buried the black sex link but I'm thinking I need to make sure nothing is going on in the flock as far as...

If by "crop" you mean her underbelly (still learning about pieces and parts of chickens), I did feel around her underbelly and nothing feels hard or strange. Her vent looks clean, not clogged or anything and still looks moist to a degree. I didn't see any obvious signs of mites/lice but I...

I'll check her for the lice/mites first. I just changed out all of their bedding last weekend (spring cleaning) and although I treated the bare wood in the coop, I did not go back and spray down the wood chips or spray the chickens themselves down. I might do that today. It's something called...