Chickens for 10-20 years or more? Pull up a rockin' chair and lay some wisdom on us!

[Beekissed]

Idk aboot stony but I knew you was a woman! Lol not very many men would take on beekissed as a name...none that I know of atleast.... it just sounds feminene....
That and when I read your posts I hear a woman reading it.... lol
Doc sez its ok to hear the voices in my head I just can't talk back.....lmao

Not unless they were supremely secure in their sexuality....

I now talk back to the voices in my head as they are the only ones that make any sense anymore!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Three nests should be enough for 12 hens. They will probably mostly use one or two, but that third one gives you a bit of flexibility.

7" each will probably work, but if you can easily go with more, why not do it? They don't take up a lot of space when they are crowded on the roosts, but they need enough space to hop up there. Sometimes they don't like to crowd, especially in hot weather.

Is 12 hens all you are ever going to have? Integration is a whole lot easier if they have enough roost space. It's not at all unusual for mine to be pretty rough on the roosts.

Several times I've seen adult hens be so mean to lower ranking chickens on the roosts that the lower ranking ones quit roosting on the roost and move to other places in the coop. Some once even starting to roost outside the coop. That was a bunch of broody raised chicks that slept on the roosts with the adults until the broody weaned them and left them on their own.

I'm a believer in providing extra space where I can. Not to coddle the chickens but because it usually makes my life easier. Any time I try to shoe-horn chickens in a coop, run, or on the roosts, I generally create problems for myself. If you can create more roost space, i think you would be wise to do it.

 

[chickletteSarge]

Yea I wish I had them kinda voices....

But back to muh chickens....
I'm building a coop for a longtailed yokohama, I am planning on it being 4'deepX8'high and 4-5' wide that way they can roost high. Should I make it a bit longer? They will be free ranging most of the day.

 

[MagicChicken]

http://www.javabreedersofamerica.com/2011/10/how-to-breed-black-java-large-fowl.html

Go to this site for the Java Club. I forgot I wrote a article on how to get started with Black Javas for Ruth the secetary of the club. I think there is a fellow in Arizona. Maybe Ruth can tell you who he is. One thing all the Black Javas came from Duane Urch of Minn. He kept this breed going for many years and today there is a good group trying to get them back to what they were twenty to forty years ago. You must understand that if you do not breed these rare breeds to a Standard for looks , shape or color they will revert back to what they looked like in the 1850s and these kind of birds are not what you want on your hobby farm. When you order from Mail order or go to feed stores your birds most of the time came from a flock of 15 females and three males and this is called flock matting. You get your best off spring from small mat tings where you have good birds and mate a male to compensate for the females weakness or vice versa.

Maybe next year we will promote the Java as a project bird. I kind of threw out Buff Leghorns this year. There is one fellow who has worked so hard to keep them going.

When it comes to old time breeds that grand ma use to have they are very very rare. Some are just about gone in my view. If you are a rookie you need to be care full what you start with because you could bite off more than you can handle. Many people get birds and dont understand their personality such as the rhode island reds you all have talked about on this thread. the males if you have them can be very dangerous around small children. They cant help it its because of the high egg production traits that has been breed into these birds. These birds are not pure Rhode island Reds they had some stuff crossed into them in the 1930s to increase their egg production to win at ROP egg laying contests. In other words it was cheating on the pure breed old fashion Rhode Island Red. It has hurt the breed ever since and Rhode Island Red roosters have got a bad rap for being mean when they can be very docile.

If you want a hardy breed the Java is a good one. Warning however, they are a DUAL purpose breed. Not egg machines. If you want eggs stay with the commerical breeds. bob

Thanks, Bob. The java breeding article was useful. I definitely want dual purpose birds. Plan on eating the culls. After I've got my chicken-keeping skills improved I would like to set up a small breeding project. Not that I want to show birds, but I'd like to breed to standard to help keep the lines going. Reading between the lines of the SOP it looks like the old breed standards were geared toward keeping a strong, healthy, productive flock. Seems like a great goal to me. Who can afford a bunch of slacking chickens? I figure if I start with a trio I would have another year to build a set of pens for line breeding. But I'm not going to start a breeding project until I'm sure I can take care of the birds. Don't want to put any of those rare birds at risk.

 

[stonykill]

see with a name like Beekissed, I figured you also raised bee's. Now if your name were BeKissed, simply 1 letter omited, I would not have thought that

 

[jeapa]

Thanks for the tips Ridgerunner. I do have space for at least 5' more of roosting above my nest boxes. I will more than likely go ahead and use the space. There really isn't any reason not too.

 

[Beekissed]

see with a name like Beekissed, I figured you also raised bee's. Now if your name were BeKissed, simply 1 letter omited, I would not have thought that

I'll tell you from whence the Beekissed came....way back when I first joined my first forum it was on beekeeping because I was really researching getting bees~which I eventually obtained, but that's another story. I had to come up with a name that went along with the forum...seemed like the right thing to do. I had a line of lip balms that I made and sold along with soaps, sugar scrubs, etc., that had beeswax as the base and the lip balms were called Beekissed because I loved the double entandre of bee/be + kissed for a lip balm...even had a little bee on the label.

Well...in the interest of simplicity with a nod towards encroaching senility, I just kept the same screen name for every forum I joined thereafter so I wouldn't have to remember all these different log in names. When I joined here it sort of worked well with chicken beaks(beeks~beekeepers refer to themselves as "beeks", which I found amusing) as well, so Beekissed~though I would never kiss a chicken's beak~seemed like it worked here also.

If I sound like some of the farmers you know it's probably because I was raised roughin' it on a homestead, lived in a two room log cabin, no utilities, carried water from a spring and fed/watered livestock before walking a mile out to the hard road to catch the bus for school(yes, it just happened to be uphill both ways...I live in WV, for heaven's sake!). I started helping to keep and butcher chickens at the age of 10(my sisters just "couldn't do it" and menfolk didn't do that where I lived) when we first moved on the land and helping skin/process deer from then also....we worked pretty much all the time to procure food for the family and lived out of the preserved food cellar all winter, so the luxury of keeping animals for pets just wasn't there.

After living like that through my formative years, you can imagine how little understanding I have of babying chickens and livestock around, with not eating them(of course you EAT them...if you don't eat them you go hungry!) and with worrying about every little aspect of their living outdoors~it's where they were born to live.

Could be why I sound like a man sometimes...I worked like a man from when I was a little girl and that hasn't changed much now that I'm an old girl.

This was the first cabin we built...in 3 wks time with chainsaws and axes for tools(no electricity there until I was well into my 20s). That's my mother. I had a hand on every log of both cabins we built...and pretty much of the firewood we had to burn. Cooked on a wood cookstove both winter and summer.



And here's the second log cabin built in the same way but in more time, years later after the land was all cleared and I was in my teens.



Now, after that totally obscure and probably unnecessary walk down memory lane, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming!

 

[al6517]

I have had the fine pleasure to know our beloved Beekissed for a couple of years now, I have read many many of her post and knew instantly she was of the salt of the earth. smart, confidant, funny and she can spit too LOL. Anyway I just wanted to say she's a fine person in my book.

 

[Arielle]

Quote: THank you for sharing. What beautiful cabins.

 

[fowlman01]

That is awesome beekissed!

Walt