Consolidated Kansas

[sunflowerparrot]

Wow my keets are huge! They grow so fast but they are so cute X3. But they are so loud still. I had Harry potter the keet on my shoulder and it crapped on me Bl

I hatched out keets a week after I hatched out some chicks and the keets are already much bigger than the chicks. I have an incubator full of more guinea eggs that we found about 10 days ago.. can't wait for my guineas - I love them! Mine are so tame... they come home every evening, hang out with the chickens - I can even pick them up... they follow me around if I have a food cup in my hand. I hope my new ones are as sweet and tame.

 

[maidenwolfx80]

Thanks rooster and Danz. I love the cochin pic. Danz I am going to post some pics of some of the beauties that have come from you. The d'ulandsk hen have started to lay so now it is time to separate them with their roo and see hoe the babies some out.

 

[chicken danz]

Oh that is really exciting Maidenwolf. Since I sold all the d'uccle and all the Olandsk I won't be producing any more of those. I wish you tons of sweet babies!
I just got in the house and it's 9:59. I swear it gets later every night.
My bourbon red turkey hen that has been broody hatched out a poult today. I found it just standing in the pen in a daze. She still has lots of other eggs under her and apparently wasn't worried about mothering it yet. So I put it in with some new chicks I just hatched.
I spent most of my day just cleaning in this room. I have the hatcher and a couple chick bins in here and the chick dust was everywhere. I really should just spend more time each day cleaning instead of letting it pile up, but what fun is that???

 

[TheDownyChick]

Oh dear. More of my babies, now 4 weeks old, have twisted toes. Ack! What am I doing wro

 

[chicken danz]

Didn't you have those eggs shipped to you? Are you just noticing them or is this something that is developing?
If it is something that was there it is probably something to do with damage to the embryo when the eggs were shipped. If it is developing it could be a neurological problem or an early onset of Merek's.
The thing to do is watch them carefully and see if they are going down hill, loosing coordination, or loosing weight. If they are eating healthy and not showing any other signs of problems it will be great. Just make them some shoes to straighten out their feet. I have the first peachick I hatched this year and it's feet are turned almost to the point where it walks on it's heels. I tried fixing his legs because he was spraddled a little but his toes didn't straighten out. I just hope it is a female. At least she could lay eggs some day. If it's a male I'll never be able to sell him. I think it is too late to try to repair them now.

 

[cherwill]

Cherwill you sound like a very organized gardener - I know I could learn a thing or two from you. In the past I didn't have a big enough area to rotate a lot (i.e. some areas were best suited for one thing and not another, and therefore rotating wasn't an option). Now that I have a much bigger garden plot, I will have to watch for that next year. This year I emptied my DLM bedding as mulch on the garden but deliberately did not put it at one end so I could plant tomatoes and peppers there. I learned from experience that the high nitrogen content of chicken poop will allow tomatoes to grow a terrific amount of green growth (I had plants 7' tall!) but not set many fruit. Instead I planted greens where I had put the chicken poop, figuring if they took off, I wouldn't mind a bit. So far its paying off. My chard is going great guns and my tomatoes have stayed small so far but are already loaded with fruit. But I'll have to be thinking about reversing it next year....

My first year gardening was pretty chaotic. I had a book that talked about companion planting and I tried to do that, but then there are things that shouldn't be together and it got to be crazy trying to figure it all out. I had read the book on square foot gardening, but DH didn't think it was practical for out at the community garden. Then I got http://www.amazon.com/Vegetable-Gar...r=1-1&keywords=the+vegetable+gardener's+bible and it has a sample of a crop rotation set-up that I like a lot.

I grow my greens at home; the chard looks OK and I have harvested some. I got a small harvest of arugula but now something is eating holes in the leaves so that's the end of that, most likely. Same with the kale, except I never got any to eat. My spinach seeds are apparently too old because only 3 plants came up. The stuff at the community garden looks great, though.

Snap peas are easy to grow -- just work like regular peas. I usually buy the larger plastic bag of seeds and plant 3 rows about 6inches apart and then put the trellis over the middle row. This was a bumper crop year, but I always get a few even when it gets hot, early. I got the nylon trellis stuff from Gurney (I think), and it can be reused for 3 or 4 years before it gets nasty if you clean it out when the peas are done and roll it up on a 2x4 or something.

What a gorgeous picture of your garden. If I add another plot next year, I plan on planting about 3 times as many peas. I think I'll plant some snap peas, too. When we plant the peas even two inches from the trellis, they don't seem to reach for it and we spend a lot of time trying to train them onto the trellis. This year we planted them right under the fence and there was no problem. I'm not sure how that would work if we did more than one row, but I'd like to try it next year (assuming I remember!). Do you do that with beans, too, if you plant beans? We plant the peas close together, too, and have never had a problem because of it.

Busy day today. I wonder if I will ever get caught up. I had a breakfast meeting this morning and some other stuff planned for the afternoon. I have slowly been trying to do some cleaning cause I have company coming this weekend. That is not going well. Th rain and the mud and the 100 or so chicks in the house has put that to the impossible to obtain category.

I think I need to have company just so I'll make myself clean house!

The thing is, with an egg eater, they don't leave it lying around for you to find the evidence. They peck it open and devour it lock, stock and barrel, and you rarely find a trace. It sounds like your GF saw an egg sitting there and then observed a bird going over and eating some of it? That doesn't sound like a dedicated egg eater to me.

There are a lot of factors. For one, I would disbelieve the PO that he was getting 6 eggs a day from 6 laying hens. That almost never happens, and is probably just a tale a seller will tell to make the sale. With the exception of the production egg laying hens, who sometimes will literally lay "an egg a day" for the first year or so of laying, before they burn out altogether, most hens lay between 3-4 eggs a week. So if you have 6 hens, you can count on 1-2 of them being on a "day off" on any given day. I don't believe I have ever gathered the same number of eggs in a day as the number of laying hens I have, no matter how large or small that number is.

The move will certainly put them off for awhile. Excessive heat or cold will also disrupt laying. I know it is frustrating to go without eggs - in December I went 3 1/2 weeks without getting a single egg. But, I am not hearing anything in what you are saying that sounds out of the ordinary to me.

I was going to mention about the heat because mine have really slacked off since it hit the 90s.

Here is one of the silkies I got in March. He is such a character and so loving. I got the others because of how much we fell in love with him. His name is Sub-Zero

Well I was going to post some more but I am having some issues so it will have to wait. What do you all think of Sub-Zero?

Cute!

Cute Maidenwolf. So I took a pic while agf course I didn't get the cooperation I wanted. I had some broodies that just wouldn't give up.... so I did. Here are two LF cochin hens. If you look at the picture you will see a yellow spot between them. That is a chick they just hatched. I have no idea how many eggs are in those piles.

That is one well-protected chick!

 

[Trish44]

I have tomato plants this year & they have some pretty good sized tomatoes on them already, none are ripe yet though. I planted a couple pepper plants & a zucchini & that's the extent of our garden this year. I'm hoping maybe next year we can redo our garden space into smaller raised beds that are easier to manage.

My Wheaten Ameraucana broody hen still has her 3 little chicks so far. I have been watching them & they're so darned cute, I need to get some pics when I get a chance.

Well I have another busy day, so you all stay cool & have a good day.

 

[sharol]

I second that. Even our predicted 93 is miserable with this high humidity.

Well I have another busy day, so you all stay cool & have a good day.

 

[HEChicken]

Trish, that's great that your Wheaten hen has raised them this far successfully - it bodes well for them to all make it as they are now over a week old, right?

That's so funny that you want to downsize to raised beds. I did raised beds at the old house and I quite liked them but as a concept I think they sound better than the reality. I had no problem coming up with the materials to create the beds but then I sat back and realized now I had to fill them. I had a couple of bags of top soil in the garage and I poured those in and that's when I realized it was going to take a LOT of fill to get those suckers full. Those two bags (80lb) was literally just a drop in the bucket. Our backyard there did not have a gate wide enough to drive a truck through, so I had to fill them bucket load by bucket load, either hauled in by hand, or loading a couple in an unstable wheelbarrow and wheeling them down. I found a guy on CL who was excavating his basement and was willing to let me haul the dirt away for free but without a truck, all I could do was drive to his house, fill a dozen 5-gallon buckets to put in the back of the car, and then haul all of those buckets down to the backyard to fill the beds. It was a lot of work and I probably spent more in gas going back and forth to his place, than I'd like to think. Then, because of the drought, the garden wasn't that successful anyway, and then we moved. So at this house I was excited to get a patch roto-tilled, and not have to go through the hassle of creating another raised bed system.

I took Madge, my turkey hen, off her nest yesterday. She started with 20 eggs but they kept getting contaminated and I wound up, at the 3-week mark, removing all but 3 eggs. Of those, one exploded around the due date, the second I found tossed out of the nest with a full term baby half hatched but very dead in it, and the third she was still sitting on and turning faithfully. But as of today she is a week overdue and when I smelled the egg she was sitting on, it smelled bad too, so I just gathered her up, told her she is done, and booted her out of the hoop coop. Surprisingly, she has accepted it quite well and after a few minutes of pacing looking for a way back in, went off to graze and do her thing. She voluntarily went into the coop to sleep last night, making Ned a very happy boy. He is displaying and gobbling like crazy this morning - he's so happy to have her back! I feel bad for her that she sat for 5 weeks and wound up with nothing to show for it, but there's not much I can do at this point. Next year I will only give her a few, and incubate a bunch for her in the incubator and then put them under her after they hatch. I am doing the same with a duck right now. My first broody duck is already broody again, so I set a week's worth of her eggs in the incubator and once they hatch, I'll let her raise them - I just can't understand why the ducks and turkeys are having such issues hatching their own eggs, when I've never had an egg go bad under a chicken.

 

[22qZoo]

Whew ! Welcome to summer, Danz, I don't envy you at all with all that work in this heat .I have the newer chicks out side next to the big girls and some of the EE's are sparing with the grown-ups thru the fence.I'm having doubts about getting both flocks merged together . That's making more work than I was hoping for ,can't imagine what some of you have to do with larger flocks.
I'm with Pumpkin this is what he did last night when he came in to the A/C