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.
f 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.
