Consolidated Kansas

[sharol]

Danz, thanks for the moon info. The potatoes are bulk. I usually buy red potatoes and they have a different variety (can't remember the name) than most.

Here are the first pictures of the chicks.

this is the third hatched. It appears to be black and white


This little one was the first hatched. She (I hope) is actually brown. When it hears my voice it comes out from under Mom. The color in the 2nd picture is pretty accurate. Mom is a BO/Blue Copper Marans cross (her front end is the orange/gold you see here and her back half is gray. You can see the stripey one peeking out from under Mom at the bottom.




This stripey one was the 2nd chick hatched, and it is the shyest. I was lucky to get it at all because it kept ducking back under the feathers.


All three have dark legs. You forget how cute newborn chicks are until you are around them again. These all hatched from pullet eggs and are pretty small compared to the marans last summer, but they are getting around well. I wish Copper would get out of the nest box so I could clean it. It is smelly in there. She wasn't as careful about that as Marlena was last summer, and I've had to clean out the nest box a couple of times.

Keeping my fingers crossed for pullets.

 

[Trish44]

Awww they're cute sharol! I hatch a lot of chicks but I never get tired of seeing them.

 

[sharol]

Mom and the babies. Finallly, the stripey one came out for a photo op.

 

[sunflowerparrot]

I have started a lot of seedlings in 3/4 egg shells this year and so far, so good. I am going to plant my garden in my pig pen... Since we have new land this year, my BF is going to prepare it for hay. I'm not really into the whole gardening thing on a big scale - but am looking forward to growing some food in my yard for canning this year.

I broke down and bought a 2nd incubator - waiting 3 weeks for new chicks is painful - now I can have chicks more regularly

 

[michelleml]

The baby chick with wry neck is doing much better this evening. She is eating and holding her head right much better Than yesterday so I'll keep trying

 

[chicken danz]

Sharol that stripey one will be the prettiest I think. It kind of looks like Chickzilla did....and or it's Mom. Congrats on such a nice little hatch. I find myself talking to chicks just like they are babies.
Well I followed the almanac and planted two rows of radish seed today. We'll see how it does. I would think this weather would be great for them. I don't have plans to be in Emporia until the 15th but if I get up there I am going to bluestem to get some more seed. I want to buy some more green bean seed there as well. It'll be a while before I get it planted but I'd like to have it on hand.
It took a while to warm up but turned out to be a decent day. I think the birds were glad to see me. I could see that DH missed a couple pens yesterday. But I was really feeling sick so I was glad he happened to have the day off.
If we'd have some warm weather now I could get in gear to get some things done around here. Seems by the time it warms up and I get done with chores there's no time left in the day.
I left the wood door on the brooder open today so the chicks could enjoy the weather. Hopefully I'll be able to relocate them soon where they'll get some fresh air as they want.

 

[tweetybaby2005]

Sharol, your baby chicks are so cute!!! I hope they are all girls for ya!

Danz, the radish top won't grow the radish again. They will flower and then grow seeds instead. But I don't know if the bottom will grow the tops or not once they are cut. I've never tried it.

Had a hen died. She didn't look sick yesterday but was dead today. I think she broke her neck jumping from the roost but I'm not sure. My seed potatoes got dug up by the dogs. I'm really upset about it. I may need to go get more from Atwood tomorrow. I planned to move the lettuce out tomorrow and plant the onion sets. Fingers crossed that the weather will continue to warm up. We all know the last few yrs that we've had snow or ice in April.

 

[chicken danz]

Tweety I don't care about the radish itself. I just want to grow more of the tops. I think I may try cutting the tops on a couple and see if they regenerate. I can eat a radish here and there but my main goal for growing them is to feed the tops to the birds.
I discovered yesterday I have an entire row of garlic up I thought failed to thrive. They were given to me by my friend Anjou and planted kind of late. The ones I planted earlier were up and forming tops but nothing was there from the later ones. Yesterday when I was out there I noticed a the whole row had come up. I am going to have garlic for everyone in the family this year. And three different kinds of it.
I have eggs due to hatch today. They are hatching in one incubator and haven't even pipped in the other. They are both spot on on temperature. That's never happened before. I was having trouble with the auto waterer and the water wasn't flowing. I think I have that fixed now but I don't know if that had something to do with it or not. I sure hope they hatch. I have that entire batch spoken for.
I also found that my one and only developing early peafowl egg didn't hatch. It was due two days ago. I haven't opened the egg yet to see if it died earlier or if it just didn't pip. Just about the time you think you know it all about hatching something happens to mess you up. At least the peafowl are slowly starting to lay again. I think I have gotten 3 eggs this week.
I am really having trouble with one of my teeth and it is making me sick and robbing me of sleep. I sure hope the dentist can at least prescribe an antibiotic for me tomorrow. It has to come out before all the dental work is done but it needs to be in place for a little while longer to line things up. It has a cone shaped root so it gets loose and then the problems start. I can't wait to get rid of that thing. I should be loosing some weight in reality. I haven't been able to eat any food I have to chew for a week now.

 

[HEChicken]

Tweety, so sorry the dogs dug up the potatoes

FWIW, we put a fence around our veggie garden using t-posts and a combination of chicken wire and cattle panels. It would have been easier to do it all in one material but we wanted to make it easy to open up for the big tiller to drive in there each year to till so at each end we put a pair of t-posts 16' apart and a cattle panel zip tied to them. The rest of it is where we put the chicken wire. When it came time to bring in the tiller, we just cut the zip ties, laid the panels flat on the ground, drove the tiller over them, and later stood the panels up and used new zip ties to hold them in place again for the next year.

We only started this garden last year and at first I had the cattle panels in place but not much else. It is far enough from the chicken yard that it took the birds a long time to find it. But one day I found holes pecked in all the green tomatoes and knew it was time to finish fencing it

Once I got the rest of it fenced, it kept the dogs and turkeys out of it. The chickens just really don't seem to go that far from the coop so I've never seen one of them up there. Interestingly, my dogs learned pretty quickly that the garden is off limits. Even during the period the cattle panels were down, any time they tried to follow me in there, I told them "out" and they quickly learned that they have to sit just outside the garden and watch me. (Of course when I'm not there to tell them, I'm sure all bets are off.)

I've been staying busy on both the garden and the birds. This time of year is SO busy and I have a list a mile long of things I need to do. And then things keep coming up that keep me from working the list anyway. An out of town friend made a surprise visit and wanted to come out and spend a day with me. It was so fun to see her but meant one more day I didn't get much done. Oh well….after the long winter, I am just glad for the warm days to work outside comfortably.

I have one incubator full of turkey eggs and another full of duck eggs. I got my NH rooster separated into the hoop coop with his Exchequer hens in hopes he will mate them given no other options. (Until now he's had access to them but with 40 or so hens he didn't favor them and every egg I cracked open or tried to incubator was not fertile.) Now that they've been together a few days, I'm collecting the eggs and will add them to the turkey incubator on Tuesday. My hope is to combine my efforts and use the "Aloha" chicks as turkey tutors.

the eggs I'm getting from that pen now are fertile.

After Tuesday I will let that group out of the hoop coop since I don't really want to incubate any more chicks this year if I can help it.

Danz, sorry to hear about the loss of your expensive chicks. Sharol, congrats on Copper's excellent hatch - I never get tired of watching broody hens interacting with their chicks.

 

[chicken danz]

Good to see you again HEChicken. Your post have just been too far apart. I can't believe you don't want to incubate any more chicks. I can't imagine not having at least one incubator going. I've of course changed my focus from producing eating eggs to hatching chicks. I still hope someday it gets down to a controlled chaos though. I have a nice group of layers now and shouldn't have to hatch any more layers until fall.
I had to fence my garden as well. The Pyrenees like to dig up a divot to lay in and the soft garden dirt is perfect for that. Plus the chickens and the ducks love to sample every thing out there. I grow a lot just for the birds but they tend to devour the small young plants or like to dig around them in the dirt. I have to replace some garden fence when I put in my new Sabastopol pen. I also lost a couple trees to the drought that had affected the shape of the garden so now I can add a little more space to it. Just more project I need to get done!