IVY, Happy Birthday early! I have been wondering where you have been also. I hope you have a great birthday tomorrow.
Hawkeye, I absolutely love that greenhouse with the doors, who would have thought of that! I'll bet you could do that pretty easy with your talents. Hey, I'm going to send you a PM about your trip to Lawrence. My spider bite got worse yesterday, it's the weirdest thing. I made the bad mistake of putting on my garden shoe & I guess it caused the poison to get distributed more around the area by putting pressure on it. I ended up with two more areas that almost look like burns. They were really painful last night when I came in from working on my turkey pen. It took me until dark last night to get the pen finished & get the birds moved out. I didn't even get all of my chores done so I had to finish them this morning. Anyway, I came in & the foot was just hurting terribly, so I got some really hot water & epsom salts & soaked the foot first & then later I iced it. It's not hurting so much today, but now I have 3 spots to deal with instead of 1. I guess I can't put a closed shoe on that foot for now. It's hard to find something to wear on it.
The turkeys seem much happier in their new pen & now have decided that their house isn't so bad after all. I didn't close it in the front, I just made a box with the front open into the pen. It has a lid that is hinged so I can get in there if I need to & then there is a gate at the other end of the pen for me to get food & water in to them. It's not any beautiful piece of work, but it's functional. I'm still using the wood I salvaged, I just had to go & buy the hardware cloth & hinges & all for it. I still need to get two more safety hooks for the box lid, I only got two & I used those for the gate. I found that the hardware cloth is cheaper at Atwoods as well as chicken wire is also, it kind of surprised me that they were cheaper on those things than at Lowe's. There was an $8 difference in price for a roll of chicken wire from Lowe's to Atwoods, so that's quite a bit of difference. I only used the chicken wire on my pen inside the run, the one outside is all hardware cloth & some small gauge fence I had around for the top. I just overlapped the fence to make it more secure since it is only 24 inches wide & the pen is more like 36 or 38 inches wide.
Pikeman, good job on the coop, I can't wait to see it all done!
Lizzy, there's not a lot of difference between the Rouen ducks & Mallards, I used to have some of both years ago. I was wondering if the chocolate colored ones are Khaki Campbell, I used to have some of those too. The black & white one looks like a Swedish, but I'm no duck expert.
I have chicks hatching today. So far I have two lavender Orpingtons hatched & one that looks more like a buff Orpington, so the people I got the eggs from must have had both & gave me the wrong egg. It sure doesn't look like a lavender to me. I had a really odd looking Welsummer chick hatch last night, it's blonde with carmel colored stripes, almost an albino looking Welsummer. I got the eggs from a friend who only has Welsummers & it came out of a Welsummer egg. I will have to take some pics later & show you the two that hatched so far side by side. I read on the Welsummer thread that sometimes they can have a white gene. Has anyone heard of that before? I'm so thrilled that some of my Orpingtons are going to hatch at least, I have 4 more eggs that haven't pipped yet, but I can hear peeping in a couple of them. I have one more Ameraucana pipping down there & I can hear another one peeping too. I got my other batch of peacock eggs this morning & they arrived in fine shape, I have them resting now on the counter. I think I'm going to try incubating them in the
Brinsea just to see if it makes any difference since I put the others in a large egg tray in the cabinet incubator. I can lay them down in the
Brinsea & turn them by hand like I was told to do & just compare the two batches to see which is more successful, it should be interesting. I managed to get the eggs in the house without my DH seeing them since I was outside doing chores when the mail lady came. I also had another batch of Welsummer eggs come & 3 were broken & boy was that a mess. They had packed the eggs in a big 18 hole carton in what looked like kleenex & after the 3 eggs broke the yolk just spread all over the other eggs sticking all of that tissue all over all the eggs, it was quite a mess picking it off. We'll see if any of these eggs hatch if they had that much shaking around. I emailed the person telling them how they arrived. I don't expect any replacements, but I do think they should know that their packing wasn't very good. My peacock eggs on the other hand were packed very well & arrived in great shape.
Danz, Oh my gosh, I can't imagine having that volume of eggs to gather, you truly do need to cut down on some of your birds! Wow is all I can say.
