Hello from South Australia

[liz9910]

from California!

 

[Red Barn Farms]

Hello and welcome to BYC from 'The Heartland' of Kentucky.

 

[Rachel96]

Thanks! You do know I joined about eight months ago, right? I'd actually forgotten about this thread until the Chicken Goddess bumped it...

Anyway, I just noticed how ridiculously out-of-date the beginning of this thread is. So, here goes:

I'm still in South Australia and I'm still sixteen. That hasn't changed (will in about two months, though, I'll be 17). We live on an acre of land in a very small, very unknown little so-called 'town' (I call it a 'locality'... don't we need actual houses and maybe a shop or two for it to be a 'town'?) in the Hills. We've been here a little over two years.

I'm in Year 11 and do school through the Open Access College. You probably haven't heard of it, but the primary school section is called the Port August School of the Air, which you probably have heard of. So basically I do it by correspondence - on the telephone and via e-mail and the internet. At the moment I'm studying English (because it's compulsory), German, French, and Spanish. I learn piano (8th Grade), violin (2nd Grade), and teach myself flute (working through 2nd Grade books).

My father, sister, and I all do poultry stuff. Well, not so much my father at the moment as all but two of his birds got taken by predators over winter and he sold the remaining two to me.

My sister keeps ducks because she says chickens are 'too pointy'. You can find out about her here https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/667931/hi-from-south-australia. From memory, she has: 2 Muscovy girls; 3 Khaki Campbells, 1 drake and 2 ducks; 3 Indian Runners, all girls; 2 Tuxedos, 1 drake and 1 duck. She also has one little duckling, a little under a week old, of unknown parentage, plus about 2 dozen eggs due on Saturday.

I have the following:
2 roosters; one is mostly barred 'Rock, with some Australorp and some other blood in him, called George; the other was a mystery chick, I think he's mostly Wyandotte, called Big Bird.
4 lavender Araucana hens, good layers of smallish mint-green eggs.
3 white Leghorn bantams, good layers of very small white eggs, I'm think about selling these ones actually.
2 Sizzle pullets, I think about 8 months old, one is Silkie dominant (called Toes, because she has 4 toes on one foot and 5 on the other) and the other is Frizzle dominant (called Caramel).
1 unknown hen, probably a buff Cochin cross something, about 7 months old (Pumpkin).
2 white Leghorn pullets, about 6 months old (Spot and Suzy).
1 Australorp pullet, but 6 months old (Raven).
2 Ancona hens, of unknown age, called Polka and Dot.
2 light Sussex cross hens; Strawberry is half silver-laced Wyandotte and New Girl is probably half Leghorn.
4 light Sussex cross Rhode Island Red hens, 3 are 12 months and one is 18 months.
2 ISA Brown hens, about 1 year old, my dad gave them to me after the rest of his flock was viciously slaughtered by a fox (lets just say this winter has dragged on far longer than usual).
I also have about 32 mixed-breed chicks in an outside pen, 18 of them are 4 1/2 weeks and the rest are 3 1/2 weeks; plus about 14 in the indoor brooders, 7 of them are 3 1/2 weeks and the rest are about 1 1/2 weeks. I've got 2 dozen eggs due on Saturday and 4 dozen due two weeks after that.

I think that's everything. My hens lay about 18 eggs a day between them (out of 22 hens), and my sister gets about 6 eggs a day. We sell a couple of times a month at various community markets in the city (where, we discovered, you can never have too many 'organic', free-range eggs. We can't sell where we live because everyone has chickens). The chicks are pretty cool, the older ones are pretty feather now and you never know what they're going to look like. My mother says she reckons mixed-breed chickens are nicer than purebreds because they're all different. I think she was getting sick of the ISAs, too, which all look like clones.

Anyway, I really need to do some schoolwork now because we're going out this afternoon.
from Rachel.