- Aug 11, 2010
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I've been lurking here often, since back in August, but haven't had a chance to post, life hit a crazy spell about then. May have had something to do with getting 3 chickens! They were given to us. Right before we got them we read BYC a little which we kept getting from Googling about chickens. We hadn't had the hens long before one got a bumblefoot, and I read BYC like crazy and finally after 1.5 months we successfully got it treated using BYC methods. We also have been spending time with our first grandchild
. I took a trip in October during which I tore one or two meniscus and have been recovering from that! In the meantime we were given a rooster, and but then the hen with the bumblefoot died (we think while laying an egg), another hen was removed from the run probably by a raccoon, (during the daytime even!)
So, we now have 1 rooster & 1 hen, and we think they're Black Australorps. Husband and I both had chickens when we were kids, but that was some decades ago, so we're REALLY new at this! We wanted to increase our flock, but we're on a very tight budget. So, he made a home made incubator, combining ideas from several in the homemade incubators section here. It's in an unused pvc utility sink, forced air, couple of gauges, dimmer switch and me. Yesterday, I was satisfied that I could get stable humidity and temperature, so we put 11 eggs in at 9 PM. Nothing's been stable since!
. Fortunately, I'm mostly a night person, so I'm not really losing sleep over this so far.
In my 'other life' I'm a computer tech including website management and mostly work from home. Hobby part of which is attempting to digitize several thousand family pictures & news articles. DH is a welder and his hobbies aside from this new BYC endeavor are cooking wondrous food for me and also building various yard items to my liking. He's been enlarging the chicken yard and making it safer also. He reads quite a lot, including BYC, but you probabaly couldn't pay him to post anything! We have one daughter that lives with us, she's got a cat, I have a small dog that's 11 years old and my husband has an outdoor cat.
Guess that about sums us up for now
Thanks to all of you for getting this going and keeping it up so's to help all us noobs!
So, we now have 1 rooster & 1 hen, and we think they're Black Australorps. Husband and I both had chickens when we were kids, but that was some decades ago, so we're REALLY new at this! We wanted to increase our flock, but we're on a very tight budget. So, he made a home made incubator, combining ideas from several in the homemade incubators section here. It's in an unused pvc utility sink, forced air, couple of gauges, dimmer switch and me. Yesterday, I was satisfied that I could get stable humidity and temperature, so we put 11 eggs in at 9 PM. Nothing's been stable since!
In my 'other life' I'm a computer tech including website management and mostly work from home. Hobby part of which is attempting to digitize several thousand family pictures & news articles. DH is a welder and his hobbies aside from this new BYC endeavor are cooking wondrous food for me and also building various yard items to my liking. He's been enlarging the chicken yard and making it safer also. He reads quite a lot, including BYC, but you probabaly couldn't pay him to post anything! We have one daughter that lives with us, she's got a cat, I have a small dog that's 11 years old and my husband has an outdoor cat.
Guess that about sums us up for now
Thanks to all of you for getting this going and keeping it up so's to help all us noobs!
