Michigan

[fuzzybutt love]

Why is it that if we have the hobby of 'chickens' that people think we have lost our minds? Do people think dog lovers have lost their minds? What is wrong with people?

Negative! They got negative! WOOT! WOOT!

Thank you all so much for your prayers and support! Thank you God!

Oh, thank God!!!!!!!!

I know you detailed all this when you did it, but can you go over EXACTLY what you did??? There are several egg dipping methods, and i will probably be trying this in the future. Also how long you gave the adults the meds before saving eggs? Did the other person you got info from on the meds say whether it would eventually clear an adult bird, if you treated long enough??? I know they work by keeping the bacteria from multiplying, but i don't know if that applies to the bacteria in the damaged lung tissue as well..... Soooo excited for you!!!!!!!

 

[Olive Hill]

EMAW - Whereabouts in MI? If lower half of the LP then you'll have time for a full fall garden -- lettuce, spinach, kale, swiss chard, peas, radishes, beets, etc. If you get right to it when you get back in mid-July, I'd also give bush beans, zucchini and summer squash a shot. And then later in the year you can get your garlic in the ground for next year. As for the jealousy, we're even because I'd kill for some venison goulash and a good german beer. On my life list is to make it to Germany, where my family is from, and have a beer there. Someday...

 

[EMAW]

EMAW - Whereabouts in MI? If lower half of the LP then you'll have time for a full fall garden -- lettuce, spinach, kale, swiss chard, peas, radishes, beets, etc. If you get right to it when you get back in mid-July, I'd also give bush beans, zucchini and summer squash a shot. And then later in the year you can get your garlic in the ground for next year. As for the jealousy, we're even because I'd kill for some venison goulash and a good german beer. On my life list is to make it to Germany, where my family is from, and have a beer there. Someday...

Olive,

I will be in the SW portion of the state, KZoo/Battle Creek give or take 20 miles. We have a huge area we are looking at, my only requirement is I am within 45 min of the ANG base in BC. I thought the root crops would be good, but I wasn't sure about the the rest. So your telling me I still have hope for homegrown vegetables over the winter.

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Give me the fall/winter there, and I might be able to cook up some venison goulash for the chickenstock in 13', I have just have to buy enough land to hunt on or find someone who will let me take a deer for meat. While horns are nice on the wall they don't feed the family. I have a pretty good goulash recipe from my local German forester's wife, I might even be able to muster up some real German beer. That one will take a little work, but I am willing to sacrifice and try....

I saw you raise pigs, do you sell them in the fall for meat? I would be interested in 1/2 a hog if you sell it that way.

EMAW

 

[Olive Hill]

Olive,

I will be in the SW portion of the state, KZoo/Battle Creek give or take 20 miles. We have a huge area we are looking at, my only requirement is I am within 45 min of the ANG base in BC. I thought the root crops would be good, but I wasn't sure about the the rest. So your telling me I still have hope for homegrown vegetables over the winter.

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Give me the fall/winter there, and I might be able to cook up some venison goulash for the chickenstock in 13', I have just have to buy enough land to hunt on or find someone who will let me take a deer for meat. While horns are nice on the wall they don't feed the family. I have a pretty good goulash recipe from my local German forester's wife, I might even be able to muster up some real German beer. That one will take a little work, but I am willing to sacrifice and try....

I saw you raise pigs, do you sell them in the fall for meat? I would be interested in 1/2 a hog if you sell it that way.

EMAW

Oh yeah! Down here you'll have plenty of time.

We usually have venison in the freezer, but the past two years have been a combination of too danged busy and not great hunting years and all we've got is beef right now. I can't wait until November.

We do sell pork. I'll shoot you a PM with details.

 

[Juise]

Quote:

Eventually I want to drag everything out and reorganize it so that maybe, just maybe, we could fit a car in there.

I spent all day one day last week doing this, and then I had to put it all back, and I still can't get a car in there.

But, the floor is swept and the things are more organized, there is more floor space, so it is actually possible to move things around to get to other things. On one half of the garage, anyway, I didn't get to the other half. In our case, we bought this house from my mother-in-law, and most of what is in the garage is her junk, with my brother-in-law's junk a close runner up, and he lives in North Carolina. Over the past 5 years I have gradually eliminated most of their stuff from the house, and even the barn, but the garage is another story. It is so frustrating!

Please leas what you feels is free.

You've got a little bit of Nova Syndrome going on there, Opa.

It's looking very nice, Eeyore!

vjwilmoth & Brethren -

So sorry for your losses.

Negative! They got negative! WOOT! WOOT!

Huzzah!!

Woah... Double rainbow all the way across the sky. It's so intense.

You had a daycare! You are a better person than I am. I don't enjoy other peoples kids...

Well... there is a reason we stopped doing daycare.

Boy, then we really did have to have the house spotless all the time, or at least at pick-up and drop-off times. DH and I are not "spotless house" type people, but having 2 adults around does make it a lot easier, even when you factor in 12 kids. (Yes, I did just say that it was easier to keep my house clean while taking care of 12 kids than it is with 2. And it's true.) We made a lot more money then than we do now, and we went from being comfortable and being able to save up, and buy "extras" when we wanted to, to barely scarping by. Every once in a while we think about doing daycare again to be done with the financial strife, but then we decide it wasn't worth it.

Hahahaha exactly! You fancy, uptown people with your twice a week cleanings!

My DD 6th grade class hatched out 5 of 6 of our EE eggs.

What fun for them!

Opa - Nice chart, thanks. Now you just go ahead and let me know when you start your planting, and I will take it as my cue to start hardening off.

After all the garden talk, I decided to snap some pictures for you out in ours this morning. We're harvesting radishes, lettuce and green onions.

Olive, I hate you just a little bit right now. Beautiful photos, and beautiful crops.

 

[EeyoreD]

EeyoreD,
I like the hoop house,nice job. I have something very similar drawn up on google sketch. If you don't mind I would love to talk to you about your lesson's learned in the build process later.

Thanks all for the props on my hoop house! EMAW, sure we can chat about it. One little tip I can give you right now is not to hold the board with your hand directly behind the drill when creating pilot holes. Oops.

Olive, gorgeous pics and crops! Now I know why you wanted to get rid of the geese when you did.

 

[RaZ]

Yea, the bees are home. Two 5-frame nucs with laying queens. Now I have to get busy and construct the hive bodies.

I'll be curious to see what the chickens do when the bees are flying back and forth.

 

[Farmerboy16]

Thanks everyone!

Oh, thank God!!!!!!!!  e      I know you detailed all this when you did it, but can you go over EXACTLY what you did??? There are several egg dipping methods, and i will probably be trying this in the future.  Also how long you gave the adults the meds before saving eggs?  Did the other person you got info from on the meds say whether it would eventually clear an adult bird, if you treated long enough???  I know they work by keeping the bacteria from multiplying, but i don't know if that applies to the bacteria in the damaged lung tissue as well..... Soooo excited for you!!!!!!! 

I will repost it here-

Treat the flock with Denagard, and when the birds get better and the shed level is down, then take the eggs, and dip them in Tylan solution.

Denagard dosages:

Treatment: 16 cc/ml per gallon Give for a full week.


For dipping eggs treatment-

(This was taken from Canada Forum, so things are different in Measurements and temps) I followed everything to the letter...

Quote-

For my eggs, I placed them in an incubator for 3 hours at 37 degrees. In order to prevent contaminating my hatching incubator with anything that might be on the outside of the untreated eggs I used a second incubator for the initial heating stage. One could probably make a basic heating box with a light bulb/cooler for this if you don't have an extra incubator to dedicate to this procedure. My hatching incubator was disinfected with virkon and set up/prewarmed as you would for normal hatching.

When the 3 hour incubation was almost complete I prepared my Tylan solution. The literature tested between 400 to 1000 ppm concentration - I chose to do 500ppm as I did not see much of a difference in the results from the papers with the increased amount of tylan. This works out to be 500mg of tylan soluble powder per 1 litre of tap water. The tylan solution must be at 5 degrees for the process to work (the antibiotic then travels through the larger pores of the shell and into the egg, aided by the temperature difference between the prewarmed egg and the cold tylan solution). You must add the water to the tylan powder and not the other way around, or the tylan powder will be very difficult to dissolve. I also refrigerated my water prior to mixing and had several trays of ice on hand.

When you are ready, you take the eggs from the 37 degree incubator then put directly into the 5 degree tylan solution. If I saw any dirt/feces on the outside of the eggs, I quickly rinsed the soiled portion under luke warm water prior to putting into the antibiotic solution. The eggs soak in this solution for 30 minutes. I mixed very gently, often using my hands. I also wore latex gloves when handling the eggs and tylan solution.

Once you start adding the warm eggs, the tylan solution increases temperature quite quickly. For my eggs (47 total) I used 2 litres of cold water, 1 litre of crushed ice and 1.5 g of tylan soluble powder. In the future, I would probably also put the egg soaking container in another vessel packed with ice to try to keep the temperature at 5 degrees. Note, that if you add more ice directly to the solution, you also need to add more tylan to keep the concentration in the target range of 400-1000ppm.

After the 30 minutes in the tylan solution, I gently dabbed off excess liquid and placed the cleaned eggs in my hatching incubator as you would normally.

Hopefully I will have a good hatch of myco free chicks in 21 days! Guelph offers blood testing for myco at a very reasonable rate (about $3.00 per sample) so I plan on monitoring my flock in the future for myco. I will basically be maintaining a closed flock from now on, only restocking by way of hatching eggs, and if I do have a bird go off site to a show or something it will either be sold at the show, or return to "freezer camp" and not the general population.
Quote.

 

[ladyfeather]

Wow, Farmerboy. Congrats on that! I am not looking forward to testing and waiting on it myself.

Does anyone know if I let my ducks out of their house each day they won't disappear into my yard? I was thinking of leaving their house open on one side (more like a shelter than a sealed house) and using a secured, smaller run for them to relax in as they want. After I get all the humans settled, let them out into the yard and near a pond? Will they freak out? Should I make a larger fenced area?

We're making a pretty temporary Summer coop for the chickens right now with a lot of hardware cloth at the top of the wall. We are nearly finished, we just have to get it raised up off the ground a bit, secure the lattice, and nail it all together.

 

[Opa]

Hello Everyone,

Would someone mind taking a look at this for me? I would really appreciate it.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/662988/any-what-breed-this-bantam-is

I took a look at it and I'd be willing to bet that it is a golden seabright. Beautiful little birds. The roosters weigh about 22 ounces, hen about 4 ounces less. They are true bantams since there is no large fowl counterpart.