Our introduction to keeping chickens, the high's, the lows and pics of our journey.

[vehve]

Ok, here's the 6 minute egg. Room temperature 59g egg, set in boiling water for 6 minutes, rinsed with cold water for 10-15 seconds.

And no, we don't have children, yes we are adults, and yes, those are the plates we eat breakfast off.

The breeder we picked up our new girls from used some sort of garden permethrin-spray, didn't seem to bother the girls and had a nice lemony smell.

 

[Fancychooklady]

Ok, here's the 6 minute egg. Room temperature 59g egg, set in boiling water for 6 minutes, rinsed with cold water for 10-15 seconds. And no, we don't have children, yes we are adults, and yes, those are the plates we eat breakfast off. The breeder we picked up our new girls from used some sort of garden permethrin-spray, didn't seem to bother the girls and had a nice lemony smell.

Where are the soldiers?

 

[vehve]

Where are the soldiers?

I'm trying to cut down on carbs a bit, was feeling a bit fat around Christmas so I decided to drop a few kilos, so not that much bread being consumed right now. Back to 85 from 92 and I can tell you, building a coop is great muscle training.

 

[cwrite]

That is a beautiful box to receive your eggs in! Perhaps the thing to do is target postal workers & get them interested in keeping chickens.

It's easy to tell that my hubby isn't into chickens yet. I told him that I bought the pullets a golf ball today & he asked me if I bought them a set of clubs as well. Lol. It's early days yet.

 

[vehve]

We received a couple of parcels with eggs when we started trying to incubate. Seemed to me, the one that survived its travels the best was the one marked "LIVE EMBRYOS".

So maybe try to make the packaging look like a medical shipment, one of those styrofoam boxes might work.

When the better half went to pick up one package from the post-office, the guy kept tossing it around in his hands while carrying it from the shelves. She said her face went like this

Next time we need to add to our flock I'm going to try hatch out some store bought organic eggs. Would be interesting to get one to actually hatch, we tried the incubator out with four of those first, but the last ones gave up on day 20. Might have been a bit too old eggs, next time I try I'll check that they're as fresh as possible. People usually get about a 20% hatch-rate with them, I'm guessing this could be improved with getting the eggs immediately when the store gets them.

 

[vehve]

Holy crap! I educated myself a bit in Finnish egg production again, it seems whenever I buy eggs I'm going to have to start looking for a new product. Starting last year, we now have a new standard available, it's called "Outside chicken eggs", basically what free-range is in other parts. You can keep 9 chickens per square meter (a bit tight versus 6 for organic), but the chickens have to have the option to go outside daily round the year. They need to have 4sqm per hen of outside space, versus 2 for organic eggs which only need to be let out daily from June to October. Also, with outside chickens you don't have to feed organic (I personally don't see the point in having organic eggs which are fed organic soy shipped from Argentina, seems stupid to have to bring the food from the other side of the planet). And the outside chicken eggs are even about 20-30% cheaper than the organic ones. The farms that produce these eggs keep roosters with the flock, although they are not obligated to do this.

The biggest misleading factor in marketing is that a huge amount of eggs sold here are labelled as "Free Chicken Eggs", which basically means that they are free to roam a huge industrial building in flocks of thousands, as long as they have 1 sqm per 9 hens. But nice packaging with a picture of a little coop and the text "Eggs from a Free Chicken" makes consumers feel good.

While we don't have traditional battery hens anymore, keeping hens in "Activity cages" is still allowed, which is only a minor improvement to how it's been done before. On a positive note though, a lot of organically produced eggs are being sold as "Free chicken eggs" as well, since demand doesn't always meet supply.

But until we start getting our own, I'm going to have to start buying the real free range eggs. So far there's one place in Finland that produces them (Or actually two farms, but they are located next to each other). Luckily they have managed to create a nationwide supply chain with the biggest chain of supermarkets in the country.

Now I'm starting to sound like a PETA-activist, so I have to mention that I do believe in eating animals, I do hunt, and I do love the fabled bacon animal.

 

[Wrightsx4]

So then plan, is to rest them until tonight, set Sal up in the rooster box and some fresh hay after dark. If she stays there we will and slip them under her late in the night. Then it's a watch and wait game.

Great news that so many of your eggs arrived safe! I bet Sal will be a fabulous mom
Tomorrow we're sending the last three roosters from the "bachelor pad coop" to freezer camp. Then I can give the coop a final clean out and move the 10 near-six-week-olds into it. There's a single nest box in there where I plan to move Fancy to (my broody! Lol @fancychooklady)
I may give her a couple real eggs tonight/today to match Ben since I have no concerns about moving her with them once the coop is ready. She's so committed to her little plaster eggs.

Haha...soldiers...I had never heard that either.

 

[vehve]

Ben, remember the webcam!

 

[Bens-Hens]

COOL, that's great Pam. Our very own mini broody hatch a long!

Sal is on her eggs, all nine of them. Alicia is nervous, "how is she going to keep them all warm and all turned?" "Nature baby, it's wonderful!" Still sounds me out how after never seeing a broody, she knows what to do, line it's encoded into her primal brain.

I cleaned out the rooster box, but it had ants in the base so I had to clean it out and it was not ready for Sal, so she is still on her favourite nest, can move her another night, maybe in a week when we candle for clears.

Fancy, I inly have A bit of DE (which I am not a regular user of) but would that be suitable as a once off dusting of Sal? We have never had lice or mites in our flock so I have not stocked up on anti live stuff.

Felix, your free eggs sound like our Barn laid. No cages but still a heap of birds in an inside space.

 

[vehve]

Felix, your free eggs sound like our Barn laid. No cages but still a heap of birds in an inside space.

No no, Ben, they are eggs from Free Chickens! That's only a marketing term though, the official term is floor-raised chickens. But that doesn't have the same ring to it, now does it?

For the ants, try aspartame, if you can find some sort of artificially sweetened juice mix that should work. Goes by the name of "Fun light" here, but I doubt you have the same product there. Or then you can use those Hermesetas coffee sweeteners as a strong water solution.

The instincts of an animal are amazing, I can't believe that just 11 weeks ago we hatched out those first chickens of ours, and they learned by themselves to roost and eat sand and everything, never having seen any other chickens do it. But their ability to learn by example is quite fascinating too. At about 1 week we introduced a nipple waterer to them, and after me tapping on it a few times they instantly caught on. What I can't understand is that the ducks in the video learned to drink milk from the cat. At no point in the evolution of birds have they done that, of course it had kittens that showed an example, but still. Weird stuff. Another interesting thing is a comparison of fetuses from different animals at an early development stage. It really is difficult to tell a few week old fetuses apart.