The Aloha Chicken Project

[FLUPHY PHEATHER]

Yellow legs???

Well it looks like you have all the right ingredients in front of you!  The Naked Neck will help lighten up the color, the Sussex adds some spots, and your rooster is handsome with good size.

Right now I'm sitting on a TON of eggs and I'm trying to save some room in the 'bator for a special breeding pen that I set up.  Know anyone driving from Phoenix to Snowflake ASAP?  If you need hatching eggs, now is the time to get them!  I'd be happy to pass on a few dozen if you have an incubator.


Also I have Aloha chicks here now, and more hatching May 7th.  If you can find a ride for them, I would be happy to give you FREE chicks.  Just let me know, you have the perfect mini-flock to add Alohas to.  Any girls from your flock would cross nicely with a spotty Aloha rooster, and your rooster would be lovely with spotty Aloha hens.   

T Y! I do have a small bator (20+- eggs) and some broody bantys lol! My daughter is coming this weekend but I have to take a trip to California til Tues so won't be able to set them yet. I will reach out next time she come up! I will also post some new pics in a few weeks or so! Love this website and this group!

 

[draye]

Look what I found in my 4 weeks old Naked Neck. This one is not from the Aloha eggs I got from Sommer.

The only known mottled carrier in the pedigree that I know of came from

. This I know because he produced a very mottled chick from a mottled hen that I have.

He is the sure if this hen (sorry but I don't have a current pic of her just this one when she was about 17 weeks old)

I'm told her color is Dominant White split to Wheaten. So I guess she could have inherited a mottling gene from daddy is is a carrier if it. She is the mother of the posted chick in question.

This is the mother of the above hen.

She is 1/2 Easter Egger (Dad was a Blue Wheaten Splash EE) and 1/2 Naked Neck (mother was a Columbian Buff NN). I call her color Blue Salmon Buff ( I kind if made it up because I've never seen a picture if that color and no proper name).

Now back to the chick in the pictures first posted. The dad of this chick was a Heritage Black Jersey Giant. So how could this chick be mottled, because in order to get mottled both parents have or be mottled or a carrier of mottled. Is it possible there is mottling in the background of the BJG's?

Anyway when the time comes and all chicks are old enough I'm breeding ( her ) to an Aloha NN to see if it is true mottling.

 

[draye]

Here's two more shots. Same chick.

 

[draye]

HELLO..........................................................,
IS ANYONE OUT THERE?............................
No action in a few days..........................................................................................................................................

 

[HEChicken]

Yeah sorry about that Draye. I've been reading but don't have much to contribute. We've been in a super drought here, getting less than ½" rain in March and not much more in April - usually our two wettest months. What I should have done is to use that time to separate birds into my hoop coop to collect eggs but did I? Oh no. Now I have nothing to work on and last night we had a super cell right over us and got over 4" rain in one night!!! That's too bad because it can't soak in that fast and will mostly run off and then we'll be back in drought conditions. But at least it did fill my rain barrels so I won't have to haul water to the birds for a little while. But it also puts the hoop coop out of commission as the entire area is nothing but mud now and I have to let the birds free-range to find a place they are comfortable. More rain expected this week. I just hope it stays dry for 12-24 hours so the rain we had has a chance to be absorbed and then maybe it will be able to absorb more from the next rainfall.

Today is super windy and cool and with it being so muddy out I'm doing minimal stuff outdoors and instead I'm in making a batch of cream cheese from both my raw cow milk and raw goat milk so I can compare them side-by-side.

 

[draye]

Yeah sorry about that Draye.  I've been reading but don't have much to contribute.  We've been in a super drought here, getting less than ½" rain in March and not much more in April - usually our two wettest months.  What I should have done is to use that time to separate birds into my hoop coop to collect eggs but did I?  Oh no.  Now I have nothing to work on and last night we had a super cell right over us and got over 4" rain in one night!!!  That's too bad because it can't soak in that fast and will mostly run off and then we'll be back in drought conditions.  But at least it did fill my rain barrels so I won't have to haul water to the birds for a little while.  But it also puts the hoop coop out of commission as the entire area is nothing but mud now and I have to let the birds free-range to find a place they are comfortable.  More rain expected this week.  I just hope it stays dry for 12-24 hours so the rain we had has a chance to be absorbed and then maybe it will be able to absorb more from the next rainfall.

Today is super windy and cool and with it being so muddy out I'm doing minimal stuff outdoors and instead I'm in making a batch of cream cheese from both my raw cow milk and raw goat milk so I can compare them side-by-side.

Yumm homemade cream cheese sounds good. I've never done that cause I've never seen a recipe for it. I've made homemade buttermilk and butter though. That was when I was a kid myself. Haven't got a milk cow now though. I would love one but I wouldn't ever fi d time to milk it though.

Lost one of my Aloha NN yesterday, no apparent reason that I could see. The rest are really whiting up though, except the roosters doesn't seem to show as much white as the pullets. There appears to be only 4 maybe 5 out of the Alohas left, there are 12 total in the batch of 14 that I'm raising up now. That seems to be a reasonably good number to me.

I'm sure hoping that little black one is showing mottling really is mottling. That will give me two unrelated crosses for the Aloha's to work with.

Getting ready to put in another 37 eggs for hatching, just as soon as the incubator gets up to temp. Meant to turn it on last night but forgot.

 

[draye]

Still waiting for @alohachickens to way in on the mottling question.

 

[Deerfield Acres]

Well, I can't weigh in on the mottling issue but I do have chicks! Haven't counted them and I'm not sure how many Buff/Aloha or Buff/Speckled Sussex I have but I believe 6 total, so that's something anyway! There is one chick with just a little black on the wing. Interesting.

Cell pic -- sorry, not great.

 

[Deerfield Acres]

Yeah sorry about that Draye. I've been reading but don't have much to contribute. We've been in a super drought here, getting less than ½" rain in March and not much more in April - usually our two wettest months. What I should have done is to use that time to separate birds into my hoop coop to collect eggs but did I? Oh no. Now I have nothing to work on and last night we had a super cell right over us and got over 4" rain in one night!!! That's too bad because it can't soak in that fast and will mostly run off and then we'll be back in drought conditions. But at least it did fill my rain barrels so I won't have to haul water to the birds for a little while. But it also puts the hoop coop out of commission as the entire area is nothing but mud now and I have to let the birds free-range to find a place they are comfortable. More rain expected this week. I just hope it stays dry for 12-24 hours so the rain we had has a chance to be absorbed and then maybe it will be able to absorb more from the next rainfall.

Today is super windy and cool and with it being so muddy out I'm doing minimal stuff outdoors and instead I'm in making a batch of cream cheese from both my raw cow milk and raw goat milk so I can compare them side-by-side.

Our weather is still April-like. Crazy. One year the storms and temps like these didn't end until last part of June. It really didn't stay hot that summer at all so it was great for working outdoors but not great for swimming. That seems hard to imagine after the summer before last with the highs above 110. Kansas weather is like a box of chocolates...

The cream cheese experiment is cool. I've never made cream cheese, but then, I have no goats or cows, either. I'm lucky to have the chickens! Which was better?

 

[HEChicken]

Quote: Ah well....that's easy to answer because the goat milk cream cheese didn't turn out at all. It turns out - see, I'm learning as I go - that goat's milk doesn't buttermilk the way cow's milk does - who knew? I certainly didn't.

I googled how to make cream cheese and the process looked pretty simple. Heat the milk to 90, then add a couple of tablespoons of buttermilk. They went on to say that if you don't have buttermilk on hand, you can make your own by adding ½ tsp white vinegar to 2 tbspn milk. I did the cow's milk batch first and sure enough, the vinegar turned the milk into what looked and smelled like buttermilk so I added it to my half gallon of heated milk and placed it in the jar to "clabber", which takes about 24 hours.

Then I repeated the process with the goat's milk. However when I added the ½ tsp vinegar to the goat's milk, it didn't turn into buttermilk. That should have been my first clue! So I made more buttermilk out of cow's milk and added that to the goat's milk. I put it in a separate jar and waited the 24 hours.

After 24 hours the cow's milk batch was nicely clabbered and I was able to strain it though cheesecloth to wind up with cream cheese. The goat's milk.....still looked like goat's milk. I decided to further experiment by adding a few drops of rennet to the goat's milk batch. It thickened slightly but still not enough to strain. So we have some sort of thickish goat's milk that actually looks a little like buttermilk now and I may use it to make pancakes or may just feed it to animals and call it a failed experiment

Its all a learning process though, right?