The Old Folks Home

[perchie.girl]

Time for my Friday evening tipple. I infused some gluten-free vodka with a whole ghost pepper from my garden a couple weeks ago. It definitely has a bite to it in this bloody mary. Tomorrow is also freezer camp send off day. Which always makes me sad, but the ruckus is just too much now, especially in my urban area.

Mee tooo... any one have the pliers...

deb

 

[ChickenCanoe]

A large amount of water goes into lakes here. We have a lot of State and Federal Gov. requirement for water flow and wetlands use though.

Lake Mendocino is part of the Russian River Storage system. It is still at historic lows but It will be going up quickly now.

We have a new Bond measure to build more water storage and a tunnel to move water down south. The new dams will not be able to store that much more water though.

Money should be spend fixing 100 year old pipes in the big citeis though. Los Angeles loses as much water each year to "shrinkage"(broken pipes and leaks) as it uses. San Francisco had a huge sink hole last week from a broke pipe..near the site of a sink hole for the same reason last year.

Infrastructure spending, what a novel idea. Will it ever happen?

 

[Peep_Show]

It might literally be a pipe dream. CA is horrendously overextended in all areas involving money. We moved away from CA due to many things, one of them being the prediction that to fix the infrastructures the taxation rate was going to be horrendous and, two, I had absolutely no faith in the administration of anything in the state having seen how well the court system got botched (from an employee's level).

 

[Bunnylady]

Isn't Wisher so thoughtful? She gave me a hat!

Thanks, Wisher!

 

[Amberjem]

 

[chickadoodles]

Looks good on you Bunnylady. Nice job Wisher.

 

[perchie.girl]

Isn't Wisher so thoughtful? She gave me a hat!

Thanks, Wisher!

Awww.... Now I need to get my own xmas spirit going

 

[Latestarter]

rant time -

Grrrrrrr... Not sure which one, but at least one and possibly as many as three of my buff orps think they are sea turtles... they INSIST on burying their eggs in the coop litter instead of using the nest boxes I so graciously provided them. Could it be because I'm using deep litter and it's "warmer" than the straw in the nest boxes? I'm almost afraid of what's going to happen once the runs are finished and they can go outside and up under the coop... I am NOT looking forward to trying to retrieve eggs from under there as it's 6 feet wide by 10 feet deep and has buried hardware cloth around the 3 sides not open to the run...

It seems they also like to eat the straw from the nest boxes... when I check them in the evenings they have full/hard crops and the straw from the nest boxes slowly gets "chewed up" and disappears... It seems my white wyandottes like to eat the nest box straw as well. They all chow down in the am when I bring them their FF, eat all of it over the course of the day and none of them seem ill or worse off from their dietary supplement, but it concerns me a bit.

Any ideas how to get the girls to use the nest boxes (more regularly)? Thoughts/comments on potential dietary issues that might be causing the silly things to be eating the straw? OK, nuff about chickens, back to the normal ebb and flow in TOFH

 

[perchie.girl]

It might literally be a pipe dream. CA is horrendously overextended in all areas involving money. We moved away from CA due to many things, one of them being the prediction that to fix the infrastructures the taxation rate was going to be horrendous and, two, I had absolutely no faith in the administration of anything in the state having seen how well the court system got botched (from an employee's level).

They say that by simply covering the canals we can save a boat load of water.... There is new technology out there to replace water lines without having to dig.... Its really really wierd.

They replaced a cracked water main in Santee here by using a pipe burster..... First they re routed the water with a shallow trench through intesections and a water main on top of the ground It was about twelve inches in diameter....

Then through they holes they dug to access the water source they ran a cable by pushing it through with air compression.... On the other end they hooked a machine that pulled the new pipe through between the pipe and the cable was the bursting tool... Smaller than the original pipe on one end and larger than the new pipe on the other end. Its dragged through the old pipe using oscillatiing pressure... they burst pipe at the rate of about twenty or thirty feet a day..... YOu could watch the new pipe go inches at a time....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_bursting

The new pipe was some sort of heavy walled plastic at least an inch or so thick.... and when they came to the end of it they just used a machine to weld on more pipe...

But yeh the infrastructure is failing here too. Sales Taxes here in some areas of San Diego County are up to ten percent.

deb

 

[ChickenCanoe]

All but one of my coops are up off the ground and I was concerned about crawl space eggs but I think in the last 6 years I've only had 3 eggs under them.
A long handled rake brought them out. If it becomes a problem, you could cut out a section of the hardware cloth and replace it with a wooden door you can latch.

Is it straw or hay in the nests? Eating hay would make sense, eating straw not so much.

Sounds like they're wanting something else in their diet. Try sprouting some wheat, barley or BOSS or even let it grow into fodder.






From time to time I get eggs in the bedding. One thing I would recommend is to get more light into the coop so the nests are the only dark spaces. Perhaps bigger windows especially to the east. Fake eggs in each nest help too.
I use these. http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-PACK-BROWN-CERAMIC-DUMMY-CHICKEN-NESTING-EGG-HATCHING-CRAFT-/160977344304
Try some of these techniques.
http://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/1133/encouraging-hens-to-lay-in-nests