New articles
Chicken Hawk the Homestead hen learning to stand on a skateboard with positive reinforcement training, her rewards in the background. Photo: HomesteaderWife
We live in an age today where information is shared all over, and has been made more accessible than it was even ten years ago. The...
These are a few thing I do for our hot south Louisiana summers, to keep my girls comfortable:
I live on 7 acres backed up to 100 acres of woods, and my property has horrible drainage - so free ranging all day everyday isn't an option unfortunately. They only get that in the afternoons when I am...
This is my first actual coop. I built this myself. (My husband helped with the run).
I am currently about to expand to a walk in coop- you live and you learn, right? I did NOT think the cleaning part through with this design, and it KILLS my back when I clean it out.
Also going to expand my...
If you’re a backyard chicken keeper, you know how quickly the months fly by. One minute you’re raising spring chicks, and the next you’re sweltering in summer heat, wondering where the year went. Mid-year is the perfect time to pause, roll up your sleeves, and give your flock a health and...
Introduction
When keeping poultry, this is a sad but unavoidable topic. If you keep birds, you are bound to run into this, unfortunately. Especially if this is your first time, or if you’ve dealt with it before, you may be overwhelmed, so this is a guide through the whole process. If you are...
Perhaps nothing is more mythic, feared, or misunderstood amongst novice incubators than the dreaded 'blood ring,' but what is it, really? The internet has all sorts of ideas: overgrowth of bacteria, decaying blood vessels clumping together, the most obvious and common sign of embryonic...
Inroduction
I have been on BYC for a year and I absolutely love it and spend way too much time on it! I have found some very helpful tips, tools, and tricks, so I thoughts I would put them here! Since I’m sure I will end up adding to it, I will dedicate a whole page to each topic. This article...
This article relates the story of the hens' encounter with Marek's disease and it shares an apparently successful approach to quarantine. The time between exposure to Marek's and breaking quarantine was two months. If your flock is going through Marek's, maybe this article will help you work out...
I named this article after the motto that emerged for this coop, the thing we said to each other every time we worked on it: "It's just a chicken coop!". Both hubby and I can be a little perfectionist, and we often found ourselves waffling about what would be the *best* thing to do. At those...
Chicks change a lot as they grow, so it often makes it hard to remember who was who once they are older and I'm often looking for new ways to keep track. In this article, I'll have in Spoilers pictures of each chick's full-body profile, back, feet, and head. Those are all ways of identifying...
Introduction
Well, it happened again. You got a rooster from your straight-run batch of chicks. Maybe you have an aggressive rooster*. Possibly you have too many birds from a breeding project or taking on too much at once. Your town may not allow roosters*. Or maybe you want to remove older...
Disclaimer
This article’s sole purpose is to show off my coop and chickens, and give a few details. It is not a guide or a plan to build the coop.
Coop
After years of begging my dad to build my chickens a new coop it was finally finished last November. He started the coop by leveling the...
I currently have 2 coops (1 for ducks and 1 for chickens), however I don't really have any pictures of the process of making my chicken coop, so here's a really poor explanation of how I made my duck coop 🙂
DISCLAIMER: there will be missing steps as I did not originally intend to fully document...
