The Second Half

Chickens: Great Expectations

My girls have come to expect something tasty from me every time I got outside.  Here they are, having come up to me as soon as I came outside, waiting for me to give them something. 

 

From bottom to top, that's Stephanie, Michelle & Sandy.  I have to admit that I often do bring something out w/me in order to not disappoint them.  Their favorite treat so far is grapes; second favorite is iceberg lettuce.  Boring.  They like most greens, veggies, fruits.  Around noonish, they get yogurt with flaxseed and their own crushed, baked eggshells in it.  When it starts to get dusky, around 3:30 at this time of year, I give them scratch so they have full tummies when they settle into their coop for the evening just a few hours later.

Giving them leftover produce or the bits that we don't use (e.g., carrot peelings), along with putting some of that stuff in my new compost pile (more on that in another post), has really cut down on the amount of garbage we put out.  And I guess that's a good thing.

 

Monday Chicken Blogging: First Eggs!

Here they are!  The first eggs laid by our girls Sandy, Stephanie and Michelle!  Two girls laid eggs their first morning here.  I was wondering if the stress of moving -- they moved in the night before -- would put them off laying.  Now, these particular eggs would have started production the morning of the evening they moved, so I was curious to see how they'd lay starting their second morning here.

 

 

So that's their nest box and those are their roosting bars.  And yes, that's their poo in there.  They are prolific pooers!  It's like their raison d'etre.

 

 
Each hen's eggs look a little different from the rest.  Two girls are laying eggs on the small side and similar in color.  Someone's laying huge eggs.  I have an old (I think) extra large egg carton that I use to store the eggs and I can't close the lid on it bco the big eggs.

Here Ed's checking out the eggs.

 
Omlet, the company that made our Eglu Classic, includes some 4-pack egg cartons so you can share them with others.  We gave some to the neighbors and there are a few other people I'd like to share them with so they can see and taste the yummy goodness themselves.

 
Now that's what I consider their raison d'etre: producing delicious eggs!

Let's have a picture of the girls before we leave bc, w/o them, there wouldn't be any delicious eggs.

 

Monday Chicken Blogging: Meet the Girls

Meet the girls!  We got our chickens about a week ago, three hens named Sandy, Michelle and Stephanie.

Here's a picture of them in their coop/run, the Eglu Classic (in red, of course) from Omlet.  Michelle is on the left, Sandy's on the right and that's Stephanie in the back.

 

A chicken's eye view of their setup:

 
 In the above picture, that's Stephanie up front, Sandy behind her and Michelle in the rear.  Sandy and Michelle look very similar, with Sandy being a little lighter than Michelle.  Stephanie looks a little different from the other two, most notably with a lighter face/head area and a fluffy white butt.

A view of my setup:

 
I like to watch them do their chicken thing.  Of course, I won't be watching them much once the weather gets too cold, but if it's kinda nice out, I sit out occasionally with a cuppa.

Kevin lets them out of the coop into the run area and gives them their mash and fresh water early in the morning.  I check on them a few hours later when I get up and check for eggs.  I give them until about noon to eat their mash, which is supposed to meet the majority of their nutritional needs.  They do pretty well with that by noon or so.  Then I start giving them fruit scraps and some vegetable scraps (only some vegetable scraps bc I want them, too, for my vegetable stock); stuff that's starting to wilt or go bad; treats (they love grapes and most lettuces); plain yogurt; etc.  They chowed down on some lentil soup I made that ended up being way too garlicky.  I only put two garlic cloves in the soup, but they were my FIL's delicious, flavorful garlics which are like Super Garlics so the cloves were practically the size of baseballs and I didn't take that into consideration.  They ate up the soup, though.

I do need to get some oyster shell to offer them to help with good shell development.  I do put their own eggshells aside after I've used the eggs, then bake them to get rid of bacteria.  Every few days I crush them and feed it to the chickens.  I thought that might be sufficient extra calcium, but I think perhaps not.

I think I might also have to get some grit for them.  The chickens keep grit in their gizzards to help process what they eat.

I thought some of these things might be in the mash, but I'm learning that either they aren't or that chickens need more.

About five o'clock or so I give them some scratch.  The chickens' food first sits in its crop for a bit.  A chicken should go to bed with a full crop.  When its crop is full, the chicken will look like it has a lump on her right breast.  She'll look lopsided.  Her crop should look empty/flat when you let her out the next morning.  And then she'll spend the day filling it up again.  So the scratch in the evening is to help ensure that their crop is full when they go into the coop for the night a few hours later.

Sometimes they free range.  We have a small yard, but they certainly seem to make the most of it.  On Halloween afternoon, they were out and about in the yard.  The fence doesn't enclose the driveway so they could make a waddle for freedom that way.  I hung out on the porch waiting for trick or treaters and knitting and reading and whatnot, so I just kept an eye on the drive to make sure the girls weren't leaving the yard.  Seems they like nothing better than just scratching around all day in grass, dirt, flower beds, etc., looking for tasty little morsels to eat.  I suppose soon it will be too cold for them to forage much; and I don't suppose they'll find much to eat during the winter anyway.

It's been a lot of fun having the girls here.  I gave their coop a thorough cleaning on Saturday, when it was beautiful out.  It was interesting even just cleaning their coop.  Don't know that I'll continue to think that in January when it's freezing, but their coop still needs cleaning.

I haven't even talked about the eggs!  The main reason for having laying hens is for their delicious, fresh eggs!  I haven't found that people blog about their chickens on any specific day, like they do with  Friday Cat Blogging, but I figure Monday's as good a day as any to blog about chickens.  I'm sure to discuss the eggs in a future Chicken Blogging post.