Chicken Coop Cleaner

Last summer we had an issue with a few of our hens having mites or lice...I'm really not sure which is was.  All I know is, it grossed us out!!  We did lots of research on how to rid our feathered friends of such a nuisance.  A soapy bath and a vinegar dip was the simplest, most natural way to get rid of 'em.  So we did it...to all of them.  We also cleaned everything out of their sleeping coop and started fresh.  We haven't any issues again, but we are in the cold months so critters are less of a problem.

 I started thinking, what if we helped prevent those nasty bugs from even wanting to be on our hens?  The one place where the hens always go to, every day and night is their eggmobile...it's where they lay eggs and sleep.  SO...we have concocted a spray that we will use every morning on their laying boxes & roosting sticks when we go let them out for the day.  We could probably spray it on the hens as well every now and then!  

 OUR RECIPE

peels from 2 oranges

handful of cinnamon sticks

white vinegar

Citrus oil is a natural bug deterrent...think of citronella candles

Cinnamon oil repels flies and other insects...so interesting the things you learn when you read books on herbs!!

Vinegar is a natural disinfectant, has antibacterial properties, kills mold and is also a bug repellent.

**Be sure to use PLAIN vinegar, not apple cider...the fruit oils in the apple cider vinegar will attract bugs!!!**

DIRECTIONS

Place your orange peels and cinnamon sicks in a quart size *glass* jar.  Pour vinegar to cover peels and sticks.  Cover loosely and let sit for a month or more.

And that's it!  It will sit in our kitchen with our other fermenting goods for a month before it's ready to use.

The happy recipient of 2 oranges for snack time ;)  Yes, I have big brothers if you can't already tell by my camoflauge!

P.S.  I decided to make one for our home as well.  We use vinegar to clean a lot but I never thought to infuse it with a scent.  

This post is linked to Frugal Days Sustainable Ways

The Eggmobile

We put the boys' plans together, purchased a used boat trailor with a makeshift box on it, added a bunch of hardwork and sweat and got a wonderful result!

Here is the trailor as we bought it.  Just a plywood box with shelving inside.  It already has the perfect doors to allow the hens to go in and out of.  

Jason sawed the top off, and we saved that piece of wood to reused for the top of the eggmobile.  We cut the frontend off and fastened a laying coop in its place...pretty smart! (and frugal!!) 

We will have easy access to the eggs as you can see!  Just flip up the piece of tin and there they are!

Nate got busy building the ladder for the hens' access to the eggmoblie.

 Even Gracyn helped! (atleast she thinks she did, and that's what's important!!)

Jason fastened some posts, 2 foot high, to allow air and sunshine in.  Then you can see the original top piece of wood with tin added to make for more protection from the elements.  That's my girl using powertools! (she's going to be a great helpmeet one day :))

 And there you have it!!  We put 5 beams from side to side for the hens to roost on at night, but I didn't capture a picture of that finished.

 Locked, loaded and ready to go! 

 And there you have it friends!  A moveable chicken house for our free ranging hens.  We will hook it up to our future tractor, or 4wheeler, or lawn mower, or...ooh, so many toys to get!! and move it around our property so our hens are never caged in to one area.  Once they are settled in a place to lay eggs and roost at night, they don't stray very far from it so they will automatically go where this thing goes!!  

Farm Activity

We had a barred rock hen go broody about 3 weeks ago...she dilligently sat on 14 eggs.  2 hatched last week, and both died the next day...one from the cold and one was found laying in the middle of the yard when we returned from the library (we think the cat did it!)  So the hen called it quits and left the rest of the eggs!  Megan, Cait and I candled them to find that the remaining 12 were growing as well!  So we put them in the incubator and yesterday we got a surprise!

This cute little one!  We left it in the incubator for over 24 hours...we're pretty sure our last baby chick that incubated a few months ago was killed by us handling it too much, too soon.  So far, so good with this one!  Hopefully the other 11 eggs will hatch as well.  We have lost 7 barred rock hens total so far(that's a loss of 6,300 eggs!!!...they each lay 300+ a year and they lay for 3 years!) So to have them replaced, by nature, without having to buy more, would be a huge blessing!

 Here are our 25 chicks that we recieved in September.  They are almost ready to join our other flock of barred rocks.  We have kept them seperate due to their size difference.  They will start laying eggs in February-March.

And here are our barred rocks that we have had since Easter.  The hens faithfully lay for us every day.  Although their production has slowed down a bit due to the shorter sunshiny days.  

We cleaned out the garden boxes today to ready them to move (next week!!) and they all had a hayday pecking for grubs and such.  Then they all got comfy and took a nap.  

The puppies are a month old today! The kids LOVE to play with them.  They are going to be hard to give up!!

Have a wonderful weekend!!

Chicks have arrived!

THEY'RE HERE!! We received a phone call this morning from the post office informing us a package of rambunctious chicks was waiting for us to come and get them!  How cute are they?

The black with white spots are our barred rock hens for egg laying.  The pale yellow ones are our cornish rock cross for meat...aka, the broiler.  We got 25 of each.

Graycie's just a bit excited!

Starting with today, every THURSDAY for the next 8 weeks we will post a photo of one of these cuties, our cornish rock cross, or broilers.  They are bred to grow extremely fast and we want to document it!  Check back next Thursday to see what this little one looks like in a week!! 

Barred Rock Hens are Laying!

Our 5 month old hens have started laying eggs!!  This is very exciting for us since we butchered our other egg layers and haven't been getting any eggs at all.  Well, except for the 2 from our bantam rumpless, but those are Ellie's eggs :)  

Our barred rocks are 5 months old now, and as you can see, look full grown. 

 What a good rooster, finding bugs for his lady!

It has been a great experience caring for these chickens from birth.  Watching their quick growth has been exciting too.  Next week, our backyard chicken gang will triple in size!....we will be recieving 50 day old chicks from a hatchery.  25 more barred rock hens for egg laying and 25 cornish cross to raise for meat.   Can't wait to share our experience with butchering 25 chickens on one day!!  

Baby Chick

What an exciting event...to watch new life be born!  No one can deny it is a miracle!  We have been incubating 6 eggs and we happen to peek in on them when one was pecking its way out of the shell!!  So of course we took the wee one out of the incubator to watch!

It took him over 24 hours to fully come out of the shell.  We put him back in the incubator overnight and when we checked in the morning, he was fully out of his shell.  The kids made a little home for him with a heat lamp, water and chick feed, but sadly...he only lived for 2 hours (sniff, sniff).  It was probably our fault...we handled him way too much.  We didn't help break the shell, but we were moving him in and out of the incubator.  We have learned, not to even touch a baby chick that is hatching until it has been out of the shell for atleast 48 hours.  Hopefully, another egg that is incubating will hatch.

*UPDATE*  No other baby chicks hatched :(  2 were completely rotten (yuck!) and the other 2 had stopped growing for some reason.  Maybe they were left in the cold for too long when we were still allowing the broody hen to sit on them. Oh well...we shall try again next spring/summer!

Out with the old & in with the new

Well, most of our original first batch of hens that we purchased last September have stopped laying eggs...they were mature hens, already had been laying for over a year.  We were just so excited to get into farming that instead of starting from scratch with chicks we bought those ones already laying....we have only been getting 4-5 eggs a day from over a dozen hens.  SO...we had a butchering day!!  Some have been roasted with potatoes, carrots and onions, and others have not and were just laid to rest.  Now we just have the barred rock beauties.  So we took a "farm day" from school and we completely cleaned out the coop where the other hens had been living and freshened it up for the barred rocks. 

The barred rocks are now mature enough that we can tell which is a hen and which is a rooster.  We bought them from a local chicken farmer hoping for all hens....well, that's not quite what we got.  We have 10 hens and 10 roosters!  All we hear is crowing all day!!  So 8 roosters are for sale, and if they don't get sold they will be our dinner.  We went ahead and ordered 25 more barred rock hens from a hatchery (to be sure we get hens this time!) along with 25 cornish cross chicks.  Cornish cross are the birds bred for meat...they are what you purchase in the store.  Quick growth and lots of meat!!  We are excited to get them...all 50 chicks will be here the first day of Fall, September 22!  This weekend we are building another tractor so we have one for the barred rock chicks and one for the cornish cross....hope you all have a relaxing Labor Day weekend! 

Broody Hen

Happy 1st day of Summer everyone!!  Today we had the most pleasant surprise...we have a laying hen that decided a few weeks ago to go broody.  We separated her from the others so she wouldn't be bothered.  Plus, we wanted to keep us (Gracyn really) from grabbing the incubating eggs during our daily egg run...we learned the hard way actually when momma cracked an egg on the frying pan for breakfast one morning and found a baby growing :(

Well this afternoon as we were doing our watering rounds for all the animals Ben spotted a fluffy little chick peeping out from under the hen!!

Isn't it cute??!!  This just makes me so happy that my kids get to experience this!! There are 4 more eggs so we will be sure to post about them if they hatch as well.  What an exciting first day to summer!!  Hope everyone else had a blessed day!

Fish & Chicken Fry!

Our neighbor, Mr. Mike, gave us a cooler full of fish today!  It was time for Ben and Christian to learn how to fillet some fish!  Thanks to Grampa, momma knows how to do it so she took the afternoon to teach the boys...they did great!  Thanks to their hard work, we all enjoyed a nice fish fry for dinner!

We decided to throw in a chicken for dinner as well...our butchering turned into quite the science experiment...CAUTION...this next picture might disturb some of you, but we thought it was really cool!! The chicken was actually one of our egg layers, and when we opened her up to clean her out we found the egg factory!!  It was an entire tube system, just like the intestines, but with egg yolks growing!  The one on the left was complete except the shell was soft.  We learned a lot today!

Barred Rock Chicks

A few weeks ago for our 15th wedding anniversary Jason got me 20 of these cute chicks!  We have learned about the different breeds of chickens...had no idea there were so many!  Well anyway, these are my favorite.  They are barred rocks. They are called that for their black and white stripes in thier feathers that have the appearance of prison bars!  They are big and beautiful and they are prolific layers of brown eggs...300+ a year, per chicken!!

In just 3 short weeks they have complete changed their appearance.  They went from little balls of fluff that didn't do much but sit and eat to these active, loud cute birds with feathers.  We had been keeping them in another section of the barn in an enclosed tractor for safety reasons and today was their first day on pasture!!  They were so excited to be pecking in green grass!  It was really neat to watch them instinctly know what to do!  They started searching for bugs right away, chewing grass, scratching, and even already fighting each other to figure out who is going to be the top bird!  We are having an incredible time enjoying God's creatures every day!  

Ellison is now 6 months old!!  She is crawling/scooting all over!  She has so much fun playing with the chicks, and she just loves her new swing under the pecan tree :)

Free Rangin'

On our farm we allow our chickens to roam free.  When they are given the chance to peck at bugs and grass anywhere they get more variety in their diet, plus the needed exercise.  This in turn creates more nutritional eggs for us!  We did an experiment a few weeks ago that we will have to do again to show you the difference in a store bought, factory produced egg and one of our free roaming eggs...there is a BIG difference in the yolk color and in the taste.  We will post pictures when we do it.  Back to the reason for this post....

Today we found eggs in the hammick!!  When you gotta lay, you've gotta lay I guess!!  No time to make it to the coop.  And the reason for so many in one spot?  Well, what we've learned by watching is once one hen lays in a particular spot, the rest follow.  It's kind of funny....we have 10 laying boxes for our 26 hens yet they all lay in one box!!  And now the hammick as well!

On a sad note, there is a down side to allowing the hens to free range....we have lost 2 to predators :(  They do have a coop for safety where they roost at night, but sometimes the door is left open(we're working on that new responsibility), or they don't all make it in before the door gets closed.  They may choose a tree branch to roost on instead (we don't always do a head count, we just assume they're all in).  We lost our rare double tufted bantam araucana and one of momma's favorites...a buff orpington, three nights ago.  We are now more careful about making sure all the hens are in the coop before the door is shut!