Picking up chicks

I had an early phone call from the post office this morning. It was one I was expecting.
The chicks I ordered from an in-state hatchery were there waiting to be picked up!

 The brooder was all set up and ready to go last night, all I had to do was get the box of peeping chicks home.

This hatchery sells the standard Cornish Cross(CX) broilers but also has the newer Freedom Ranger(FR) chicks. We ordered 25 of the CX and decided to try out 5 of the FR too. The FR's are the reddish-brown chicks above. They will be a slower growing bird that isn't supposed to have the possible leg problems the fast growing CX are known for. All the chicks made it through the mail and they even sent one extra CX as well.

After a quick dip of their beaks in water they were off and running in their new brooder. Their home for the next 3 weeks or so. For the first 4 hours I'm giving them water with electrolytes and vitamins only, to make sure they are well hydrated. After that I'll add in the crumbled chick feed to start filling up their little bellies.

It's hard to believe how fast these little chicks will grow. In 8 weeks they will be ready to send off to the butcher and will come home all nicely packaged and ready for the freezer. Giving us many Sundays of wonderful roasted chicken dinners!

And the total is...

... ten chicks!

I turned off the incubator today and put it away. There were a total of 11 chicks that hatched, 7 Swedish Flower Hens and 4 Wheaten Marans. One of the Marans didn't make it. Another one had pipped and half un-zipped but then stopped. After giving it a long time we decided to "help" it out. Yes... I know you aren't supposed to help them out of the shell, but it would have died otherwise. It very well may die yet, it's hard to say. It's not as strong as the other chicks but doing alright. It was shrink wrapped within the egg's membrane and just couldn't move around enough to work himself out of the egg. Only time will tell.

I don't have great pictures of all the chicks yet, just ones I took quickly on my cell phone. I'll take better ones soon. If you're a facebook friend you may have already seen these.

First the Swedish Flower Hens

And now the Wheaten Marans, only two pictures as they all look the same anyway!

Notice the feathered feet on them.

We also took a drive to pick up a few started chicks this weekend. I'll post more on those soon.

For now here's a picture of Emily with the Buff Laced Polish she picked out!

Fuzzy butts and peeps!

They have started hatching!!

So far we have 6 total, 3 each of the Swedish Flower Hen and Wheaten Marans.

Here's a picture of one of the Marans eggs un-zipping.

Some of them make quick work of it, others take awhile. It's lots of work to get yourself out of an egg you've called home for 21 days!

Once they make it out they aren't the cute fluff balls you'd expect quite yet. They take some time to dry off and pouf up. Looks like a bad hair day!

The new incubator doesn't have a lot of room for the chicks once they hatch so we have been scooping them out quickly and moving them to the old incubator that I have set up just to keep them warm and dry off. Otherwise they keep moving around on top of all the other eggs knocking them around.

Here they are warm and drying off.

The light colored chick front and center is a Wheaten Marans. If you look closely you can see it has feathered legs! The strip of wet sponge is in there to help keep the humidity high. I'll move them out to the brooder later today. The heat lamp is all set up and their water and feed is ready to go!

I can hear another one peeping in the incubator now!! Time to go check again.

Don't count your chickens before....

...they hatch!

Well I'm not counting them yet, but I do have a few eggs wiggling and a little chirping going on!

My wait for some Swedish Flower Hen(SFH) chicks is about to come to an end. I ended up bidding on and winning an eBay auction for 20 eggs from a person in Pennsylvania. It wasn't great planning on my part as they were shipped over the 4th of July holiday week so they sat for a day somewhere in the postal system. Add to that the extremely hot and steamy temps we had that week and it made for less than ideal shipping conditions for fertile hatching eggs! They were package very well, none were broken or cracked on arrival. In addition to the 20 SFH eggs I also bought 10 Wheaten Marans eggs from the same person. Those too were in great shape when I unpacked them.

The eggs arrived on Friday July 6th. With how hot that week was I decided to set the eggs in the incubator right away instead of letting the air cells settle for 24 hours, in case they had started to develop during shipping. I just waited 24 hours before starting the auto-turner instead. This is my first time using our new R-com King Suro incubator. It's all digital, has a turning cradle and automatic humidity pump. So far it's been keeping the temp and humidity levels perfectly!

I candled the eggs on day 17 before they went into "lockdown". It looks like 10 SFH eggs will potentially hatch along with 6 Wheaten Marans. I'm not sure if I will keep the Marans chicks or not at this point. I was disappointed in the color of the eggs. I know Marans eggs have a range of colors but I expected them to be as dark or darker than my Penedesenca eggs. So I may put those chicks up for sale.

You can see a couple of the Marans eggs in the right corner in this picture.

In other news, we acquired another chicken coop! There was a 4' x 4' coop on Craigslist that we went to look at. I had been thinking about having a smaller coop that size built, possibly for some Silkies.  I'm not sure if we will get into Silkies or not, but it will work perfectly for a breeding coop. I will be able to have purebred hatching eggs available next spring! The SFH will be in the coop Dale built this year so I can put another breed in this coop. I'm thinking a blue egg layer. I'd love to get some Cream Legbars! However, I may have to settle for some Ameraucanas. I plan on getting a Penedesenca rooster to put in with the layer flock as well. It will be easy to pick out the eggs from the two Pene. hens in there and hatch those out too.

So keep your fingers crossed for a great hatch and I'll update in a few days on how things turn out!

More progress on the new chicken coop

It's been quite some time since I did an update on the chicken coop construction. Well, things are looking great! All 4 windows are in. The siding got two coats of paint. The trim is almost all up and painted and it's been moved into the final position now that the concrete has cured.

You are looking at the east facing side with the two sliding windows and the chicken pop door. Our DIY rain barrel is just to the right of the coop catching water from our down spout. This is the side of the coop that the 10 x 10 run will be attached to.

This is the south facing wall. Still need to build a door. The inside has one coat of primer so far, with one more to go before the final coat of white.

I'm still waiting on getting my Swedish Flower Hen chicks. It will  be a couple of weeks so there's lots of time to finish up work on the new coop.

Weekend progress

Last weekend we had perfect weather! Which means we were outside working on the chicken coop.
It started out with moving the chicken coop out of the pole building so the roof work could start.

Then next step was putting up the rafters.

Of course Buffy had to come around to check out the progress too!

I think she approved!

After the rafters were up then the OSB, tar paper and drip edge went on. The rest of the siding was next. It's really looking nice now!

On Sunday the windows went in along with some blocking work on the interior.

You can see the two windows on the east side and the chicken pop door. The cutout in the peak will have a vent in it. Eventually it will all be painted to match the pole building and the other chicken coop too. That will be my big job.

This week the concrete guys have been out and finished getting ready to pour the slab in front of the shop and along the east side where the coop will eventually sit.If the weather holds out they should be here to pour today!! The weekend will have us working on shingles and hopefully more interior work. We will need to wire everything then insulate before putting up the interior walls.

Source: backyardchickens.com via Casie on Pinterest

I hope to have a feeder built into the wall for this coop. An idea I got from the forums on Backyardchickens. It will be nice to not have the feeder hanging in the middle of the coop taking up floor space and I will be able to fill it from the storage side of the coop and not have to go into the chicken's side!

The latest word on my order for chicks is three more weeks. I'm waiting for some Swedish Flower Hens! They are still pretty rare and hard to get. The people I'm getting them from only had 4 hens and are hatching all the eggs they get but still can't keep up with the orders. All the Swedish Flower Hens in the US have come from Green Fire Farms. They were first imported to the US in June, 2010. They are a very colorful breed that's extremely winter hardy! I can't wait to get them!!!

Broody hen

I have a wannabe broody hen.

This golden laced Wyandotte has taken up residence in the favorite nest box. She's all puffed up and actually growls when you try to move her. She isn't even sitting on any eggs! If we had a full sized rooster I'd let her sit and hatch out some chicks, but our rooster is a Silkie! I don't really want any Silkie/heavy breed cross chicks.

I keep evicting her from the nest box hoping she will just give up. We will see!

Up, Up with a new Coop!!

We are building a new chicken coop!

You know chickens are like potato chips... you can't have just one! Or two or twelve! ha ha

If I wanted to add a few more fluffy butts around here there needed to be another chicken condo. Our current set up is maxed out. The 8 x 8 barn style garden shed that was re-purposed into our coop is serving us well but the 11 large breed hens and our one Silkie bantam rooster pretty much fill it up.

He's a handsome boy isn't he?

The new coop will be an 8 x 10 salt-box style with a 10 x 10 fenced in run. This coop with have two operating windows and two stationary ones so there will be lots of natural light. In addition there will be two 12" x 12" vents in the roof peaks on the east and west sides giving us plenty of ventilation. We will have an automatic pop door for the chickens in this coop like we have in our current one. That makes having chickens so much easier! Dale started building it a couple weeks ago inside our pole building.

Here's a few pictures of the progress.

Insulating the base.

Two side walls framed up, looking at the north wall here with one window.

Four walls framed out and the rafters ready to go up.

Looking at what will be the east facing wall with two windows and the chicken pop door.

Not much more can be done now until we pull it outside with the tractor, the rafters won't fit out the door on the pole building. We are having concrete poured and once that is done the coop will be moved into place and the rest of the work can start. 

Here's is a look at our current coop with the 5 x 15 run.

First day of summer... time to catch up!!

Well, not much for a regular blogger here lately! Lots of things to catch you up on though.

First, the chicks we hatched here at home are doing great! Looking more and more like adult chickens all the time. We gave 6 of them to a friend and kept 5 four ourselves. In return we got a red silkie! Oh she is a beauty!! I'll have to post a picture of her soon, she has blue earlobes!

Our Muscovy pair are still waiting on their eggs to hatch. This will be the hen's first clutch, so we are hoping she's a good momma. We've have some predator issues and reinforced their pen as much as we can. Now to just hope for the best!

Our 7 one year old hens are laying 6 eggs a day now. Still waiting on the two new  partridge Penedesenca pullets to start laying. They were supposed to have hatched in January, so I think they should be laying any day now. They are not friendly chickens at all, but I can't wait to see their dark chocolate brown eggs!
The other nine pullets we bought are doing really well. They took over the coop the broilers were in. Now this group is very friendly and calm. The Buff Orpingtons like to be picked up and held along with the new Silkie. We have such a great variety in this bunch! Lots of different colors to see.

The broiler chicks were taken into the butcher at 8 weeks old. They grow so fast!! Now we have a freezer full of delicious home grown chicken! I tried a new recipe for roasting them and it's my new go to for delicious moist chicken! Low and slow is the way to go with these.

Now on to the garden update!!

Dale and the rest of us put a lot of work into getting the new large garden bed ready for planting. It was just a field of grass earlier this spring. Take a look at some of the progress we made.

Here another shot of our mini hoop house too.  I removed the plastic at the beginning of June once our night temps were warmer.

My trays of transplants that I started from seed were all ready to be planted out after hardening off in the hoop house. They are all doing well in the garden now.

I harvested all of the diakon radishes today, the larger ones were beginning to bolt so it was time. The chickens feasted on the tops and I cleaned up the roots for us. Now I'm not a big radish fan, but I had read that these large radishes, when roasted, taste a lot like parsnips. Parsnips I like! So I pulled a few last weekend and roasted them along with some carrots and our chicken. Delish! I'll be planting a fall crop of them!  We've also lunched on BLT's with the L-lettuce coming straight from the garden. So good and fresh. There wasn't much asparagus to harvest yet this year, but it's coming along. We also ate beet greens one night with supper after I thinned the bed. The kids surprised me and really liked them!

I need to get out and take some updated pictures of the gardens and chickens soon! But it's raining today so that will have to wait. I'm glad to have the needed rain, but now we need some warmer temperatures too!

How does your garden grow??