spring? soon????

Look what arrived in the mail (Thursday)

The chicken catalog from the hatchery we ordered from last year.

I was so excited.
Not really about getting chickens. I'm still not sure if I want to do more this year. Especially not meat birds, since we still have something like 14 birds in the freezer.
I'm seriously thinking about doing some exotic bantam breeds, and then trying to hatch chicks...well see...

But what I was really, REALLY excited about, was the idea that you can start ordering chick...as in SPRING is around the corner. (knock on wood)

Actually our weather finally broke tonight. One of the weather networks actually reported us a 1 degree tonight. 1 DEGREE - Like on the plus side. Not the minus.
Of course its about 4 days overdue from when the said we were suppose to get it, so I'm not going to hold my breath, when they way it suppose to be like this for the next 5 or so days.

But doing chores tonight wasn't half bad. So no complaints.

chicken myth articles

Barbara Foreman is writing a series of articles entitled "7 myths about Urban Chickens" on the Mcmurray Hatchery Blog.

In the first article she published yesterday, she is trying to dispel the myth that Chickens carry diseases communicable to human. ie. The avian bird flu.
Apparently many experts and even the CDC think that the solution to the Avian flu may actually be backyard or smaller flocks. Since commercial raising of chickens usually has such massive amounts of birds housed in less than adequate space, and and all diseases can run rampant.
It stands to reason that smaller flocks, especially small well cared for flocks will be better cared for, housed and fed. Therefore being much healthier and more resistant to diseases.

It may be an interesting series of articles she has planned...

My top 5 problems with chicks

It's been just over a month since our chickens all went to their final resting place. Our freezer.
And to be quite honest I'm not really missing the work they created.
I have a good friend who bought a few acres of land down in New Mexico recently and is thinking about raising chickens next year. She's asked for my "expert" chicken advice on a few things, which has made me think about the things I wish I'd known before I jumped in.
Don't get me wrong I did do some research before I order 26 peeping chicks. But considering 26 chickens arrived and 18 Chickens are in the freezer, I'd say there was some learning curve there.
I read a lot of articles in hobby farm type magazines that lead me to believe that raising chickens was so easy pretty much anyone could do it. Shelter. Water. Food. not hard right?

Let me state for the record.

Chickens may be low maintenance for theses sorts of things. But raising them from day old chicks requires a little more finese than the basics.

All the chicks that we lost (8 of them) we lost as chicks. And after the reading and research I've done since I'm kind of surprised we didn't lose more.

So here would be my Top 5 things I wish I'd known before getting Chicks.
(and the things I'd do differently if we raise them again)

1) Temperature is VERY Important- Get a Brooder Thermometer.
Although I had the proper infra red heat lamps for the chicks, and raised or lowered them depending on how the chicks were acting. I've since learned that chicks have no ability to regulate their own body temperature for the first 2 weeks. Therefore~ The brooder house needs to be a consistent 95 degrees for the first week. You can then lower the temperature ( raise the heat lamp) by 5 degree each week until you reach 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Since I didn't have a thermometer I can't tell you the exact temperature I kept the chicks at. But I can bet between, weather. drafts and water it was not consistent.
2) Have an Adequate Brooder pen
Adequate doesn't have to mean expensive or even bought from a hatchery.The most important aspect to this is a Round chicken pen. Since chicks tend to gather together especially for heat, it's important that they can't squish each other or trap themselves in a corner. Many Hatcheries sell a Brooder guard which is basically just corrugated cardboard that can form about an 8 foot circle.I used my kids old plastic swimming pool and had I made one small modification (drainage holes) it would have worked perfectly. Next year I'll be drilling holes in the bottom of the pool to make sure that there is a way for water to escape instead of collecting in the bottom of the pool, under the straw. Which leads me to...
3) Chicks do NOT like to be WET!
I talked a little bit about my concerns of having wet chicks in a post soon after we got the chicks. I am absolutely convinced that being wet is what killed most of our chicks. We had a combination of a leaky waterer and no drainage. which meant that the chicks stood in (and ultimately played in) water in the bottom of the pool. Unfortunately it was hard to detect the water underneath all the straw until things got really soggy.
4) Seal drafts
Although this may seem obvious. Do everything you can to make sure your barn or chicken coop is protected from the weather outside. I thought getting our Chicks at the end of April would mean that the worst of the winter weather was behind us, and weather wouldn't be a major challenge. BUT. We got Wind. Snow.and Rain within the first few weeks. and the Chicken coop was simply not air tight around doors and windows. Allowing too much fluctuation in temperature. And drafts of cold winds on wet chick. Which inevitably is a bad combination.
5) Have proper waterers -and check them first
Our biggest downfall was having the waterer leaking into the bottom of the pool. The people that use to live here had left a couple of chicken waterers behind. Thinking that I could save some money on equipment, I used them without properly checking to make sure they weren't leaking. This caused the major issues that led to most of the deaths in our coop. If your using hand-me-down equipment, make sure to check it's in proper working condition first. From now on, I'll even be checking new waterers before putting them in a pen. At the end of the day, if a waterer doesn't sit level, or it isn't put together properly, it will leak. Most waterers are designed to stop flowing when they reach a certain level, but this function doesn't work if they are tilted, or have small holes (like ours did in the bottom pan) that lets water escape. and ultimately allows all the water to flow out at once.

I think Honestly, if I had been aware of some of these things, at least some of the chick deaths could have been prevented. If and when I raise chicks again, these are the things I will be doing differently. Some of it may seem like common sense, but I learned these lessons the hard way. By losing chicks that I probably shouldn't have.

The only other thing that I learned was...
Chickens poop a lot and its gross and amazingly sticky.
People will tell you chicken poop smells really, really bad. and it's true. What I didn't know, is that it has to be the stickiest most hard to scrub off substance I have ever seen. Be prepared to spend  (lots of) time scrubbing it off of pretty much every surface. We actually had an old snow brush that we used to try and clean all the waterers quicker and easier with the hard bristles (while the brush was long enough that you could keep your hands away from the nasty off spray)

Hey- by no means am I actually a chicken expert. But if sharing my short comings in this little chicken experiment saves anyone the hassle of having to learn these same lessons the hard way...

Return of the Chickens

We picked up the chickens this afternoon from the processors. And man are those some big chickens

17 of them are currently taking up about 1/4 of our freezer space.


Yes, 17...although we dropped off 18. Apparently one of them still had food in it's crop. This caused some sort of mess (I don't totally want to know the details) and the meat became "infected". They used to just wash off the birds and package them anyways (according to the lady at the plant) but new regulations state they must cut all salvageable meat from the bird and dispose of the carcass. Since this is a relatively new procedure for them, I guess all the bugs haven't been worked out yet and the entire bird was either disposed of, or it had gone missing in the very least.
They paid me out for the bird. At $15 dollars. I was tempted to ask if they wanted to pay me that for all the birds. Then I wouldn't have lost any money in this little chicken raising experiment.
Actually I did ask quite a few questions about how the bird had become "infected" I was more interested in making sure it had been a contamination problem on site. Rather than us bringing in a sick bird.
I probably sounded like an idiot re asking this question is several different ways, but I kept explaining to her "this is our first year raising chickens and we really don''t know what we're doing".
She told me it sure looked like we knew what we were doing because they were awfully big birds.
Maybe she just said it to shut me up.
but Ill take it.
It felt pretty good.

When we got home we spent another couple of hours cutting the Styrofoam insulation for the "Boys" barn. Chris got the front window sealed off too. Hence the ladder. and little jack-and-the-beanstalk, climbing into the clouds. We bought some more wood tonight, and I'm hoping we get finished with the barn makeover tomorrow. I doubt it will get paint right away (I still want it to go red, and we only have white paint kicking around) but I may get some pictures up of the whole PROCESS once I get some AFTER pictures.

I did another "experiment" today. I took Maggie into the goat pen.

She's walked up to them sniffed them and lost interest. She's actually been in their barn, which nearly caused a revolt on their part. But today I decided to bring her into the pen unleashed and see how things went.

She chased them.

But would stop when they were all together.

She actually does have the herding instinct she's suppose too!!!

I'm not totally surprised I've actually seen her try to herd Nathan (minus the nipping at the heels) whenever she feels he's gone too far in the yard.

Overall, Maggie did pretty well as far as I'm concerned.

The goats as you can see in the picture have completely different feelings about this new addition to the herd.

Not that I'll be leaving her alone with them any time soon. We're going to do quite a few more experiments in the next few weeks to make sure she understands her job would be to protect them. Not just make them run around for her own amusement.

Guess what we did yesterday?

It was the end of the line for the chickens.
Well  the end of the line with us, and the start of the conveyor belt for them. I'm sure I completely traumatized Nathan as he watched the chickens get hung upside down on a device that resembles those spinning dry cleaners carrousel's, but the chickens just disappeared through the wall never to be seen again.
Not until we pick them up frozen and bagged on Monday anyways.

I know we bought the chicken plucker and spent hours putting it together.
But the fact is, we couldn't coordinate Chris' time off with enough good weather to get the chicken processing done ourselves. (especially knowing he would probably take us hours per chicken)

I'm also pretty sure that chickens should be "finished" at about 16 weeks, and these guys were nearing 5 months. I'm hoping we don't end up with stringy nasty meat. I guess there may be a lot of marinated chicken in our future if we did wait to long and have "18 STEW birds"

And...I have a horrible confession...
at 6:30 this morning Chris and I were rounding up the birds and shoving them in the dog crate in the back of the truck. *** Our dog crate is the greatest thing EVER BTW. I was convinced we needed an old horse trailer, but we've managed to move all our animals in this over sized metal cage and the back of the truck- so Awesome- especially considering a horse trailer isn't really in the budget for awhile***  Anyways, The Chickens were not very impressed that we were scooping them up, and taking them somewhere. And that the somewhere didn't seem to be to their outside pen. A few of them got right cranky. Or more like a few of the roosters got territorial/defensive/aggressive??? One of them literally attacked my boot. I'm not talking pecking at the toes. More like full on fly towards me with wings beating and start pecking at my shin.
Luckily my rubber boots go nearly to my knee so it did no damage.
~Except making me shriek like a girl, side stepping (or running-whatever) away from insane rooster. And then refusing to pick up any more of the roosters.~
In my defense I did haul the rest of the hens out to the truck.
By WOULD NOT go back near the Roosters.
Yeah, not my proudest "I'm a true farm girl" moment.
My only excuse is I was incredibly tired and this seemed really really early to be chicken wrangling.

I really don't think I could work at the chicken processing plant. You can't see him really well in this picture (the combination of bad lighting and me not wanting to be a total freak getting in every ones face with my camera- although I'm sure they all thought I was anyways taking pictures) But the dude is carrying 3 of our chickens at once upside down towards the scary looking chicken loading machine.

And here's a closer (as close as I was willing to get) picture of the chickens being loaded for their "last ride" on the conveyor belt/dry cleaners rack/ medieval torture device.

I have to admit I'm pretty relieved that there just gone. Without me having to stick my hand in a freshly slaughtered chicken and remove...well you get the picture.

And the really, really, really best part. It's like having my chores cut in half. Not having to feed and water them anymore.

and then the RCMP showed up

After deciding were not quite prepared enough to butcher the chickens this weekend we realized that meant we needed more chicken feed. ummm we were completely out.

So Saturday morning we headed for town. Actually I guess it was closer to the afternoon.

Since it was 12:20 pm when the incident occurred!

We pulled up to the feed store and even though the parking lot was completely empty all the lights in the store were on.
Chris tried the door. It opened.
He walked in
There was no one around.
He assumed someone must be in the back and started looking for the chicken feed on his own.
and then...
and then the alarm starting going off.
yeah. the store was close. the alarm was set, but they'd forgotten to lock the front door.

He came back to the truck and told me what was going on. I suggested he head back to the door and see if there was a number for a manager or owner on it. He got a hold of the guy. and as we were waiting for him to show up...that's when the RCMP showed!!!!
Nice.
Luckily the owner showed up just as we were explaining the story to the cops. He walked right over shook Chris' hand and thanked him for calling. The officers went into the store to check over things with the owner, and I posed Chris in front of the cruiser. Mostly because I needed documentation, for how funny I thought the whole story was.

In the end the owner also let us buy some chicken feed off him.

Chicken Woes

We've had a small set back with the chickens.
I was assuming ( I know, I know) that any of the butchers in the area would process the chickens for us. Especially when their ads say all animals. But I guess technically a chicken is a bird. Not an animal.
Anyways turns out there's only 2 chicken processors in Alberta. Down in Lethbridge. and up in St. Paul which is still about a 2 hour drive from here.
We talked about taking them to St. Paul. but they want over 70 dollars to do up the chickens. Plus the time and gas...
well long story short, we decided that this would be a problem again next year so maybe we should look at a longer term solution.
so

tada...

The chicken plucker 10 000.

Okay it's probably not called 10 000 I just named it that because of the hours and I mean H-O-U-R-S it took to put together. (Note to self- next time when it costs 50 bucks extra to get one pre-assembled. DON'T BE SO CHEAP!!!!)

and now...

I'm Doing lots of reading like how to butcher a chicken tutorial

and how to process a chicken on The Deliberate Agrarian Blogspot

***Note Most of the Pictures are quite graphic~just so your warned****
trying to figure out exactly what I'm doing before we even attempt this.

Answers to dumb questions

remember me complaining about dirty chicks?

apparently you can wash chicks. as long as you don't allow them to get their heads under water. Do it with warm water. and dry them well before they can get a chill.

At least according to people on the the backyard chicken form

Backyard chickens is quite the information packed site about ummm...everything chickens. funny how that works.

I found it through the site hencam.com, which was talked about on the scratch and peck blogspot
Lauren is such a cute illustrator, and writes with such a passion about her little flock you can feel the love she has for them. Totally worth checking out just because it's so darn cute.

Everyone is just so darn funny

So yesterday, I made a flurry of phone calls with one specific question.

"Can you wash a baby chick?"

Everyone laughed at me.

Yeah guys like I have nothing better to do, I just got bored and decided it might be fun to give the chicks a bath?

No.

Actually we have really crappy waterers. The kind that slosh everywhere when you set them down. And leak all over the bottom of the chick pen if they are not completely level. or if they bumped or pretty much for no reason at all.

Anyways they created a little puddle in one corner of the pen.
The chicks then pooped in the puddle.
They then proceeded to play in the poop puddle.
and now?

Now I have 26 very VERY dirty little chicks.

I changed all the hay in the bottom of the pool pen. I washed everything out.
But I still have very dirty little chicks.

and I'm torn.
I have 2 trains of thought on this.

One. washing a chick and getting it wet seems like a really good way to get the chicks sick

but

Two. Any animal should never be covered in its own feces. That in itself could cause it to get sick.

So I made a ton of phone calls asking for advice on washing the chicks. EVERYONE LAUGHED at me. The suggestion is, if I feel like I should clean them probably just do it with a slightly damp paper towel. Don't wash them,
Right guys
Like I was going to stick them in the dish washer or something?!?!

The Chickens little

We finally have chickens (well we have chicks at least)

The arrived yesterday. Nathan is in LOVE with them, and constantly wants to hold one.

I, on the other hand have been totally stressed. Rigging up coat hangers to drop the heat lamp another 6 inches. Putting cardboard over the window entrance/exit to stop the wind. And now were having crappy windy rainy weather and I'm realizing there are a million drafts in that old coop. I'm thinking I have to go out this afternoon and try to cardboard and duct tape??? a bunch of the cracks and spaces around the door frames or I think these little peeps are going to freeze to death.

chicken coop

I'd set aside about a thousand dollars to build a chicken coop here,

So I was absolutely thrilled, when I finally got into the back of one of the outbuildings and found this...

It's a little ragged and for sure needs some repairs and some cleaning, but has everything from laying boxes, and perches

It's even equipped with a heat lamp already. So minor repairs, Kicks butt on having to start from scratch (was that a pun? chicken scratch???)

The outside run area of the coop


Nathan and I exploring the outside parts

...and Nathan demonstrating how the chicken can move from inside to outside!

some excellent websites

so I was cruising around looking at sheep and Chicken stuff and found a few interesting and informative stuff.
I found Miller Hatcheries a hatchery with 2 Alberta locations
This was the first time I heard about beak trimming on Chickens.
I guess it...

It stops cannibalism, saving lives and annoyance
It stops fighting - the birds is literally disarmed
It stops feather pulling - preserving a good grade of bird
It stops feed wastage - birds can't pick so they receive a balanced diet
It stops egg loss - a major plus for the egg producer
It stops the nuisance problem of toe picking.
Beak trimmed birds tend to be quieter - fear of other birds is eliminated

I also checked out UFA the farm supply store, and found out they carry all the fencing supplies I think we might need for sheep. As well as the feed, and waterers and fed for chickens. They also had a link for miller hatcheries- which has got to be a good thing.

Another website I thought was a good resource for sheep was sheep 201 ~ a beginners guide to raising sheep
which has a ton of links to explain sheep fencing, handling, different breeds and more resources than I can even fathom right now.
and the website sheepandgoat.com which is affiliated with sheep 201.

More research

Although we've been running around like crazy lately, I did manage to find a pretty cool website/resource about chicken off a link from kijiji
Murray McMurray Hatchery
will actually ship out day old chicks (although they are in the states- so I may have to look for a closer to home source)
but they also have a great resource section with all these cool books- there is even a book on how to build your own chicken plucking machine.
Although I'm thinking baby steps right now this is the book that most interested me...

I like the fact that it sounds like it will be about farming on a small scale. Most of the books I've seen expect that your going to start out with entire herds of cattle or hundreds of chickens....

so the fact that its backyard- makes me think it will be talking smaller scale animal care.

I managed to reserve this (although I'm on a wait list) and about 12 other books from the library last night on line. I'm hoping to get some reading done about, animal fencing and needs before we get out there, since the idea of getting sheep to keep the grass under control this summer keeps coming up in our household. The problem is I know less about sheep than I do about chickens!?!?

Research

Mother Earth News-wiser living series
Guide to Growing your Own Food

a magazine I found in the book section at Wal-mart actually about a month ago.

I loved the articles just from flipping through,

I've only managed to sit down and read article on backyard chickens in it's entirety.

But it has a bunch of other great looking articles about weed free gardens, learning how to can, and buying the right yard tractor for your needs...so I'm sure I'll probably end up reading it pretty much cover to cover.

But, wanna know what I learned from the chicken article???

apparently...

"Homegrown eggs are more colorful and flavorful, and they're more nutritious: richer in beta carotene, vitamin D, vitamin E, folic acid and vitamin B-12. Plus, eggs from hens raised on pasture have one third less cholesterol."

how's that for another few reasons for raising chickens???

Of course I think I'll start with just chickens for eating, and get into laying hens after I'm sure I know enough to get them to survive a winter...so maybe next year.