Monday Apr 14, 2008
On Friday the kid's elementary school PTA held its annual
carnival. One of the attractions was a petting zoo. They had
goats, piglets, rabbits and chickens.
Karen has been trying to figure out what to do with one our
young roosters, Harry, who was hatched out in early January.
He's acting more and more like a rooster, and is getting a bit
unpleasant to be around. Also, living in a suburban
neighborhood, we think sure the neighbors might get annoyed with
hearing a rooster in the early morning, so we've always intended
to get rid of our roosters. Karen had posted a "free rooster"
note on a pet chickens web site, but got no interest. The next
alternative was to take him up to the feed store and give him
away.
Anyway, back to the petting zoo. Karen asked the petting zoo
owner if she'd take a Rhode Island Red rooster, and she said she
would. So Karen got our rooster and took him over there.
Our son Nick was upset and said he was going to miss Harry, but
hasn't talked that much about him since then, so maybe he won't
miss him that much. He still has 9 other chicks, 4 hens, 3
cats, a brother and mom and dad on which to shower his
affection, so maybe that's enough :).
Wednesday Feb 13, 2008
When I last wrote about chickens, we had nine chicks indoors and
four hens outdoors. Last week I came home from work and was
looking at the indoor chicks in their 2' W × 4' L × 2' H box and
noticed a little black chick. To this I said "Where the heck
did that come from?" I was told it was a silver
laced Wyandotte pullet (female chick). Karen knows she's
going to have to get rid of the new roosters at some point, so
she wanted one more hen. Okaaay.
At first, the little chick seems quite wary of the much larger
and older chicks, and got chased around by a Rhode
Island Red rooster. But by the next morning, she seemed to
have settled in and started hanging out with the larger chicks
and keeping warm. She particularly liked our largest chick,
which we think is a Buff
Orpington rooster. She even roosts with the larger chicks.
Also, she really stands out as the other chicks are buff and red
and she's black with a bit of silver. Pretty cute.
The older chicks have a few weeks before it's warm enough for
them to go live outside. We're not sure how this will work with
the little Wyandotte, who may not be old enough to go outside
yet. When we've taken the older chicks outside for a few hours,
the poor little Wyandotte makes lots of noise and really misses
her friends.
Monday Jan 07, 2008
Late last week and over the weekend we had 9 chicken eggs hatch
in our incubator. We started out with 20 or 22 (don't
remember), discarded some earlier as they weren't developing or
had stopped developing, and were left with about 15 eggs we
hoped would hatch. Getting 9 is pretty good, as Karen knows
folks who've tried hatching multiple times and gotten no chicks
at all.
We have
Buff Orpington sounds like some sort of macho guy to me, but
Buff Silkie sounds like an oxymoron, as we think of
buff as well built and silkie
as kind of prissy looking. But in this case, of course,
buff refers to the color, a light blondish color.
Sam and Karen took care of turning the eggs three times a day
and candling them to see if they were developing. My only
involvement with the incubation was to help wire up the
incubator. I wired up a light bulb to a hot water heater
thermostat, and Karen used a thermometer to help set the
termperature. I also wired up a computer fan from an old
computer we still have around to an A/C adapter. Funny thing
about that, the best place on the web to find instructions on
wiring a computer fan to an A/C adapter was a web site dedicated
to growing pot! :)
The nine little chicks seem to be doing well, and they act like
chickens right out of the box. They test new things by pecking
at them, so every new chick that was born was pecked by the
others first :). We moved them to a brooder box with pine
shavings, they had to peck at the pine shavings to determine
whether it was something to eat. We saw one poor chick got one
of her toes grabbed by another who thought it might be something
to eat!
Monday Jun 25, 2007
We now have three of our four hens laying eggs. Shiner's eggs
continue to be the largest, and they're a medium reddish brown
color. Eggo started laying a couple of weeks back, smaller blue
green eggs. And just last week Chick started laying light brown
pullet eggs. So we've got loads of eggs to eat and give away.
Monday Jun 04, 2007
Previously I talked about the four hens who live in our back
yard. The oldest hen, Shiner Bock, has been giving us eggs for
a few weeks now. We're expecting the other hens to start laying
soon, so we check the nest boxes a few times every day.
Yesterday, I opened the lid of the two nest boxes, where we have
nesting material and some golf balls and a plastic hollow Easter
egg, so the hens get the idea that this is a good place to lay
eggs. Much to my surprise, I saw a snake with its jaws wrapped
around the plastic Easter egg. At first I thought one of my
boys was messing with me, as they have lots of rubber and
plastic snakes that they play with. As my wife Karen has said
many times, one of these days she's going to pick up what she
thinks is a rubber snake and have a nasty surprise. But anyway,
I saw the snake's tail wiggle a bit, so I quickly closed the lid
and called Karen over. Hey, they're her chickens, maybe she's
heard of some great method to get rid of snakes. And maybe I'm
a wimp :).
Karen opened the lid, and banged on the box a few times with a
board, and the snake eventually slithered out of the coop and
into the garden. He was about 3-4 feet long, and according to
our reptile book, he was probably a rat snake.
So now we have a couple things to think about. First, how many
other eggs has this snake gotten? Second, how to we keep him
out, other than hope he'll succeed in swallowing a plastic egg
or golf ball and die? We can also hope the chickens will catch
him in the coop or run and kill him, and get a good meal too!
Tuesday May 08, 2007
So, there's the old question Which came first, the chicken
or the egg? In our case, it was the chicken.
Okay, let me back up and explain. A few months back my wife
Karen decided she and my son Nick were going to raise hens for
eggs. She started with four chicks, of which three (Chick, Eggo
and Yoga) have survived to this day. A few weeks back, when
Nick and I were gone on a cub scout campout, Karen and Sam, my
other son, went out and bought a chick, Mrs. Shiner Bock, a few
weeks older than the others. Yesterday, Shiner presented us
with her first egg, a brown egg with little red flecks on it!
So, in our case, indeed, the chicken came before the egg.
Friday Mar 09, 2007
So, I've discovered that my blog isn't worth all that much. And
whose fault is that?! Oh yeah, mine. Gotta post to make it
worth something.
So, the boys' spring break started about an hour ago, so I
thought I'd take a break with them. Here are the plans:
- build a chicken coop
- attend a seminar on chickens
- visit Crater of
Diamonds State Park in Arkansas and find, we hope,
diamonds and other gems.
- get a training ride in for the Red
Poppy Ride. Nick wants to ride the 30 mile loop this
year, and since the longest he's ever ridden is 14 miles (at
last year's Red Poppy Ride) we need to do some training to be
sure we can ride 30 miles. I'm pretty sure I can
ride 30 miles, as I get within a few miles of that riding my bike to
and from work.
- Convert my old mountain bike to a single speed
You may wonder about the first couple of items. Karen suggested
we raise some hens as pets and to have fresh eggs. Once she
convinced herself (and me) she wouldn't get into trouble with
the homeowner's association or the city of Round Rock, I
agreed. I also promised to help build a coop when the chicks
got old enough and large enough so they could be outside.
In the meantime, the chicks have been living in Nick's bedroom,
with occasional forays to an outdoor enclosure where they can
eat anything they think might be interesting :).
Karen and Nick will attend the seminar, while Sam and I do
something else, not sure what. The seminar is at Boggy Creek Farm in
east Austin. We visited there a few weeks back, just before the
regional science festival where Nick and Nate exhibited their
science fair project. The kids really loved the fresh carrots and
the bread we got, which was actually from Sweetish Hill
Bakery and Cafe. It was also interesting to see an organic farm in the middle of an urban
area.
As for the 30 mile loop of the Red Poppy Ride, I hope Nick can
complete it. I will definitely be impressed, since Nick is only
nine years old. I suspect he'll finish it but be tired and
sore. The first big ride I did as a kid was a 50 miler, but I
was 12, and I was pretty sore. We'll see how it goes. Part of
the training is to see what Nick thinks about going beyond 14
miles.
Finally, about converting my mountain bike. I've never been a
big fan of the off road aspect of the mountain bike, I bought it
because it was new and trendy in 1985 and I was sick of bending
the rims on my Schwinn Sprint when I went over railroad tracks.
Since I have another bike with 24 speeds (though some of those
are unusable, really), I don't necessarily need a mountain bike
with 15 speeds, and the single speed idea intrigues me. Looks
like it may be somewhat easy since my 1985 bike has a freewheel
rather than a cassette, so I can replace the freewheel with a
BMX single speed freewheel. Getting the chain right will
probably be the tricky part.
I hope to take pictures of some of these activities, but our
digital camera no longer takes pictures. I can still view the
pictures I've taken, but I get a black screen when I want to
take pictures. Time to get a new camera, since I don't really
want to pay to fix a camera that was free and is now a few years
old.
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