Spring Garden and Chick Update

Moving the chicks outside this week was quickly followed by a lot of cloudy rainy days.  So there are no photos.  I don't want to stress them out in their new coop.  They are adapting, eating, drinking and pooping.  I have the tall brooder warmer in the pen and they will get under there when they get chilled. But mostly, they are loving their roost bar and acting like "big birds."

The new 12 chicks arrived that are already presold.  They are, of course, cute little fluff balls. Six Barred Rock and six Rhode Island Reds.

Garden is the big factor here this week.  Plants in the greenhouse are finally picking up.  I had purchased some cloned plants to supplement the plants that did not start well in the greenhouse. The Onions and Garlic starts are looking good in the back section of the square garden. We have covered the broccoli and cauliflower starts to help keep them a bit warmer but also protect from the cabbage moth, and other bugs that like to eat broccoli.  The strawberries, peas, and lettuce are looking quite good. Also, the wintered over plants are thriving.  I have already cut half of the oregano for drying and cooking.  The rest will be cut in a week or two. Potatoes finally came up and are looking strong.

Pea starts planted 2 weeks apart	Potatoes - not sure which are what
Potatoes popped up a little later	More Potatoes that finally popped up
Strawberry blossom	Wintered Over Parsley
Wintered Over Oregano	Wintered Over Marjoram
Winters Over Thyme	My starts next to a Cloned Tomato Start
Pepper, Tomato & Lavendar Starts	Some of my lettuce starts 1+ month old
Lettuce Start 2+ mo	Onions Left and Garlic Right
The new garden space	Cover tunnel for Broccoli & Cauliflower
Inside the tunnel	Wet dandelion Seed Head

Pre-Spring Chicklets Arrived

Nine little fluff balls arrived this morning.  We have them in our small cage with high sides for now, to make it easier to control the environment.  We have the brooder warmer at the low height and they are all piled under there as they adapt.  Since the garage is on the cool side right now, we have added a space heater to blow a little warm heat in there.  Of course, we also have the cage covered with a sheet to cut down on drafts with the one foot wide opening at the far end of the cage (away from the chicks) to ensure that they are in a warm, but not too warm environment.  If it is too cold, they won't leave the brooder warmer for the food and water. It can be quite the task to find just the right temps on these cooler winter days as we head into spring. 

These are only the Cornish Cross - meat chicks.  No layers this year.  We will replenish the layers next year. So, it's the start of the new flock. 

Cornish Cross huddled under the warmer.

Late February Chicken Update

With the really cold weather temps in December that continued into early January, the older Welsummers stopped laying again.  In February, I decided to give them one more month to get back on track.  After the Christmas temps/storm, we begin to notice more and more pest issues. Then we started noticing that we were going through more feed. Soon, we noticed that their water was getting fouled quickly because the varmints eating the chicken feed were climbing the waterer to get into the feeder.  

I wondered if the pests were contributing to the older hens' laying issues.  Two of the new hens were also not laying well.  So, we now take the feed out of the pens each night when the hens roost, and bring it out early in the morning when the hens are up (about 6 am). We do know that the hens will chase any small mice that get into their pens, when they are awake. Took almost a month, but the older Welsummers are back to laying eggs. We are getting about 1 per day from the three of them. So that's better. They were almost stew pot poultry, because I had decided I would only wait until the first weekend of March for them to start laying again.  Another upside to the removing food at night is that we are not going through as much feed now. "Imagine that?" LOL 

Older hens will be either sold, or slaughtered in about three to four months, anyway. We need to make room for the new chicks.  We got three Rhode Island Red pullet chicks last weekend. We also picked up six Cornish Cross this weekend. 

Weather-wise, it is super cold again after starting February with some spectacular warm temps. It was in the 60s F the first weekend of Feb. What a cre-azy weather month. Last week the temps started dropping in to 30s during the day and 20s at nights. Then we received, all told, about a foot of snow this past week. However, the most snow on the ground on any given day was about 6 inches.  Finally melting and almost all gone. I didn't have any batteries for my camera and didn't get any pix of the snow when it was happening. This is all that is left now. But we may get more this weekend. 

That was a lot of Snow for February!

New chicks are all snuggled together in a small pen to keep them safe and warm until the temps in the garage are warmer. The Rhode Island Reds are about 10 days while the Cornish Cross are about four days. We will put them into a larger pen when we no longer need to control the pen (brooder) temps. 

First Photo of the Day

New brooder warmer; long story. Short version is that we could not find the power connector for the brooder warming plate and to order one takes more than a week to receive. But, I could get a new warmer shipped overnight delivery. So, yah, different warmer and it is keeping the babies nice and warm. Still waiting for the power cord. [Ugh] For now, it is the one warmer to be shared by all. Thankfully, the Cornish X are about the same size as the 10-day-old Rhode Island Reds. 

Snuggled under the Warming Plate

The rest of the photos from last night. 

Cornish Cross meet Rhode Island Red

Peeking out from the Warmth

Poop is Always Happening

One Week Cornish Cross

Last week, we picked up six little peeps for the second meat growing season for the PacNW. In our garage, I set up a short version of the small outdoor run that I have for young pullets that I use in the springtime for transition from indoors to outdoors. The run comes in two sections that hook together for about a five foot run. So the chicks are in one half of the pen in my hope to minimize having to move them from one pen to the next since they grow so quickly.  I have cardboard on the cement floor to minimize the coldness from the ground. I have an old sheet for the "floor" of the pen to help keep in the wood shavings.  I always use aspen since the odor is less intense with it. 

I have the brooder warmer's height at its highest level with an old folded up sheet for them to sleep on at night.  That way I can wash the sheet every couple of days since that area contains the largest concentration of POOH in the pen.  I have poster board all around the sides (outsides) to help keep heat in, and drafts out. At night, I cover the top of the pen with a large sheet and have a space heater just outside the pen that pushes warm air into the pen between two of the poster boards to help it stay nice and warm while they sleep.  Today, they were congregated in front of the heater rather than snuggling under the brooder.  This is a good indication that the area is warm enough for them that they are not all bunched up but not all sprawled out at the opposite end of the pen trying to get away from the heat.  

We picked up the chicks on Wednesday so they are almost a week old (Monday-ish). Their little white feathers are already starting to grow.  We have everything set up for the move outside in a few weeks. 

The older Welsummers are moulting as of this week.  We took the oyster shell out of their pen and will switch them over to a higher protein diet as they shed their feathers.  I was actually hoping to sell them off this weekend, but, alas, I waited a week too long. I won't sell them during the moult since that would be just toooooo stressful on them.  It has been bad enough on them with the smoke from the out-of-control fires just a few miles north east of us for the past two weeks.  Today, it started raining! This should help to contain the wild fire.

Six Little Chickies - One Week Old
No Worries!	This is What we Do!
Yesterday - Smoke at Sunset

Heritage Turkeys at five weeks old

The turkey babies are growing growing growing! The pen that I had them in was just too small after a couple of weeks and, well, it is too cold outside still for them. I had originally hoped to have their coop done to keep them in the coop in the garage until they are old enough to go outside.  Well, that's not done yet.  It is only a floor of a coop, right now. They don't have enough feathers yet and are still babies, in a sense. I have an outdoor bunny pen that is about 3.5ft sections, so I put half of it together to create a decent enclosure for them out in the garage.  I have lots of old sheets so that's turned the pen into a turkey fort to keep out the drafts. I put grass hay on the floor for them (on a sheet to keep it contained).  I also put the brooder warmer in the pen/fort.  The warmer was too small/short for them at this point, but I have placed it up on blocks to give them room to get under it, if they want to just in case it gets too chilled in the garage. In the first photo, the roost is about a foot off the ground, and they have to duck their little heads to walk under it, so you can see just how much they have grown in the pictures. This at least should hold them for a few more weeks for the weather to warm up in June. 

A little sneachta with that New Year

Our "official" winter, thus far, has been cold but not a lot of precipitation in our area, so that's been nice! The east winds have been whipping through with 30 mph gusts that drop the temps from barely freezing to brrrrrr. So we put up wind break panels on the chicken runs. You may notice that we have clear plastic strapped on the top parts of the pens to allow sunshine in but keep the elements off the center of the runs. This only helps on snowy days, like today, or when there's a light rain.  Heavy duty rains, of course, can turn the run into a real muck fest, so we throw out some hay to keep that manageable. 

Also, you may be able to see a block on top of a garbage can lid near the corner of coop two. That's to help protect the power cord connections from the elements to bring light and water heaters to life on these dark, cold winter days.  Coop one, in the background of coop two is empty. If you look in the "space" next to the wind break of coop three, you can see one of the Welsummers peeking out to see what's flashing?  :) 

Coop 2

Coop 3

Checked on the garlic and onions.  Garlic stems look fine.  Can't find any onion stems. Hoping that's normal and they will be back in the spring. We will see.  I have enough seeds left to plant more onions in the spring, if necessary.  That's it for the New Year 2016 update. 

Update on our efforts to combine the Welsummers with the remaining Russian Orloff in coop three.  I think it was about November 10 that we shoved the Welsummers into the coop in the dark of night and kept our fingers crossed.  While two of the Welsummers did fairly well with the transition, the smallest of the Wellsummers was bullied by the primary Russian Orloff.  We kept that Orloff because she was the best layer of the group. And, she still is the best layer, laying almost every day after finishing the molt. The smallest Welsummer even pushed her way out of the pen one day to get away from the Orloff! She was a mess! She ended up with a bloodied comb, losing all her tail feathers and neck feathers. We were not certain she was even going to make it through the week! Although she still avoids the Orloff, she is now being allowed to roost with the other three hens at night together. She has regained her feathers, her weight and is no longer getting beat up. She even laid her first egg since the transition on December 31. So, all in all, it took some time, but the hens are all back in action as a new flock.

Looking Back at Past Chicken Experiences

I was just thinking about when we started on this chicken raising adventure.  The first year, we lost three of the seven little chicks.  The chicks were purchased as "just hatched" from a well known farming store closer in to Portland. In talking with the store owner later in the year, I learned that others had a similar die-off experience. That store no longer sells Russian Oroff chicks.  That year was an unusually hot spring, that I feel contributed to the issue. But there were other things that I we have learned. For example, we initially placed the chicks into an aquarium and the heat from the lamp radiates off the glass, making the area that much toastier. We would have done better to use the little brooder heating shelf instead of the heat lamp in that environment. After the first year, we lost one of the hens. We think it was kidney failure. 

In our second year, we invested in one of the little brooder heaters. We purchased 10 Russian Orloff chicks from a different farm store. in anticipation of losing some, again. But this time, we did not lose a single chick. Additionally, we started them with a fine ground chick feed (non-medicated) and a little pro-biotic in their water. Also, the first week, we did not use any shavings. Instead, we used towels for flooring. We did switch to shavings a week later. After two weeks, we stopped grinding the feed and no longer added the pro-biotic. We ended up selling some of the hens because we just had way too many.  We kept seven, thinking that a family member was going to take three off our hands, but life circumstances changed and we kept all seven.  We got one of the hens back because she was a he. He is moved to a new location. We live very close to the city and we didn't want to cause any rooster ordinance issues (but we don't live in the city.)

The third year, we picked up five chicks. This time, we picked up Welsummer. We decided to use an old rabbit cage with sheets wrapped around it for a brooder. We used the brooder heater. We basically did the same as last year. We used towels for the flooring and ground their food, but we did not do the pro-biotics. Again, no dead chicks.  We gave away two chicks and kept three for ourselves. 

Looking back, losing those babies during the first few weeks of caring for them, was a really difficult experience. In fact, even when we lost the year-old hen, it was emotional. We knew that these girls were probably not as healthy from the start. We did not give up. We tried different techniques and approached the situations differently in hopes of giving the chicks a better, healthier start. 

One thing we know for certain now, is that, for the most part, these tiny little chicks are resilient, considering all that they go through to get to the farm store! Before buying the chicks, ask friends and neighbors about the store you plan to purchase the chicks from. Also, have a large enough brooder ready to go. Have a large enough coop and pen ready to go. Because let me tell you, these little chicks grow much faster than you can even imagine! Thanks for allowing me to share :)