Feeling the Sweet Soft Sunshine!

Such a cold and wet winter that slowly slid into spring. Cooler temps are slowing the crops.  Record breaking rain fall, in for the Pac NW! The sun brought a much needed day of Vitamin D.  

The Orloff flock will be sold to make way for the new Welsummers. They are ready to move outside.  I'll post photos when they move. 

In the mean time, it was nice to walk around to check my little crops, and pet the gals as they sun bathed for the first time in quite some time. 

The crops above are 3 different types of potatoes in barrels, spinach around red onions, and walla walla sweet onions.

These Orloffs are ready for sale.

The Clucky Flock	There's Sun!
Any Treats for us?

The Welsummers will stay for one more year.

Looky, we have sunshine :)	Buggs! Yeeha!
The Flock of Four

Layers and Turkeys

We have concluded the the two turkeys are both hens. I thought they were toms, but as the weather got cooler, they developed feathers on their heads and the snood never got any longer. So we are assuming that they are not going to get much larger. Regardless, and we have fattened them to prepare for the fateful day. 

The Orloffs have started to lay again.  When the standard time went back into effect, we put the lights back into the coop to light up at 4:00 in the morning.  The Orloffs are back to laying, but it is sparse at this point. Only one egg every other day, this week. The "layoff" lasted fabout 10 weeks. Little by little.

Welsummers' First Year Molt

The Welsummers first molt began about 10 days ago, and the one Orloff that is with them, is in her refeather mode. One of the Welsummers is not yet in full molt, but the other two look a little like porcipines. Their pen is a be-feathered spectacle.

The Blending Experiment Failed

The combining of the Orloffs failed. The three Orloffs were pretty cruel to the one transitioning Orloff. They made her sleep on the floor at night, or in the nesting box. She spent most of her day in the nestbox to try to protect what feathers she had left. The brutes were picking all the feathers out of her back and neck. 

The humane solution was to put her back in with the Welsummers, who were all too pleased to have her back. The Welsummers truly missed her as their "dominant" hen. So, yah, that attempt to combine the remaining Orloffs was not successful. 

The Wellsummers are starting to molt, as well.  The egg production has slowed down to one per day from that pen. It will be interesting to see how the Welsummers molt since we have never experienced the molting season with them. They are starting to look pretty scraggly, but not anything, yet, as scraggly as the Orloffs look 

We were talking about transitioning out of the Orloffs this next spring to raise meat birds along with just a few Welsummers.  A small flock of four or five would probably be perfect for our needs. The Orloffs are too easily stressed out with the rains and heat. While they do fine with the really cold temps, the Welsummers also do fine with the type of winters that we have. We may just get a couple of new Welsummers next spring, and thin out the aging Orloffs that have slowed down on their egg production.

Orloffs are Molting Again, Right on Time

This is the second annual molting season (or is that moulting) for our four remaining Orloffs.  D felt this would be a good time to take the lead Orloff from the Welsummer's pen and add her to the Orloff pen.  Um, I'm not so sure this is a good idea. But, since they are already stressed, who knows? It might be the perfect time. She is definitely is fiesty and may be able to dominate in the end. Yet, she is also a very friendly hen, so, she may not be able to win out with the transition.  We are adding probiotics to their water to help their immune system and we will watch to see how they fare.  

The hen keeps calling to the Welsummers and they to her. It's quite interesting. After a few attacks between her and the other Orloffs, she seems to be ruling the pen dominance, but that may not last as they wear her down. It would be one thing if we had pulled the others into her territory where she feels the dominance, and moved the Welsummers to the other pen/coop.  But that would have been considerably more work and efforts. This will be an interesting experiment.

The Welsummers are not yet molting, and producing plenty of nice eggs. So this should reduce the burden of the eggless time period.

The Mystery Plants of Spring

Every year, we discover an/other new plant(s) on our property. Some years, they are noxious, and poisonous weeds. But sometimes, they are productive plants.  Then, there are always the plants and things that come back year after year, no matter what we do. Such as Blackberries.  The fact that the winter temps hardly dipped below freezing this year, the blackberries are growing faster than we can dig them up. We will need to get a backhoe to get these beauties! We have almost acre of berry coverage. Ugh! This is a view of about a third of the blackberries.  I don't know if you can tell, based on Lucky, but these bushes are up to six feet tall in some areas. Ugh again!

 

We found an interesting blooming tree in our field that we had not noticed until this year. It's an Apple tree!  We assume that Lucky (the horse) planted and nourished that tree in a pile of horse apples. hahaha  I think we have another young apple tree out there.  We will see if Lucky lets it live.

 

We also discovered an ash tree that has survived the horse in the field.  Most times, the young trees don't survive because Lucky loves to chew on the bark, push on the tree as a scratching post, eat the leaves, etc. To see these trees growing quite tall out there is an unusual find! We also have holly trees and some types of sticker bush trees that Lucky avoids and we try to pull them out at least once a year. 

 

Today was a beautiful spring day. Not too hot and not too cool. Gentle breeze and the garden is loving it. This is a photo of my favorite shade tree. It's a maple tree.  I guess I just never realized just how much pollen this tree produces! Wheeee! All those yellow buds are enough to cause me to sneeze. 

Late last fall, we threw out some ground cover seed where we pasture the chickens and the other discovery today was a bunch of oats! Oh boy, are the chickens gonna love this new plant. 

That pretty much brings you up to speed on the findings for the season. 

Garden is great. Strawberries, Blueberries, Peach, Cherry and Apple Trees (that we planted last year) survived the winter.  Garlic survived. Onions did not. I had to replant from seed and they are so tiny that I opted to purchase a handful of onion bulbs for this year. Red and Blue potatoes have good growth. Yukon and White potatoes are planted, but not out of the ground yet. Spinach is doing quite well.  Lettuce has just started. Peas are late. Got a late start and I think something ate most of the seeds out of the soil. I planted some more, in the green house to try to get more for replanting. Planted first row of carrots and dill. Starting basil and parsley in the green house. Got another garden area ready for planting corn in a month. Will plant more carrots, plus beans at that same time. We have our gardening thumbs on. 

No chicks this year.  We are going to wait until next spring to get some more.  We have eaten the old hens and they were very flavorful! The Wellsummers and the Orloffs are producing very well this spring. The wet sloggy winter cut down on the production. We ended up adding pro-biotics to their water for a few weeks to get them to feeling better. 

We do have request for a couple of turkey chicks at the farm store this year.  I decided we would try to raise a couple of turkeys for the holidays. So that will be our "adventure" for this year.

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.

Welsummer Layers are Back

Despite the troubling start to merging the one remaining Orloff with the three Welsummers in coop 3, the distress appears to have settled down. The smallest of the Welsummers is regaining her tail feathers and has found a spot on the nightly roost. That Orloff has been literally laying an egg per day for the past week! The Welsummers have been leaving us one to two eggs per day since December 18, so I think we are back to getting a decent number of eggs.  Of the eight layers that we have, we are getting at least three to four eggs per day!  So we are short a couple eggs per day, overall, but that's fine. We still have enough eggs left over to sell off to friends. One Orloff in coop two continues to lay her eggs in the corner of the coop, just outside of the nesting box. :)  

Weather continues to be a sloggy mess, but the winds have been coming in from SW making temps stay above 40F in our area. We may get some snow in a few days.  

10-week Molt in Coopdee Three has Come to an End

The remaining Orloff in Coop three laid her first egg post-molt today. We received four eggs today from both coopers. We actually got three from coop two, which, essentially indicates that all the hens in that coop are back to laying. The Welsummers are still not laying eggs. I'm hoping that now with the lone Orloff in coop three back in laying form, they will pick back up with theirs too. 

We're a soggy mess in our region. Normally, for the month of December, we get about 6 to 7 inches  of precipitation, usually in the form of rain, the entire month. But, in the past week alone, we had approximately 6 inches, with a lot of flooding in some areas. Hillsides are collapsing, roads are getting washed away, new pot-holes are forming, roadways are under feet of water. It's not good. Our ground is saturated beyond the point of draining and our poor chickidees are slogging around in the muck. We threw out some grass hay (not straw) to help minimize the amount of muck, but that's not perfect. It's just the best we can do for now. 

Onions and Garlic might end up rotting in the garden due to the warmth of the air and the amount of rain. Oy Vey! 

The 12-week Moult is Done

Finally! The Orloff hens in Coop Two have finally started laying eggs again!  They started molting about the 2nd week of September and in the past two days, we have received 2 nice eggs.  Big Sigh of Relief there!  I really think this very hot summer was just too much for them so they molted twice as long as typical. 

The Welsummers have yet to lay any new eggs since being consolidated into coop three. That was two weeks ago. One of the Welsummers is super low hen on the pecking stick. She's finding creative ways to avoid the other hens' pecking by hiding behind the water pail and fighting back when necessary while making a mad dash for the feed when the other hens get in the coop.  Hopefully, she will be able to regain her weight and strength soon.  

Coyotes are coming right up to the house with the colder weather creeping in. We've been locking the hens in at about 6:00 p.m.  The light set-up that I created for the two coops this year seems to be holding the lights in place without allowing the hens to knock them down. I have the timers inside of a hard plastic casing. This year, we have the lights coming on at 4:00 a.m. instead of 4:00 p.m., because last year, the ladies would not go to roost until the light would go out at 8:00! This makes it easier to corral them in as it is getting cold at dusk.   Live and learn what works for us.

Last weekend, we prepared the garlic and onions ground with old hay to help prevent deep freezing. It looks like we have about 10 garlic and about 15 onions.  Hoping  they make it through to spring.

Re-Group and Re-Coop

Well, it's that time of the year!  We have less pasture places to place the coops and with the lack of sunlight/new plant growth, we have to move coops more frequently throughout the area. Four coops was two coops too many! We have consolidated. We kept the "only 2nd year layer" of coop three, and she is now co-mingling with the 1st year layers. We also kept all of the 2nd year layers of coop two. Coop one's 3rd year layers will all be winter soup material by the end of this week. 

D has decided that he definitely "over built" that first coop. Without any wheels to move it along, the process of moving that big old heavy coop was getting to be too difficult to move in the winter, even with heavy slog boots on. That coop will be put away, for now. 

I have strategized a different "hoop" coop that we can build for next spring. We can work on it over the winter in the garage. It will be a combo of the coops we built last year along with PVC hoop (tunnel) pen. So I think we can get at least five to six hens in that one while it will still be easy to move.   

So, our thirteen hens are dwindling down to eight hens this winter. That will be plenty of eggs for the family with a few extra that we can sell.

Last night, at dusk, we pulled the three 1st year Wellsummer hens out of their coop. Just before that, we closed the door from the coop to the pen on coop three. Then we pushed all three hens into coop three with the remaining Russian Orloff (in the dead of night). Interestingly, no major fights.  I knew they would not fight in the dark, but wondered what the daylight would bring. They definitely kept their distance, with three in one part of the pen with the one in the other part of the pen. So, perhaps, they will work it out without any damage until they figure out a new pecking order. 

The moult has been a long one this year.  Don't know if the extra hot summer is the reason, or if all the house construction has just been too much stress on the hens. The 1st year layers, of course, basically grew up with all this noise, so they appear oblivious to the racket. Nonetheless, the coops are set up for winter with lights in place.  I attached some oversized plastic electrical boxes in the coops to protect the timers from constantly being knocked down.  Now the issue is the light socket being knocked out of the box... Oy Vey! Will need to work on getting that secured. 

Hopefully, we'll start getting some more fresh eggs in the near future! For now, we are only getting one or two eggs per day! Come'on Girls - let's get back to Egg'n!

Garden-wize, I wanted to make note so that I don't forget next spring, that I planted the Garlic and Onions about the 3rd week of October (10/18/15).  I had never tried onion seeds before, so I was not sure that would even work.  Due to the temps being in the low 40s almost every night, not much was happening even after two weeks. I put my plastic hoop house over the garden, and a week later, I had a nice sprout of onions and garlic.  It's dipping into the high 30s at night now, so I'll leave the hoop house up for another week or two. In the meantime, I plan on adding straw to the garden to help protect the bulbs from frost. Winter is on its way!

Triple Moulty Molt

This past week, the hens in Coop three have headed into the full on feather molt for the year. Coop one has been in partial molt since the end of August. There was one hen who has been pretty much laying an egg every other day, but I think she has given up. Coop two has had no eggs for about four weeks now. So, for now, we seem to be relying on the new girls.  We're getting about two eggs per day, so we should be fine with that. 

Darned Coyotes are hanging a little too close in our back yard. Neighbor told me the other day that he's noticed that we have a wide trail leading right up to our house from the highway. Also, he has noted that there are typically two or three coyotes pacing around the coops almost every morning now. That's not good.  I had commented about the crazy coyote we had a little over a month ago, wondering it it had rabies, but he suspects that it might actually be mange. We have an over population of coyotes in the area and that tends to lead to a lot of unhealthy stress in the groups, resulting in more disease. So, that's not good either!  Just another thing to have to keep an eye on. 

Well, anyways, hopefully, the hens will be done with their molt in a couple more weeks and we'll back in egg production soon. 

Smoke, Construction, Coyote, Stress, minus Eggs... Until Today!

This past week has been really rough on the Clucks! And the humans here too. Saturday morning we woke up to a thick haze and the strong smell of timber burnt smoke. The smoke of wild fires up in Washington was being blown south to us. Basically to the whole Willamette valley. The winds were not of the dangerous intensity, but enough to flip over things that were not battened down. As the day wore on, it got stinkier and smokier.

The Sun looked like a tiny red orb in the sky. It was intense.  Sunday, the sky and smell was a little better, and by Monday, we were pretty much back to normal.

Then our new neighbors started on some new construction. Lots of saws buzzing along with the banging of nails and lumber. Plus, another neighbor brought in a tractor for mowing the tall grass that has been left unattended for more than a year (they are trying to sell the property) and so the blades were clanking as the tractor mower moved over the rock-hard ground, while hitting rocks and other debris that had not been cleaned up around all the nursery stock (trees).  It was extremely noisy and distracting, considering there's been no real attempt until this week to improve the appearance of the property for several years. The new activity was quite foreign to our ears, after all this time.

Early Monday morning, we heard a dog in our backyardish, barking and barking.  When D turned on the yard spot light, it didn't stop, which we thought was hugely odd. Then, all of a sudden it yipped and yodeled... Ahhh, it's a coyote.  But it was persistent! It was not going to leave. After about 15 minutes of all this coyote noisy ruckus, it finally quieted down, and we assume it left.  We could not actually see it.  It was not near any of the coops. So we didn't do any active attempts to find it or scare it away.  But when I was leaving the house to go to work, next to the garage door, laid a dead wild bunny with its face mauled off.  That was disturbing enough, but even more disturbing was the white gravy looking substance on it's neck and hind quarters. There was even some on the pavement around its little body. I have never seen anything like that on dead victims of coyotes, and believe me, there are lots of coyote victims out here for us to find.  This photo is not from our area, but the image accurately represents what we see/experience a lot. So, no, we would never leave our chickens unattended or free to roam across the acreage. 

Between all the smoke, noise and predator filled activity this week, our poor chickens have been stressed to the max.  Add on the fact that several of our Orloffs are starting into their molt. It has not been a good week! So, we have received only two eggs from them, so far, this week. (Until today!) This morning, when I went out to check, there were hens (four) in all the nesting boxes. This should be a BIG egg delivery day. :) 

Additionally, we have been waiting and waiting for the new chickens to start laying eggs.  The Welsummers, according to what I have read, can be late bloomers in the egg laying department. I have read that they can start, basically, anywhere from 20 weeks to 40 weeks, with, of course, 30 weeks being the average.  But, regardless, I have been checking their box every day right along with all the rest. At 22.5 weeks, it's a WooHoo day for the Welsummers. Two cute, small, chocolate-colored eggs were laid this morning! 

Our Orloffs' eggs are a light brown (almost pink) color, weighing anywhere from 45g (1.6 oz) to 67g (2,4 oz) The large eggs are laid by the older hens.  The year old hens typically lay medium sized eggs with a few large ones, on occasion. (I'm using the USA egg size standards). Different countries have different standards for determining egg sizes. Anyway, the new Welsummer pullets are now starting to lay eggs which are distinctly different from our Orloffs! A nice deep brown egg with darker little speckles. The first eggs are 43g/1.5 oz and 41g/1.4 oz. Small and narrow, but it's a start! They will get larger as time progresses.

In the photo with the eggs on the paper, left to right, 1.4g, 1.5g, 1.7g, 1.9g and 2.1g.  The first two are considered small and the last two are considered large. There you have it. 

I have been apologizing to the chicklets every day for all the stress. Finally, things have settled down and we are getting back to normal. Plus, the added bonus of the new pullets joining the ranks with the other hens. 

An Evening Out with the Orloffs

First and foremost, I apologize for the fuzzy photos.  I really should have used my tripod! 

Yesterday was an eventful day! Normally, we keep all the hens/pullets penned up for safety reasons.  There are plenty of predators out here, even in the daytime, from Hawks to Coyotes, Feral Cats and Neighboring Dogs. Also there can be some traffic zipping past our house, on one side or the other. D and L wanted to investigate how well/close the chickens would stay in proximity to the house and their coop. Will they venture over onto the neighboring properties? Will they slip out into the field? Will they attract the predators? Will they proverbially, "cross the road?"

These are the soon to be dinner chickens. They have been the least productive peep that we have experienced to date. We should, at the very least, get 14 eggs per week from them, however, if we are lucky, we get 7 per week.  Typically we get 5 per week. That's food in their bellies without giving much back. Breaking it down, that's about $12 per month expended on all three of them in food (organic), grit, oyster shells, other supplies and coop cleaning efforts.  At the price I sell the eggs, I would only recoup approximately $6 per month.  That's not even breaking even! Soooo... something has got to give.

Of the other two coops, the hens are costing us about the same, $12 and $16 ($28 total), but, if we sold the eggs from the other two coops, we would  recoup about $40 per month.  But we don't sell all the eggs.  Of course, the real benefit to us is that we know we have healthy, happy chickens laying the best chicken eggs in the territory! :)  We personally, can't eat all of the eggs.  Essentially, we try to sell just enough to pay for the grain. So it's not like we are making a "killing" on selling the eggs. On the average, we sell about 2 to 3 dozen eggs per week and eat the rest for ourselves.  We are recouping about $9.00 per week, but the benefit ratio would be better without the three non-productive eggers. Then, of course, there's always the 6 week molting period where a chicken basically does not lay any eggs. We are heading into that period in a few more weeks.

So, that being explained, the question was raised, how safe would it be to let the hens roam the property, on their own during the day, letting them forage more freely outside the safety of the pens.  Our property is not well fenced.  There is a fence for the pasture where the horse moseys around, but even that is not something that slows down any other critter or predatory animal.

The "experimental" hens stayed pretty close to their coop.  They ventured, at most, about 75 feet from it. They did investigate the horse, by running between his legs while he was noshing on some green grass. But, for the most part, they stayed close to the opening of their pen, under the trees.  They did not venture into the field.  It was close to twilight when I let them out, so that might have been a factor. But they did stay outside longer, well after dark, after the other hens had already gone to roost. We will try letting them out again today, a few hours earlier in the day.