Category Archives: Farming

Moving the pen caused loss

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday I moved the Leghorn pen, to give them some fresher grass, as well as to collect the five eggs they’d laid. For some reason without a box they all lay in a different spot, so the eggs are not in a pile or even close to one another, but all spread out. The pen they are in, to remind readers, is the Superyard, which originally was a baby containment gate system in our home. I carried it outside one day whatever year that was, and the rest is history. Since this year the roof consists of a large piece of plywood, which is VERY heavy, I can’t move the pen easily. My method is now: two long 2×4′s, get them under the pen, which I can do on the sides, then pull the pen over the 2×4′s to fresh grass. It works, it’s easy compared to any other method I could choose from. :)

This 2×4 method to move the Superyard pen makes collecting the eggs, as yesterday proved, easy yet very hard. The dog was running around and I had no human helper. I pulled the pen, intending to stop before getting to the first egg. I pulled and dog came and ran away. I pulled too far. He got an egg. Urg! Oh no! He got TWO eggs! How did that happen? Hmm. I pulled it too far too fast. I didn’t realize how much of my strength I had put into it. It’s not that I had to output the strength, it’s more like, I put more pull into it than I needed to, without realizing how far I had pulled. I ran after the dog, I could see the white egg sticking out of his mouth, he must have had two in there, he has a big mouth. :) I couldn’t get him, so he went off under the deck to munch on his unexpected bonus win. He’s quick, I know that, so I pulled the pen fast so that I could get the next egg, there were only three left to collect, and one was right there a few inches away, I could get it if I hurried, without worrying about the dog getting it. I hurried alright, smack — crunch. I didn’t pay attention in the rush of it all and smooshed the egg, I didn’t have enough clearance to get over the egg. Usually I do using the 2×4 method, sometimes extra care needs to be invoked, and in this case, I didn’t pay close enough attention to consider that. :(

So I carefully pulled the pen the rest of the way, scanning my environment for the dog as I pulled, and I got the only two eggs I could collect, and pulled the pen to it’s final grassy position for the day.

The dear Leghorns laid 5 nice eggs yesterday, but I only got 2 to take into the house for human consumption. The dog took 2 and got a 3rd as extra-bonus-bonus.

The hennies are all doing fine. They are laying fairly well, I’m just not counting their eggs. Somedays we don’t get many from either pen, not the same day necessarily. It’s 2 in one pen, 5 in another, or 6 in one and 4 in the other, or none and 7, or 3 and 5, etc.

It’s mid-point in Summer, sort of. Laying of eggs will go on, if all goes well, into November, maybe longer. I do hope to have good enough surroundings for some of them to continue on laying in Winter. I want to get some new girls, this fall if I can, who will be new layers next Spring. If we wait until Spring, we won’t have new layers until Summer or later. The Leghorns we have hatched in October the other year. They began laying in March. That was nice. So if I can get some hens to keep laying over Winter and let some molt, then have new pullets laying begin in early Spring, and the molters will begin laying then or a bit later, and during later winter/early spring I can let the winter layers molt if they want to or not if they don’t want to. Sounds nice, but it won’t work out so easily.

We are at the point to plan “What do we do with our old biddie Leghorns”. They are not cheap to keep around, and as long as they lay eggs they are valuable … we won’t be eating those stringy chickens, they are scrappy Italian production facilities, not to-be-eaten-by-us-hens. The other hens we have, the Wyandottes and Australorps are much meatier. I don’t want to eat them either. They are my dear friends. I want to raise chickens to eat. We raised these chickens to lay eggs for us to eat. In worse times I can see eating your old biddies, but not in these times, currently. :)

Hennie Pennie Talk

Posted on by
Reply

I haven’t written about my Hennie Pennies for awhile, they deserve a few words. They didn’t lay over Winter, that’s alright. They were slow in getting to the laying part of it this Spring though, but did do it. The Leghorn hens are old, for hens. We got them in February 2003, they hatched in October 2002. As Pullets their first laying began in March 2003. That information combined with this years timing means they are in their 3rd laying season, and doing well. Not every day for each one, but some seem to be every 2 days, and some are every day almost. We have 7 Leghorns and often get 4 white eggs a day. They are our only white egg layers.

Our green layer is Hawklady. She’s doing alright, laying often: every other day, many times every day for a few or up to a week, sometimes off for 2 or 3 days, but overall, a good layer. Sporatic pattern, but laying.

The 2 Wynadottes, brown layers, are laying, as are the other brown layers, the 4 Australorps. That’s 6 hens in the brown egg category, and we get 2 or 4 eggs sometimes each day, often more so 4, and sometimes 5 or 6.

I have been horrid about counting the eggs on a sheet of paper, or on the computer. I have these neat little plans in my head, and they don’t translate onto visual very often, to my shame. I really want to have accurate figures, and fall off the wagon too often.

I have had too many eggs to do anything with at times this year, but not for very long. I have a rash of eggs to give to the animals now, old ones that are too old for people to eat. Dog and cat will eat the ones they want to, not bad ones usually. It’s not that they are “bad” only eggs with bacteria in them are “that bad” and they are eggs usually that are cracked or filthy for days on end, but almost universally will have a crack somewhere, hairline or bigger, whether or not it’s found by a knowing human. So my contention here is only that “bad eggs” come about because of hairline fractures in the shell, and that fracturing allows the introduction of bacteria.

I am not saying there is no other way for an egg to go bad, just that this is the main thing about it most of the time, in my mind. I never saw a bad egg before last year, and it was a very dirty egg, about 2 weeks old, I opened it up and said “yup!”. Further understanding came when I did see that hairline crack afterwards.

Since having hens that lay I’ve been careful to inspect the eggs and use whatever is cracked or hairline cracked right away, but that doesn’t mean a super-hairline crack could go unfound, of which I did have one of those the second egg year. None others that year though.

This year I’ve had a couple of bad eggs, my practices are worse though. It’s just that I don’t “always” clean the eggs right away, and then I often clean them before I use them. Eggs built up this year and I didn’t use them as fast as I wanted to, so I had a couple of “going bad” things when I did get to some “sort of older” eggs. I don’t have a box for my Leghorns to lay in and it can get messy when they aren’t moved on the grass to a new location ‘religiously’, therefore in the case of things as they are, the eggs aren’t “lilly white” when I get them. I need to get a box out to them, that alleviates dirty broken eggs of any sort, if I make sure the straw or hay is clean each morning. Rain makes my nesting boxes fall apart. They are simply the water boxes we get 6-one-gallon jugs in, with a few cuts and held up with bungee cords. It works wonderfully. Tropical rainstorms defeat that system though, the bottom drops out. I could paint the box first, then it’d hold up. But that is neither here nor there as to why I haven’t done so. Just the fact is, I COULD put a new box out there once a week. We have enough boxes available at any time for such. It’s the basic “I designed it” but “don’t do the every-day-of-it” so well. My actual design calls for an easier lid for that hen pen, and the box that I use to be painted before installation. As it is, the top is too heavy and I could go on and on … just a different top would make the pen easy to move again and it’d be no problem to do that or to get egg out from the grass. The current top is just a big aggrevation, a piece of thick plywood. It doesn’t blow away with tropical gusts though. :) So I will just say, I need to put a new box out there and just live with it. Replace it when it needs it. I failed myself ;)

The brown and green eggs are from the A-frame and that situation is much different. Their egg nest shelf isn’t for eggs anymore. They just sleep up there. They lay in the corners in the grass for some reason suddenly this Spring, instead of the lofty nest area. So I recently pushed a boxed in the area under the loft, and it stays, gets wet from the ground, doesn’t fall apart since it just is sitting on the ground in the first place, and it dries out eventually, the 90% of the eggs are layed in the box now, and the others are just in the corners in the grass, and they are mostly clean, just spot cleanings and they are mostly uncracked, leaving the language open to allow for a crack or two in the past or future. ;)

I haven’t “refridgerated” eggs before since they can be used in a few weeks and stored at room temperature just fine. Our house is without A/C this year and last though, so it’s an issue with ickier eggs to keep them for a few weeks. Ickier eggs need to be used right away really, especially without cooler air. 80 degrees F. is not “room temperature” :lol: Because we now have “two” refridgerators I am now starting to put eggs in the old fridge, but I have a lot of eggs left from the end of May as well as June that I need to just give to the cats and dog now. Eggs that are cleaned, if they are white, are not pretty, so I’ve not tried to sell any, or had opportunity to give them away fresh. I would be comfy giving stained eggs to some people, but not most. In any case, my hennies are really not laying THAT much more than I can use. For now I have to just use what I get and get a better nest box situation going for the Leghorns. With that, I’ll post this and go get a box ready. :)

Exciting day

Posted on by
6

Today our hens laid! As far as we know, three today. It’s raining quite heavily now, frequent lightening, so we haven’t checked the hens in awhile. :)

Hawklady, one the Leghorns, then one of the Wyandottes laid. So we have a green, white, and brown each. My favorite combination! I didn’t see who laid the brown egg. Frank did. It was a Wyandotte, but he knows not which one. (He can’t tell the difference between them, for some reason ;) I can, Trinity has a tri-topped comb, and Pointsettia has a pointy curved topped comb, distinctive, both of them, and their feather patterns are a bit different as well.)

Earlier this afternoon Frank went to the store to get a few things, as well as get some mousetraps. We found a dead baby mouse on the front walk earlier this week. So that signifies other mice around no doubt. Foster, our outside cat, might have gotten that mouse, or another cat prowling around might have. In any case, the ants ate it, not a cat.

So Frank was at the store, and there’s Scarlet in the kitchen holding a mouse in her mouth. Russell saw it first and drew my attention to it. It was a regular sized big mouse. Well I couldn’t do anything, just keep my eye on her and the mouse in her mouth. It was alive. She held onto it, growling at the other cats gathering around her, following her … she’d put the mouse down now and then, it’d sit then try to run, then Scarlet would just pounce again and grab it up in her mouth to hold it.

Frank finally got home. He picked Scarlet up and put her in the garage, with the door down. We checked her a bit later and she still was holding that poor mouse. Another time Frank went in the garage to do something and Scarlet got in the house, holding the mouse still. I got her back out. It wasn’t fun, not wanting the mouse to fall on me, or for me to really touch it. So then she was in the garage again. Later I looked and didn’t see her. She must have been hiding. But on the step there was some white thing and gooky blood-like stuff around it. Not a lot, just a small thing, um, mouse-size innerds of some sort I guess. Sometime after that Frank looked in the garage and Scarlet came out of hiding and back into the house. She was all cutesy rubbing our legs and proud of herself. :rolleyes: Doing what God intended for her to do.

We have mousetraps now then. I hate using them. I really like mice. We had pet mice when I was growing up. Wild mice are different, I know. I still think they are cute though. That poor mouse that Scarlet had in the house, it was squeeking a few times, right after she’d put it down then pick it up again. Sigh. Poor little thing.

We live out in the country but not totally, but it’s country around and our yard is big. We have gotten mice in the house a couple of times in the past. I haven’t seen any in the house, just know they might be in the garage. So Scarlet’s mouse from today shows that they can get in the house. She got one, afterall, and is an indoor (totally) cat.

So it was a big day here, three eggs! And a live cat and mouse game.

Breezy to Gusty

Posted on by
3
Now that it’s later … it’s now8:30 am … the forecast has changed and it’s about 40-degrees even … instead of the 8-degrees higher it was said to supposed to be about now a couple of hours ago. :wink: Weather changes … changes … :smile:

Yesterday the accuweather forecast for Tuesday, today, said that the storm coming through would bring temperatures down so that highs today would be around 49 or lower. It rained most of the night long.

Right now it’s 50-degrees, very breezy, balmy, and the current day forcast says a high of 57 degrees. Hourly outlook has the temperature going down to the high-40′s over the next couple of hours, then climbing up to the high-50′s.

I’ve been outside already, I heard metal roofing flapping around and had to be sure it wasn’t the Leghorns SuperYard roof floating around the yard. That would mean possible white birds getting out and I’m not up to that chase. I mean I’d have to do it, but it’d be so hard. I’m still regaining energy from Sunday’s sickness. [The sound I heard was loose roofing material that was on the ground near the fence to the west. One of them ended up near the deck ... so yes, the breezy gust were moving metal roofing around the yard, 'quite a few feet'.]

Waking up today I do feel better than I did waking up yesterday. That’s a plus!

So it’s a very breezy day. The last few have been pretty breezy with lake wind advisories being released by the weather officials. We don’t have a lake nearby that we traverse upon ;) but a lake wind advisory always means gusty breezyness that we need to make sure the hennie pennie roofs are well weighted down for.

Whoa! We just had a gust roll over the house, the direction it took made the house a wind break for the backyard … that’s good. It was a very powerful gust, the house was rattling. I guess I should trudge out back with some more firewood to put on the SuperYard roof.

Hens, Lights, and ears

Posted on by
Reply

Well it’ s rather wet and dreary and chilly again today. Yesterday the hennies gave me a white egg, then three brown eggs, and that was it. Today it was exactly opposite. First a brown egg, then three white eggs, and nothing more so far.

It’s funny to look at the eggs in their prospective cartons side by side. I always store each eggs days in a separate carton, and in the order they were gathered, and I also decide which of a gathered-at-the-same-time came first and second, and so forth, based on the temperature in my hand feeling. So it’s fairly accurate day in and day out, but on slow days, dead on certain. ;)

So that’s two days of just 4 eggs total (unless a seemingly-miracle happens in the next couple of hours.) It was only the day before yesterday that we had a nice amount, and the past week has had high counts. I think I have to go back to February 17th to find a 5-egg day.

So I am hoping this can be pinned on the chilly wet dreary weather, somehow.

Otherwise though, I can understand them. I’m rather drugery-minded on days like this too.

Speaking of that, I saw a commercial, really an “infommercial” on TV last week during the night. I had the TV on and had fallen back to sleep, and awoke hearing talk of light, and seeing better, and such things that’d really catch my ears, and did.

What it was: Ott-lites. A Dr. Ott created a different kind of lightbulb due to working on a Disney project many years ago. Lights that actually let plants grow indoors under their light for good results.

These are lights that are good for seeing better in the darker times, seeing true colors, and well, they should be a cheery presence for these drudgery times. I was able to get one this past weekend. We went to Fry’s and found a task-light for my bedside. They, at Fry’s have other models as well.

The lightbulbs are rated for 10,000 hours of use. That is way more than traditional modern lightbulbs. The light is not like flourecent, though it turn on similarly. It doesn’t have a nasty hum. It doesn’t have any real glare, just lots of wonderful light.

One day I hope to have a few standing lamps, Ott Lites.

I’m glad to have my bedroom light and it will become very useful for me if I can train myself to stay awake and read in the early evening again (as I do in non-winter times). As well, with my “insomia” likeness at times, this light will encourage me to be able to read in the middle of the night. Other book lights have only frustrated me. Lamps frustrate me too. I cannot stand to read from overhead lights, as in a fan fixture. So I’ve fallen into a “watch DVD’s or TV” mode for late night non-sleeping times.

I guess part of it is my eyes, aging. I do wear correction for distance, and do alright with close work naturally, but there is strain in bad light. That’s the aging, the irritation with reading in artificial light. The difference being, Ott Lite doesn’t seem to bother me, but I do need to test it out more. I have several books that I’m in the middle of reading, and haven’t really picked one up in several days … last night I did though, and just couldn’t find my “spot” it had gotten lost, so I have to find that spot again!

Oh too, about correction lenses. I used to wear contacts, and in the last few years I stopped wearing them voluntarily and just wore my glasses instead. In the past year plus I try not to wear my glasses unless I need them too, and I started wearing an older pair of glasses happily at that point. So it’s been beneficial for me to stop wearing contacts. One thing contacts did was give me trouble reading. They corrected far vision too well, so much that close vision suffered.

I’ve read of eye correction methods and am sad that I never heard of them in my younger years. But I do what I can in my older ones without the aide of knowlegable ones around me, to just pretty much do what I can in life to train my eyes a bit better.

One trick I have is if I don’t think I’m seeing well, or just took off my glasses, I shut my eyes for a moment or two, then open them being sure, totally certain, to focus on something very near, like look down at the fabric of my dress on the arm or chest, looking at the texture, so that my eyes naturally sharply focus, then gently look away to further things. It works wonders, keeps blurr-shock away ;) for one, but I do believe I am seeing better than I USED to without glasses.

Glasses overall make me feel ill anyhow. They are unnatural and I’m glad to do away with them in most cases of living. Contacts were helpful, but ended up being less helpful as the years went by. Dr.s like to fine tune contacts and that can get you into stronger and stronger prescriptions easily. I’m out of that ratrace, so gladly too!

As I’ve been typing this Victoria came to me with her second loose-tooth getting looser. I told her to go to her Daddy and ask him to check and see if it was ready. He helped her with her first the other day. She was a bit hesitant, so I brought out thecard we’ve been holding for awhile and told her that if she went down to Daddy and he could get it out, then we’d have her ears pierced this weekend.

She proudly ran away, then soonly ran back holding it, prouder than a peacock. :)

So’s she has a gap in the front on the bottom, two side-by-side missing. She is now telling me how good it feels to have the loose tooth gone, she doesn’t “have to go in and wiggle it” anymore. I remember how that was. ;)