Chickens And Eggs

To get a real feel of farming, you need to have farm animals of some type.  Possibly the easiest animal to start with is a chicken.  And wouldn't you say seeing a chicken poking around the barnyard just really makes the farm feel like a farm?  Or a rooster crowing in the morning as the sun comes up?   Oh yeah, I can feel it...

We got chickens from a public school project about 6 years ago.  These chicks were an egg incubation and hatching experiment done by some students.  The neat thing about it was that the eggs were from different hens and the chicks that hatched were of about 6 different breeds.  Donated by a local chicken farmer, the students had a great time watching the eggs crack, open and the little chicks develop in the first week.  This is when we got the chicks, at about 5 days old.  We were pretty excited to get the chicks but also did not know what to expect.  So we started with a fairly large wood crate, about 2 x 3 feet in size.  We bought a heat lamp, thermometer, chick starter feed, a waterer and put it all together.  We also got ourselves a book called, "Raising Chickens for Dummies", an excellent resource for anyone.

As the chicks grew, it was apparent they needed space so we built a coop and an outdoor run; it was a ramshackle space inside our equipment shed that we eventually insulated and closed off to be the coop.  We opened up a small hole in the wall so the birds could move between the outside run and the coop.  This lasted for one year until we realized that having a number of hens with a daily collection of eggs might be even better for us.  So we bought 25 chicks from a distributor and moved the whole issue into our brand new barn.  We designed our barn to house about 60 birds in the coop area.  With outside access to the coop, an inside passage from the coop to the feed storage room, high efficiency lighting, good R20 insulation and a large window, we have an ideal chicken coop.  We have since bought two more batches of laying hens, currently settling on the Plymouth Rock Cross Reds as a durable, calm and hearty breed.  They are such a classic looking bird, mostly white with a few black accents and small combs.  One rooster is in the mix as we've found having a rooster in place keeps the hens a bit calmer.  Somehow he got named Fred.  The original group of chicks all got named by the kids at the time; amazingly we still have 4 of the originals.  So here's the names - William, Henrietta, Jet and Soup...yes Soup.  Chicken Soup!!

Though it is a daily set of chores, hanging out with the chickens at feeding time is quite relaxing and very entertaining.  One starts to realize there are birds with character and you can count on the daily shenanigans.  We have a jumping hen who launches herself at the door when we take the feed in.  Not sure what her intentions are but she literally jumps against the door as it is opened.  We have a nesting box inspector who needs to "supervise" when eggs are collected.  She follows the egg bucket closely, often standing tall to peer into the nesting boxes.  We also have a hen who will "escape" from the outside run if we aren't there by 5 in the afternoon to feed the flock.  She wanders down the barn lane, waiting to see if we are planning to feed the crew.  Yep, those chickens are a whole lot of fun!

2 Weeks Old

4 Weeks Old

A Rooster named Fluffy!

Our first flock at 4 months.

More Thoughts On Land Clearing

The last time I spoke on land clearing was just over two years ago.  We have done some actual clearing and subsequent soil preparation for planting in 2017, but it seems once you get the clearing bug, it's hard to stop.  So in the last weeks of February, I headed back out to the new field area and have cut down a small cluster of trees that were like a "last stand" for the area.  The trees are useful as firewood, especially the spruce and poplar, but the Balsam Fir is miserably sticky to handle, even in the cold of winter with the resin flowing endlessly, it seems.  So down those trees went and now I am slowly piling the wood up in the shed to dry over summer.  I now have a usable planting space nearly 2 acres in size once the stumps are removed.

The interesting thing about the ground in this area of our farm is that it is a transition zone between a very orange sand, hard clay and silt.  The goal is to get this stuff mixed up over a few years of plowing and general soil management.  Already last summer I was able to move some of this sand around into the clay sections.  Because it's located on a slope, the sand has a tendency to travel downhill so mixing the soil and letting it winter is always beneficial.  Plowing before winter allows the clay till to crumble and this in turn allows easier mixing of the sand during the spring harrowing.  We will see how well it does.  A heavy summer rainstorm can find loose sand in a hurry, especially on a hill.

It's quite exciting in many respects.  This last bit of clearing gets the sunshine into the space earlier in the day with less spot shadowing.  The unfortunate part is getting the morning sun to this hill.  The hill faces West!  I've been told not to worry about it as the evening sun can be more beneficial overall, holding the heat level until sundown.  Perhaps some careful record keeping on my part could give way to some answers regarding the hill facing West and how much difference it makes.  I might have to follow up on that!

The upper photo is taken from the South corner of the clearing; the bottom three photos are taken looking back at the last clearing from the North corner.  To note, the dogs insisted on being in the photos!