Category Archives: Chickens

Days May Be Getting Shorter, But Still Lots to Do!

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I know it’s been a while since I last posted, but things have just been busy… there’s just not enough time in the day to get everything done. Normally at this time of the year, things start to wind down around here. The garden slows down, the goat dries up and milking comes to an end for the year, and we start planning when to butcher our turkeys and meat chickens. But this year has been so different and I’m beginning to wonder if we will get everything done by the time winter hits. I really hope so because I really don’t want to be out butchering birds when the snow is flying.

So far the only thing close to being on schedule is our milking season has come to an end. We milked the last time for this year last week and are using up our last quart…


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What Our Chore Routine Is Like

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Chores, chores, chores… every morning and evening we always have chores!! I admit, doing chores every single day… morning and night… day in and day out… can leave us feeling burned out at times. There’s no break… the animals have to be fed and watered… let out during the day and penned up at night… no matter what, whether it’s poop needing scooped, water pans needing scrubbed, food dishes needing filled… there’s always something needing to be done.
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Our Chicks Hatched!

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There’s been all sorts of excitement and anticipation over the arrival of our chicks!  When hatching day finally came, Miley made many trips made to the coop to see if the eggs were hatching. Each trip ended with a little disappointment because she didn’t hear any peeps or see any chicks. As the day went on, she wondered if any would be any hatching, and even at one point, I was wondering the same thing too. I told her we just needed to be patient and wait another day or so because the chicks could be hatching and we didn’t want to risk disturbing them.
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Getting Ready For Our New Arrivals

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Today we’ve been cleaning out the coop while trying not to be blown away, it’s horribly windy out there, and gearing up for the arrival of our new chicks. Excitement and anticipation are mounting as the curiosity over how many chickens will hatch and what they will look like grows. The hens are growing crankier by the minute… but who can blame them? I know I’d be pretty cranky too if I sat crammed in a nesting box with another hen for 20 straight days. I’m sure they’re ready to have this over and done with so they can get out and about with their new bundles of fluff.

Last update, there was quite a lot of drama going on over who exactly was going to be sitting on the nest. It started out with two light colored hens sitting, and then the red hen ran them out every day to lay her egg. Eventually she went broody, claimed a spot on the nest and one of the light ones gave up.


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Hens Gone Broody

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Throughout most of the summer we’ve had two and, at times, three broody hens all sharing the same nesting box. Let me tell ya, having to fight one broody hen when gathering eggs is quite a chore, let alone two or three. Normally I will take a stick, or whatever I can find, and hold the hen back while I reach in and grab the eggs. But with two or three in there, there’s no way to hold them all back, so I just brave up, go for the eggs and deal with the pain of being pecked from all different directions. It makes me laugh when my husband and kids gather eggs because off and on through the summer, they’ve come in saying, “Those (insert random not so nice word) broody hens are so (insert other random not so nice words.)” They can be quite irritating to deal with, for sure.
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Raising Turkeys and Chickens Together

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When we started out with our first flock of chicks, we really didn’t have any plans on adding any other type of fowl to our flock. But then one day, when we stopped into the feed store to get some more chick feed, we saw that they had baby turkeys for sale. And well, one thing led to another and we ended up bring a few of them home. Assuming they’d do just fine living with the chickens, we put them in the coop with the chicks. They got along fine and we just figured they’d all coexist happily.

A few days later, I started doing a little research on raising turkeys. I know, I should have done that before we got them, but it didn’t happen. Lesson learned. So I came across an article that said that turkeys and chickens shouldn’t be raised together. I started doing more research on it and found the same info all over the internet. In fact, I found very little on raising them together successfully.
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Cornish Cross vs Red Ranger Meat Birds

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Before we started raising chickens, I never realized that there were different types of them. To me a chicken was a chicken, whether it laid eggs or was used for meat, I figured they were all the same. It wasn’t until I started doing research on the different types that I learned the differences between meat birds and layers. Even then, I still didn’t really believe there would be that much difference between the two when it came to using them for meat. It wasn’t until we tried butchering a couple of laying breed roosters along with some meat birds that I finally realized the difference.

The layer breed turned out rubbery and tough… so rubbery in fact; it was almost rubberier than a rubber chicken, if you can imagine that…


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Butchering Day

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Each year, when deciding how many meat birds we want to raise, we start out excited and look forward to raising a new flock… and each time we order, we get a little more ambitious and want to try a few more than we had previously… and then each time butchering time comes around we say “UGH” and wonder “what we were thinking?”

So the other day when we checked the chickens and decided butchering day was getting close, we all said “UGH” at the same time. Really, butchering isn’t all that bad, it’s just one of those things we dread and put off, mostly because it’s a lot of work. But once we get started, we really don’t mind doing it.
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Our Turkeys Arrived!

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This year, for some reason, turkeys have been hard to find. None of the feed stores in our town are carrying them, and stores in surrounding towns don’t have them either. We considered not getting any this year since the chicks we got a couple months ago are almost grown up and the thought of having to start over with a brooder and heat lamp in the house, when it’s warm outside isn’t very appealing. But after thinking about it, we decided that we might regret not getting any. Turkeys are the first animal we grew and butchered on our own. It’s been a tradition every year since we’ve been here to raise two turkeys for the holidays. While it’s not really necessary we do it, it’s something we enjoy. Summer just wouldn’t be the same around here without hearing the sounds of turkey chatter and gobbles while watching the turkeys graze and chase bugs as we sit outside in the evenings.
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