More chickens?

More chickens you say? Well, yes. We needed to get more chickens as our supply wasn't keeping up with the demand. Since I'll be at the Windsor Farmer's Market now, I figured a dozen or two wasn't going to cut it.

Enter the Golden Comets, a cross between a Rhode Island Red and a White Leghorn. They're supposed to be good layers of brown eggs. I found out that my feed store carries 16 week old pullets to purchase. We ordered 12 of them and I went to pick them up yesterday morning. I'm hoping that I got the chicken that laid an egg in the crate while they were waiting to be offloaded. Wouldn't that be lucky? They're currently residing in the Boober's kennel. Okay, Boober hasn't resided there since we put breeding groups together (hence the hay chaff on the ground).

Tim and I worked on a small pen they could go into for the evening (nothing more than a modified breeding hut) with a roost and guess what they chose to sleep in last night? That's right, Boo's dog house!

All 13 of them (including Limpy the second banana Barred Holland roo - thanks mom for the phrase).

The girls have taken to Limpy, including grooming him. I've not seen my other chickens do this before.

The only time they dissed him was when I let the other chickens out and they got a good look at the Partridge Chantecler roo. According to mom, they ran over to the fence and left Limpy with a cold shoulder. Here's a shot of him. He is a pretty handsome devil if I do say so myself.

Do we have quail or chickens??

Today Tim came in after giving the chickens a little veggie snack and said that he had a special egg for me. I waited as he pulled out six different eggs from both the Chanteclers and the Hollands until he showed me the "special egg". It came from the Chanteclers, but I could have sworn it was a quail egg. Below is the picture of the crazy egg next to a nickel.




Here's another picture with it next to some of the normal sized eggs we've been getting.




We decided this wouldn't make much of a scrambled egg, so we decided to crack it open to give to Adrienne (aka Boober). The shell was very thick and took a good whack to get it to crack. Only a small portion of the top (or the bottom - if you're so inclined) came off. Try cracking a grape and you'll understand! It was very interesting looking with what appeared to be a fairly colorless yolk with only a smidgen of color that was comma shaped. How bizarre! Boober enjoyed it and downed it in one slurp.



On the sheep side of things, Bergelmir was placed in with the ewes for clean up duty. We figured that if he settled his mother or any of the other Wilkins children we have (Helle and Rafn) that the offspring would go into little white packages. Bergelmir is an old chip off the block, and was walking around with his neck stretched out looking for all the world like he's been walking around following his chin. On a side note, it will give Wilkins a break as the two of them have been trying to determine who is king of the farm. Wilkins wants to keep his crown and Bergel is trying to dethrone him. Arrgh! Why can't boys just behave??

Just us chickens

Tim's away helping Nadine and Glenn put up 5 acres of high tensile electric fencing. So, it's just us chickens. Here we are, the Partridge Chanteclers. Mr rooster is in the center of the picture. They were created in Canada to withstand colder winters. Each chicken has a slight bump/nub of comb on them to prevent frostbite.

Another shot of the girls.
Here are the Barred Holland's. They are also a dual purpose chicken, like the Partridge Chanteclers, but they lay white eggs. Actually, they look more like eggshell white (not as bleach white looking as those in stores). Rooster in the center (looking a bit more greyish than the hens.

Here's another shot of them. Okay, now you see the sneaky part. We ordered two roos of each breed. The Partridges are down to one roo as the other was getting really persnickety (read mean). Needless to say, he was enjoyed in a nice wine based marinade. We still have two of the Barred's as they haven't been really mean to us. We will eventually take care of the one (who happens to have a crooked middle toe - like it was stomped on or has arthritis). Just not right now.Okay, it's more than just us chickens. There are the 2 cats, Adrienne the Border Collie, the 11 rams (we're trying to shrink that number down) and the 14 ewes. Since it's after Halloween, we've got a real good deal worked out with a pumpkin farmer to pick up his pumpkins to get them out of his field (before he discs them in) and we get pumpkins to feed the sheep for an extra energy boost. Here's some of the pumpkins we picked up over by the girls.

Normally we go for the pie pumpkins as they last longer, but as they say beggers can't be choosers. They pointed out to Tim where the pumpkins were this year (they rotate them each year) and unfortunately showed him where the regular jack-o-lantern pumpkins were. C'est la vie! Here's a shot of some of the girls. It's a bad shot, but you can see 3 black girls (Sage, Freya, and guessing Rosemary (can't see the ear tag). Fee Fee is also there (white) and one of the kat twins (either Rakel or Viveka). A grey girl (my guess is Mulan) lying down in the foreground.

In the next picuture, there is Celebrian (moorit in the background), Rafn (black ewe peering around bale box), Helle (grey in front of Celebrian), Sabrina (white), Sylph (grey lying down to left), Arwen (moorit) standing betwee Sylph and there's Mulan again.

Looks like we're missing a few girls. Brisingamen (black ewe lamb from Freya) and the other kat twin seems to be missing. Probably chilling out near the barn (that would be to the left of the last picture.

Soon there will be breeding groups. Stay tuned to see who goes to whom.

EGGADS!!

Tim has been having some talks with the chickens as they haven't started laying yet. He's told them that if they didn't start laying soon that he was going to eat them one at a time.

I didn't realize how persuasive his talks were to the chickens. Tonight, when closing them up for the night, Tim spyed an egg! The Partridge Chanteclers have done a good job! This is our first egg from our own chickens.

It's kind of small, but I'm really happy. He found it on the floor of the coop, even though there are nest boxes in there for them to use. We'll need to do some things to make the chickens feel confident to use the boxes.

Now we need to start cajoling/threatening the Barred Hollands!

I'm so happy!

Getting back into the groove

Okay, so I'm bad about blogging. There are only so many hours in the day to do stuff and my life is kind of busy. I had intended on blogging on a regular basis, but got out of the habit. Then I thought that it'd be fun to blog when there are only lambs on the ground. We all know that lambs are the cutest thing in the world, but I didn't get to that this year because we were in Hawaii during lambing. Okay, not during the whole time, but pretty much. We missed two out of four births because we were away.

We also got chicks this year and they arrived in the mail (from Texas) the day after we got back home. The picture below shows the Partridge Chanteclers. We have 6 pullets and 2 roos of that breed and also got the Barred Hollands with the same pullet and roo numbers.

Now for the why I'm getting back in the groove. One reason - guilt. Tim and I went to Michigan during the MFF (Michigan Fiber Festival) and met a bunch of Shetland people. We went to get different ram genetics and managed to pick up 4 new boys (3 purchased and one rental). While there, we spent time with some Shetland folks we hadn't seen in at least two years, if not longer and got to meet others that we only knew through the web. One of those people was Garrett Ramsay, a fellow Sagittarian, who's blog resides here. He made my first and only comment on the blog and told me to update this thing. So here goes, Garrett, this blog post is for you. :-)