Busy Days Ahead

I have been thinking about starting plants for my garden a lot lately.  I saved seeds from last years harvest, and I want to make sure they will sprout.  I am not planting pinto beans this year, those just take way too much effort and room that I could grow other things in the same space.  I will probably plant a lot more bush type green beans this year, I am going to plant some ginger and garlic this year too.  I bought some seed potatoes and a few seeds already.  I need to plant things to supplement my chickens feed too.  I will plant pumpkins, cabbage, sunflowers and oats for them and probably field corn too....maybe some wheat.  I sure wish I had a tractor to plow with, it is going to hard for me to till as much as I need to, to get the ground prepared.  I have been thinking about burning off the grass and weeds before things start greening up.  A lot of the grasses here have gigantic root systems that spread and it is difficult to cut through them with my hand tiller, I am thinking burning may damage the roots enough that they will die back.  I need to expand my herb garden by about 30 feet and enclose my blueberries inside the fencing.  I am hoping to get more of a blueberry harvest this year, along with strawberries.  I also want to get asparagus planted, I pulled seeds off of the wild asparagus I found growing in the middle of my Chicasaw plum grove.  I still want to dig and move more of the plum trees to a sunnier location too.

Since we cut a passage into the garden from the chicken area, they have been eating everything green there was, they have chowed down on what remained of my brocolli plants too and have been chewing on the stalks.  I just hope once I plant my garden they don't decide to jump the fence and eat it all.  My upper garden has grown well and is high enough on a hill that it doesn't flood when it rains, the others are in what the call the bottoms...and by the creek, it is the best dirt I have, but there is the danger of flooding down in that area.  I may end up having to dig it out some and clean up the creek bed so it drains properly to avoid flooding.  I am hoping we don't get 8 inches of rain in two days this year!  One garden that was tilled, I never planted because of the rain...and how fast the weeds grew up in it...I had it tilled three times, then I tilled it three times with my little tiller.  But, you can't plant anything in standing water and last year, it just got to be too late in the season and I gave up on that one.  You get smarter and wiser to the ways of your land, one of the reasons I have four separate gardens was to see where in my yard would be best for growing things.  This year I am going to plant a few things in my front and side yards and hope the rabbits don't chow down on it before I get fencing up.  I still want more fruit trees too.  Which reminds me, I have not sprayed the Dormant oil yet!  Maybe I should do that today...if not, my harvest will be awful like the first season.

I also need to power up the incubator and get it regulated.  I have Dominique eggs to hatch and I need to get the brooders ready for the geese and chicks before they get here.  I still need to finish the breeding pens too.  I will be able to use them for the chicks when they are old enough, and it is warm enough outside for them to stay outside full time.  I have some 90% shade cloth coming for over those, I need gates for them too...so I need to get busy making them or finding some that will work.  Needless to say, I have a lot on my mind...and it seems like I have more than enough to do for about 5 people!  Lol, that doesn't even scratch the surface though, I still have to keep the house clean, the laundry done, the shopping for feed for all the critters and ourselves, and cooking...and I still have not finished going through the boxes from when we moved here.  We still have a bunch in the office to go through...not counting all the stuff in the shed.  I want to create a logo for our farm and a sign for the posts out at the driveway.  I need to look into farm taxes and create a business plan, find out rules and regulations, get with our Agricultural Extension Agent, find out what certifications I need to start selling chickens...and probably my list will get longer the warmer it gets.  I have a lot to do and daylight is a wasting.

Learning More Medical

I have never had any experience with doctoring on animals other than dogs and cats after surgery, but having over 100 chickens...that is changing quickly.  I have a book on chicken care, but it doesn't cover every situation.  I have a rooster with what I believe may be an eye worm.  From what I have read, it can be transmitted through fecal matter of roaches...or a chicken eating a roach?  We have had a good amount of rain lately and I have not seen any roaches, but you don't always see them outside.

This morning, I have to work on my rooster...and I need to check the rest of their eyes for it.  It actually makes the tear duct swell and a white blob about the size of a small marble comes up, sometimes you can see the worms on the surface of the eye itself.  I do not see any worms, but it has to be early stage eye worm infestation.  I have to remove the lump of gunk from his eye and give him a shot of penicillin.  This rooster is not very nice, he bit me twice yesterday...I have a couple of bruises on my hand from him, so I need to wear gloves and long sleeves for sure.  I was told to put VetRx on the roof of his mouth and it will make the worm vacate.  I hope I can do this...

I have been working on trying to get breeding pens set up.  I am building on to the run too.  I need to separate out all of the roosters from the hens for at least three weeks before I start trying to breed any purebred chickens.  I put in an order for female geese for our two ganders, and ordered some chicks too.  I need a replacement rooster, a Silver Laced Wyandotte and a Dominique Rooster, plus I ordered a few females for our Polish Rooster and the Gold Laced Wyandotte.  I am going to hatch some eggs too, I have my Dominiques separated for over a month now, so I am going to hatch some too...I am not positive my Dominique rooster is fertile...but, it never hurts to try.

I am gathering more eggs every day, yesterday I got 35!  We had several days in a row that were just gorgeous...highs in the 60's and bright sunshine filled days, today it is pouring rain.

Not Again!

I am upset.  The trail camera I got to catch an image of our predator is not working.  I thought it was something I might have done, but my waterproof camera has condensation in it, the screen just has snow on it, it doesn't shut down and you can't access the menu.  When my husband set it up, he put fresh batteries in it that should have lasted a couple of months...they lasted four days.  We have had another rooster killed too.  There were files on the card, all they showed was black snow looking stuff on the screen...all of them.  I had been putting up the chickens, the rooster that died was a special needs rooster...he was knock kneed and had what appeared to be a dislocated toe.  Not sure how he ended up like that, but I had separated him because of his issues.  I put him in a pen with my original batch of chickens, but he stayed in a chicken tractor by himself at night, so my rooster Mr. Poofy Face wouldn't pick on him.  When he was in the Rooster House they pecked on him so much he had no more feathers on the back of his head.  I figured him against one rooster would be better, he had more of a chance to get away from him in that pen.

My husband looked for him, walked around the pen and figured he had gone to the back of the chicken tractor.  The chicken tractor had a tarp on it, so you have to squat down to see into it.  It rained all day today, and it was really cold...I did not check to make sure there were no holes in the chicken tractor wire, if the predator dug under, it would be hard to tell with all the puddles.  I had spread pine needles all over in the pen so the chickens would have something to walk on besides mud...didn't see any predator tracks.  I found the rooster under a tarp that covers a large dog kennel that some of the chickens stay in at night...I could see his legs sticking out from under it.  When I pulled him out from under the tarp and Inspected him for damage, he was missing his head, neck and part of his breast.  The other chickens and duck that were killed, appeared to be killed in one location and taken to another based on piles of feathers and blood found...there was no pile of feathers for this one.

I didn't let my chickens out of most of the coops today, only the chickens in kennel got let out, I am tired of finding dead animals...the count stands at 5 chickens and 1 duck.  I am having a few issues with roosters fighting because they are locked up all day.  One of my Cream Legbars had one of his waddles (red hangy down thing under his beak) torn badly a few days ago, I separated him and thought about trying to glue it or stitch it up, I just kept putting it off and even though it is still torn...I put him back in with the other chickens in the big coop.  The waddle section torn kind of curls down and hangs, but it scabbed over well, I may have to learn how to "dub" for future injuries like that.  I hope and pray he will be Ok, I looked and chicks at the hatchery of the Cream Legbars sell for $47.00 each, they are a rare breed and they lay blue eggs, that is why I got them...I have two roosters and four hens so I can breed more...I bought hatching eggs and raised them myself, the hens have only been laying a month and I haven't built my breeding pens yet.  The rooster that died last night was my Silver Laced Wyandotte, one that I purchased for breeding purposes...can't breed them now, well...not until I get a replacement.  I have a Gold Laced Wyandotte rooster, but that won't give me pure color...but it will make them sex-linked so I can tell males from females at hatch.

We have been getting a lot of rain, it puts a damper on my building projects...maybe tomorrow will be a better day?

Predator - What Are You?

We have been dealing with a predator problem for several weeks now, I really don't want to loose any more animals.  It is rather distressing to think you have a secure safe place for your animals, only to go out and find one headless or just missing period.  We had not had any predator problems until recently, and now we are puzzled as to what is killing our poultry.  After the first killings, I try and make sure all of the chickens are put up.  I finished the rooster coop with hardware cloth and made the door and hung it.  I even rebuilt the duck house and skinned it with metal, put polycarbonate for a window and made a lockable door.  But...roosters can be stubborn and sometimes they get up too high to reach them...like on top of the chicken coops or up over 15 feet in the tree.  We have lost five of our flock, the last two were roosters that decided to roost in the tree, I tried to get them down from the coop roof...but they flew over to the tree and just climbed even higher.  Those that choose to spend the night in the tree are the latest lost.  Don't let anyone tell you chickens don't fly...they fly to the top of the coop 8 feet high, they fly from the top of that coop at least 30 feet through the air to the top of the other coop or a bit further to the tree.

I think our predator is striking between 5:30am and 6:30am.  Today, it tripped the trap...but was not caught.  My husband pulled the cameras card, but the images were black...and I found out maybe it was my fault, I have not dealt with a trail camera before so I need to read the instructions.  Apparently you have to turn it off to pull the card and when you turn it on to put the card back in, it needs to be in test mode or something.  I just didn't know...so we are still in the dark as to what it or they may be.  My husband found talon marks among the feathers that came from the last rooster killed, so it could be a hawk or owl...but what tripped the trap?  Would a bird try to get in a live trap for marshmallows and tuna fish?  I have been trying a lot of different foods since the dead rooster didn't work...and neither did the canned cat food.

I have been hearing an owl at dusk when I put all the chickens, ducks and geese up for the night.  We have had no losses during the daylight hours.  But we have been letting the dogs out to run the land again.  I worry about them getting in the street in front of the house...although we don't have a lot of traffic, the speed limit is 60 miles an hour and logging trucks do use the road.  We have been taking the dogs on walks too...all the way to the back of the property so they can mark their territory.  Our dog Sophie keeps getting in the chicken pen, she ignores the chickens...she just likes their food and droppings, which I think is disgusting, but at least she doesn't chase or harm the chickens and she does mark that territory too.

I need to get out and do chores, another cold front is suppose to hit and we may get ice or snow out of this one, I still have not integrated the last of my babies in with the other chickens and they are way to big to be in the brooder any more...I guess I had better get busy.

Don't look if you are squeamish...these pictures are from one of our predator attacks.  I never thought I would be so mad or touch dead critters like this.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Yesterday was very cold and windy, I am not sure it ever got above freezing.  I live in Texas for a reason...I dislike extremely cold weather.  When it is 16 degrees and windy...I am not a happy camper...especially when I have a lot of chores outdoors.  When you have over a hundred chickens, ducks and geese...you are responsible for keeping them alive through frigid temperatures.  I spent the day breaking ice, hauling water, putting pine shavings out, throwing scratch grains out for them, scraping frozen poop off of roosts, gathering eggs before they froze, filling up feeders with dry food because the fermented feed froze up...I even let them have access to the compost pile by taking down the fence.  I had to let them out...they tend to swarm me when they have been locked up in the coop and run and it is hard to even feed them or change out water.  I had to mix up the grains I feed them and they kept jumping in the big trash can I mix it in.  So, I opened the door and they flooded out...it is really funny standing back and watching them taking off running across the yard, some on the roosts fly out the door so if I don't want to get hit I have to stand back away from the entrance.

I have not started on the breeding pens, but I need to soon if I am going to start breeding chickens and selling them this year.  I have a lady who I have sold eggs to that wants hatching eggs. I need to separate the hens with a fertile rooster to get pure bred chickens.  I have a roofed area I need to enclose for this purpose.  It is very cold again today and it may rain, so it ain't happening today...I would much rather it be at least in the forties to spend the day constructing anything.  I am no "Spring Chicken" and the cold tends to make me ache a bit and when my hands are cold, it is difficult to hold on to the tools.  I have already called my husband to take me to the emergency room once...I would prefer not having to do it again.  He was good about me calling him when I got locked in the rooster coop too...I wonder sometimes how I got so lucky with him, he doesn't complain about it...he does tease me a bit though.  

I know my husband loves me...that is why I married him.  I try doing all kinds of things, he is my backup...and when I screwed up the lawn tractor, he fixes it so I can do it again!  Lol, I really don't want to mess things up, just weird things happen sometimes...and in tall grass you miss things sometimes.  He had changed out the blades and done a complete tuneup on the lawn tractor, so I thought I would mow more in a different area so he wouldn't have to...we had a man mow this area with his tractor so I thought it was safe to mow.  Long story short...I hit a downed branch and the mower blades being sharp cut it and it got stuck in the blades and shut down the motor to them.  I could not get it out and I messed up the blades.  Kinda like when he got the tire fixed because it had a slow leak...and I forgot to check it and took off and the tire came off the wheel...OK, so I did it more than once, but something was wrong with the valve stem, and after he got it fixed...I thought it would last.  It didn't.  I bought a new tire for the lawn tractor so we could have a spare, I was good and stayed on this side of the creek when I mowed the last time...he winterized it and put it up before I could break it again.

This is all new to me you know?  I was born and raised in a city.  Out in the country, there are a lot of chores that are simular to city chores...but a larger scale and probably a bit more dangerous.  I am just glad when I mowed by the pond I didn't fall in with the lawn tractor or loose it in the creek.  Instead of trimming hedges with electric trimmers, I trim trees with saws and a machete.  Instead of planting just a few flowers, I plant fruit trees and huge gardens.  I planted a Granny Smith apple tree, two pecan trees and a large blueberry bush before this last cold spell.  I dug up and transplanted 9 Chicasaw Plum trees a few weeks before that...and a Santa Rosa Plum.  This is a good time to transplant stuff...if it wasn't so cold, I would go dig up some muscadine grapes and transplant them closer to the house too...maybe once it warms up...

Dangerous Times

Living in the woods, we knew we may have a lot of wildlife running around.  We actually saw far less than we thought we would.  I am not sure if it is because the year we moved here was a really dry year in the way of precipitation and animals moved on or what.  The past few months we have been seeing more rabbits and squirrels, less birds...but that may have to do with the scare tape I have on the fencing...and less deer.  It is not that they aren't around, we see tracks and other signs of animals when we go for walks.  We have had Canadian Geese land on our pond and spend days...our geese talk to them but can't see them when they land, as do cranes of some sort.  We know we have raccoons around and that they like eating turtles.  We have had packs of coyotes run through our yard in the middle of the night, and we were told that there was a fox den up on the shooting range.  We also have Hawks that circle overhead at times, the geese keep a close eye on them and if they get to close, they honk loudly and put their wings out from their bodies trying to look even larger than they are.

I bring these things up as we still don't know exactly what has killed four of our chickens and one of our ducks.  We had no deaths from predators up until now.  The first 4 of our poultry were missing their heads and necks, one was dragged to a corner of the fence in it's pen and whatever it is...grabbed it's wing and attempted to pull it through the fence...this was a full grown rooster in a completly fenced in pen.  We have set a trap and had it set for the past two weeks, we have caught nothing in the trap.  We have a game camera set up and it has infrared and a pretty good range on it, and we have seen nothing in the pictures, other than ourselves and our dogs.  The last rooster that was killed, I thought we had our proof...but when I pulled the card to view them, the batteries had run out two days prior...it pissed me off that the batteries only lasted 4 days!  I inspected the dead rooster trying to see If I could figure it out, it was killed in the same pen as the one before it, killed in one area and there was a lot of damage to this one, there were three piles of feathers this time and a lot of the feathers had small chunks of meat still on them.  I had to pull the body from the fence to see the damage, not only was it's head and neck missing this time, but a whole wing and all of the breast too.  The remaining wing was hanging on by a thread of tendon.  Among the feathers, I found bones striped clean and scattered through the main pile of feathers, it looked almost like they had been cut.  I didn't notice any obvious tracks, but I was thinking I was looking for raccoon tracks.

I have been doing my best to get all of my chickens, ducks and geese put into their houses at night.  The roosters sometimes have different ideas.  They will fly to the top of the big coop...it is about 8 feet high at the back, when I try to get the rest put up sometimes the ones on the roof fly to the branches of a tree by the rooster coop and roost for the night 15 to 20 feet off the ground.  I refuse to climb a tree and try to wrangle a rooster while on a ladder, I would probably end up breaking a bone.  The roosters who spend the night in the tree sometimes get lucky...sometimes they die.  I have kept them in the coop for the past few days to protect them.   My husband went and looked at the destruction and tried to figure out what is killing them, he saw tracks I did not see...talon marks and prints.  That night when I put up all of the poultry, I heard an owl for the first time since we have been out here.  I am not sure if the owl is killing the chickens, because it puzzles me that two of the carcasses were partially pulled through the fence in the same exact spot.  If it is an owl, does it try and carry them and maybe the 7 pound rooster is too heavy, hits the fence and then it try's to grab it through the fence?  I am not sure...I hope we find out soon, my rooster population is going down fast and these that have been killed are earmarked for the freezer.

If I truely want to find out what it is, it will require the sacrifice of another rooster.  I have been thinking about it, but I can't do that on purpose...I am just not wired that way.  I never thought in a million years that I would become a CSI...Crime Scene Investigator...for poultry.

Happy New year!

Well, I thought it would start off better than it did...the New Year started off with another predator attack.  We got a trap big enough for a raccoon and it is set, but we haven't caught anything.  The game camera I ordered came in and we set it up and then a rooster was killed in an area that it didn't cover.  We bated the trap with the dead rooster, he was missing his head and neck like the others that we found, so far nothing in the trap...we moved the camera too, still have not caught anything on it.

The only other thing we can do is electrify the fence, we think it is a raccoon doing the killing.  The last rooster was carried to the fence and I guess the predator crawled over the fence and tried to pull the rooster through the fence by the wing...lots of feathers on the outside of the fence but the body was on the inside.  My roosters are not all going into their coop at night, if they are low enough I pick them up and move them into it...but several of them have taken to the trees and roosting 15 to 20 feet up.  I refuse to risk breaking my neck trying to get them down.  I have been able to get my breeding roosters inside the coop and that is the most important to me.  I am not sure I can kill a rooster to process for dinner anyway...I am not quite setup for it yet, but the roosters in the trees are the ones earmarked for dinner.

The Farmers Almanac said we would have an unusually wet winter, and so far it is proving true.  We have had a lot of rain lately and the night before last some terrible thunder and lightning.  We live in a metal house and the way it is insulated it is hard to hear rain at all...we heard the rain and the thunder and lightning was like major explosions.  We got almost three inches of rain that night on top of something like an inch for the previous few days.  Needless to say, everything is soaking wet.  We have had water standing in several areas of the yard for the past week and when you have Sandy soil that doesn't happen very often...usually.  I feel bad for the chickens, their run is soaking wet...water goes up over my feet walking around in there.  I have been putting fresh straw down for them every day, but they mix it up and dig down to the dirt looking for bugs I suppose.  I am going to have to fix it, but trying to dig trenches to devert the water has not worked very well.  We need to get gutters up which will help, but finding end caps for the piece we have is proving to be a challenge.  We probably will have to buy new gutters, but everything requires money...and time to do it.  Right now we are just trying to not loose any more chickens.  If a predator kills my breeding roosters, all my hard work the past year will be down the drain.

I really need to be able to sell chickens and chicks to make money, and hatching eggs.  I got specific breeds for that purpose, but still need to build my breeding pens.  The rooster coop was more for protection of my hens, I took 18 roosters out of the hen house when I finished it.  I still have at least 10 roosters in the hen house, some are going to freezer camp...but some are for breeding.  They talk about chicken math...well I have a problem with it, but I hope it starts paying off soon.  I have some of the coveted varieties of chickens, Cream Legbars, Black Copper Marans, Easter Eggers, Silver Laced Wyandottes...well, most of you won't know what I am talking about, but these lay pretty colored eggs...so it would be like Easter every day when you look at my egg basket...all different colors of eggs...blues, greens, pinks, peaches, chocolate Browns, golds...light brown and white too.  I raised almost all of my chickens from eggs...Ok, maybe not 29 of them, but 100 of my chickens I hatched and raised.  I only have a few more to go out to the coop from the brooder.  I am going to take a short break from hatching and caring for chicks to get breeding pens built, then I will start hatching to sell this spring.

I need to start preparing my gardens too...ah the joys of country living, I seem to always have pine shavings in my hair, poop on my shoes and plans for another project in my head.