Remnants of a Hurricane

I am sorry I haven't written lately, as usual I have been rather busy.  We had some chilly temperatures that prompted me to get my rear in gear and start getting the chicken coops ready for winter.  I got some tarps hung before the rain started from Hurricane Patricia and cleaned a few out...but didn't get finished.  It has been raining for days now an I have been trying to get more done in the rain.  I got two more gates built for my breeding pens and shade cloth hung over them, and then a tarp...but when it started raining the tarps caught so much rain it bent the t-posts and the tarps were so full of water they were almost on the ground...the roosters in the pens were on the sides of the pens and I had to bail the water out to even get the gates to open.  I was able to basically put a pole in the center of some sort of the pens to get the rain to drain off...but a few actually broke under the weight of the water.  I will have to rethink those pens, they were meant as breeding pens not to house any chickens long term, but they have a lot of roosters in them and a couple of turkeys that were injured.

The rain is causing issues...because the chickens have stripped all of the vegetation out of their yards. We are on something of a hill and a lot of the dirt is washing down the hill and blocking gates, getting deep around the coops and holes are opening up in spots.  Not sure what I am going to do, I don't have any way to move it...except one shovel at a time.  After all the bailing out of the tarps, I can't do that...I hurt myself and have to wait to try.  So I may have to actually take the gates off and rehang them and hope all of the roosters I have penned up in them, don't get out.  Why are they locked up?  Well, I hatched a lot of eggs this past Spring...I don't know how to sex chicks and the ones I didn't sell got to grow up, there are a lot of them.  My male to female ratio in some batches was two or three to one, in a small batch of Polish I hatched one female and 5 males!  I have seven of the eight pens full of roosters...there are at least 60 in the pens.  If a rooster is overly aggressive towards the hens or participates in basically gang raping a hen...I will snatch them up and separate them from the rest of the flock.  At this moment, I have quite a few hens that are bald on their backs because of the roosters.  I am trying to get them out any way I can and most of these roosters will be processed and eaten for dinner.  I just want to make sure that I save the best of them for breeding purposes.  I still have a lot of roosters running around in the yard too.

This city girl gone country should have done more homework and realized how hard it would be to get everything done in a timely matter...that is a big fail for me.  I always thought I was pretty tough and could always get things done with very little to work with.  That may be true of some things but the country is NOT the city.  I cannot get everything I need at the drop of a hat and it is harder for me because we only have one vehicle.  Although I sell eggs and chickens, those sales don't bring in much money, some weeks I may not sell anything at all.  This past week has been pretty good, but I only sold $55 dollars worth of eggs, since I spent about $175 on feed and parts for gates and feed pans, that is not a good ratio.  It takes 50 lbs of feed a day to feed our almost 300 poultry, if it was not for my husbands business doing better the past few weeks I would have a bunch of hungry poultry.  They free range during the day, and even though the main part of their yard has no grass left...I fenced a large portion beyond that, that still does have grass.  It was looking pretty bad because of the drought, but with the rain we are getting it will green up nicely and give them some more supplemental greens.    The fence I used came from a garden area that I made that stays too wet when it rains like it has been.  So far we have gotten over 5 - 1/4 inches of rain out of Hurricane Patricia's remnants in a couple of days time.  It is still raining too.  It has been a fairly steady and gentle rain for the most part, but the temperature dropped yesterday when a cold front came through and the wind picked up and it always worries me when it has rained a lot and the wind gets up over 20 miles an hour...trees start falling.

I can see a lot of roots around the trees in the poultry yard, these are large trees and I am just hoping none of them fall.  I positioned the coops under those trees.  I am going to have to get some type of winter forage planted for the poultry and to hold the soil in place.  The good news is a lot of my poultry is finely venturing out the gate into the larger fenced area with the grass.  I guess it helps that I go out there and throw scratch grains out there and they run to me when I go out.  They see grasshoppers and such and go after them...so they are finely getting the hang of it.