Big Chickens

The chicken coop, renovated and populated this past spring, is now settled into high productivity.  We have fourteen hens in the 'big house' and they have all finally come into their own as proper layers.  They had started out as three factions: five chicks raised in our garage, five chicks raised in our friends Keith and Ruth's garage, and four layers given to us by someone who just had too many chickens running around.  Those cliques were impenetrable as the chicks grew up into teenagers, the separate groups would band together, eyeing one another suspiciously - a poultry version of Westside Story.

But these days the old animosities have been left behind.  There is reconciliation in the big house, and the hens get along very well.  We haven't had any incidents of them picking on one another, pulling feathers, or that kind of stuff, though we have heard stories of such things becoming a real problem.  With fourteen layers in there we are now getting up to 1 dozen eggs a day.  Usually it's somewhere around 8-9, but occasionally they get fired up and crank out a full dozen.  They are also spending a great deal of time free-ranging these days.  We often leave the coop door open 24 hours a day, and the girls find their way in and out and all around the farm property.  They especially like the peach orchard across the road, and I've had to fetch them out of there on occasion.

One hazard of such a free and easy lifestyle is that the hens can sometimes get a little sassy about where they are laying their eggs.  The other day I was rounding them up from their daytime haunts around the farm, and while chasing several out from under a boat tarp, came upon Red Ranger, Tavish's favorite hen, who had clearly been holding out on us.  She is a new layer, her eggs still on the smaller side, and she had been depositing her eggs each day in a private spot, and was trying, in all earnestness, to hatch those little things.  This task is beyond her, of course, since the eggs are not fertilized.  We have since dissuaded her from this course and she has mended her ways.

Putting all these eggs to use is a challenge, but egg-rich recipes like brioche and lemon curd help make a notch in our supplies.  We give some away, the girls may start selling them by the dozen, and of course the pigs look forward to a score of hard-boiled treats now and then.

Meanwhile - a new flock is being developed on the other side of the farm!  Eleven birds of mysterious parentage, dropped off at a tender age.  Keith and I repurposed one of the horse stalls into a new walk-in coop, opened a door to the outside world and stopped feeding them after several weeks.  These are our wild birds, who free range because they have to!  We make plenty of water available, provide roosting poles and nesting boxes (which they don't make use of quite yet, still being of a tender age....mmmm....tender chicken).  I catch sight of these feral chickens on occasion as they dart in and out of the weed patches around the property.  They like to patrol the pastures where the larger animals graze, so the pigs and the horse each get their company during the day.  They seem to be doing very well, and this experiment in pastured, free-range poultry looks to be a success.  When they get to laying age, we will restrict their movement some in order to get them established in their laying routines, and then they can pursue their vagabond lifestyle once again.    

An Old Shed, A New Coop

There have been some exciting developments recently that have resulted in a great deal of work.  Real, get-your-hands-dirty, be outside kind of work, which has prevented a lot of blogging.  Blogging about work and life is a kind of derivative, a downstream product of life, like shadows on the cave wall.  I would much rather be occupied with the font of experience than the products of experience, so I make, once again, no apologies about the trickling pace of posts.  There is a great deal going on, however, and I suspect that 2012 will produce a great collection of photos and reflections!

Things like this - a new farm!  Well....an old farm....and not our farm.  Some friends have recently acquired a small, run-down farm property located just minutes away from our house here in Yakima.  They have graciously included us in a rehabilitation effort, as our two families, both interested in homestead-y kind of living, work to put animals of various sorts back onto the property.  Our plans are ambitious and far-ranging, including chickens, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and who knows what else.  We have been working hard to get the place ready for the first couple of move-ins and I have learned the first of what will surely be a whole host of important lessons.

Lesson #1:  There is no such thing as an "animal-ready" farm.

Even a property that has previously housed animals will probably need a surprising amount of work to get ready for new residents.  A great example is the new chicken coop.  We quickly identified a shed that looked like a likely candidate to be repurposed into a chicken coop.  It had previously housed a couple of varieties of pigeons and then just the scatalogical remains of pigeons.  There were various design considerations to deal with, not the smallest being that the shed had been cobbled together with a variety of materials and not a square angle in the structure.  Also a consideration was our desire to make great use of recycled materials, of which there was a large supply of around the property.  The very first step, logically, was to purchase 5 chicks from the local feed store.  These we began raising in our garage, which was a great delight to our kids.  It also started a stopwatch on the coop project.....we had about 5 weeks to get the thing ready.  Nothing motivates like a deadline.

The shed was torn apart and cleaned out.  No less than three front-loader buckets full of guano were carted away as we made the space as disease-free as we could manage.  The coop is a large design, more than capable of housing the now 14 chickens that make it their home.  A front run is open-air, surrounded by fencing and accessed by a recycled door.  The chickens access the coop proper by way of a ramp that leads to a small door.  Inside, there are roost areas and nesting boxes for all those eggs.  Four of the chickens are laying adults, and so there are already eggs being produced and enjoyed!  The nesting boxes are accessed through individual sliding doors, which the kids check daily.  New tin was put on the roof and on the sides, to make the thing look a little less like a shanty (though putting tin on that structure was a challenge, to say the least).

The chicks are all moved in an enjoying the new home, which has light and heat provided so that it will be able to sustain them through all seasons here in Yakima.  The kids check in on them just about every day, keeping close tabs on their personal favorites.

We've also been working overtime on getting one of the large paddocks on the property ready for new residents that will arrive this Friday - four pigs!  Pictures of that project and the little porkers will soon follow.  I've established my new apiary on the site as well, and will probably have about 3-4 hives working by the time summer is in full swing.  Green acres is the life for me!  Stay tuned for more updates from "the farm".