First Flock

No time to update!

2009-05-15T20:22:00.001-07:00

But soon I will :-)

Pasty!

2009-04-08T10:12:00.000-07:00

If you remember the little chicks from my dad's office,

we are on the same page.

They are growing feathers on their wings and backs, and will be ready to move outside to the hen house soon. Seven are doing amazing, considering we are first time chicken farmers!

But we had eight, if you remember correctly. The eighth is as small as he was when we bought him! He has a sickness called 'Pasty Butt'. Now don't laugh. We did as soon as we read about it on the Internet. But that's before we knew how important it is to take care of a pasty butt.

This sickness can actually be very bad for your chickens. Let me explain-people who don't have chickens probably don't understand what having a pasty butt means. Pasty butt is when your chick can't poop correctly. The poop won't fall to the ground like a healthy chick's will. Instead, it gets stuck on the chick's rear, and blocks the chick's poop from getting out. The poop dries up on the chick's rear and you have to pull the poop off the chick.

Yuck it is really icky.

So he won't be going outside for a while!

Chicken Update

2009-03-29T19:10:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on my first flock...everyone is doing great. The younger chicks have a new home in a horse water trough in my dad's office. The bigger chicks and the turkey like their finished hen house, complete with a yard and newly-added nesting boxes. Now all we need is an adult hen and we'll be in the egg-selling business. We even had our business cards made!

Here is my dog Sid meeting his first chick muzzle-to-beak. I wonder what could possibly be going through his mind!

Fluff

2009-03-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

We had originally been waiting for the eighteenth of March to go and get baby chicks from D&B. But when we got older chicks, our plans were blurred and re-written. One day we were coming home from a class and we had to stop by D&B to pick something up. You could hear chicks from the door! We ended up with six adorable fluff balls. They don't have any feathers! They are under a heat lamp at this moment chirping to the wild birds outside my dad's office.

Finally!

2009-03-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

It was a boring old Friday when my parents told me that on the weekend we were going to build the hen house. I had been waiting for those words for over two weeks! The next day, we were up and outside at about eleven in the morning, dressed warmly from head to toe. My dad already had the frame made. We nailed the wood to the frame for the walls. My mom and I left for lunch and when we came back, the thing had been half covered in siding left over from our barn project a few summers before. After lunch we helped my dad some more. Everything was coming together and the promise of hens and maybe a rooster lay in our future. The next day, my dad went outside to work alone while my brother and I ate donuts on the bed. By the time we were done, everything was looking great. But my dad had run out of roofing. We had to split up and go to two different stores to buy what we needed. When we got home, the house was nearly done. Now we just needed to clear all of the tools out of the house and add some comfortable hay....
We went up to a far off city where we bought the best dog I have ever had to adopt our chickens. Well, we came home with a diaper box full of six hens and an un-sexed turkey named Butterball. Yikes, they were loud all the way home!