Sunday, May 26, 2013

Chicken Yard

I've been keeping the hens in until noon at least so they lay in the nest boxes, the pullets go out first so they can eat without the fryers bugging them, then the fryers get out in to the chicken yard. Having breakfast seems to be one of their favorite things! The pullets are all feathered out and incorporated in with the rest of the flock and now they want on the top roost too. [No eggs yesterday.] The day before the broody hen started to lay again so that is good news. Last weekend we culled some of the older ones so egg count is down. 

Yesterday I made up some fabric feed bags in various sizes smaller than the feed sacks I can lift them; I struggle with the 50-80 lb. ones. So these work out great! I was hoping to find corn print for cornmeal at the fabric store but no luck so I got yellow instead. I got some turkey hand print like kids do in school to make a print for turkey crafts. I can put the all flock feed in that one! I have one bag for the scratch made up and another one for the layer feed done. I need one for the grit next I think. These are fun to make up and fast! 

Speaking of fabric I got some different [green] fencing fabric to put up; the orange stuff is not so durable and when I put it up I knew it was just temporary. 

I need to decide what kind of fence area for an isolation / roo cage. I'm also hoping to change the chicken yard area so I can put them in different parts of it and rotate the over grazed parts to let it recover and put the chickens in under the apple tree when apples are on to help clean that up. They are great for eating the weed seed so that's helping. 

Last weekend I pulled chick weed was hoping they would eat that but they don't seem to like it. The roses are blooming in the chicken yard and we have some small fruit coming on now. 

This weekend we will be grilling one of the home grown chickens we raised yum! On interesting thing this week was finding a dead mouse in the water bucket that had dround and another outside the bucket in the coop so I had our grandson help bury those out side of the chicken area. 

Last week I cut out the bottom of a plastic apple sauce  jar to screw on the round chicken feeder to make it easier to fill that sure works better saves a lot of time and mess. 

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