Our chickens hate us right now. We have most of them confined to the coop because there has been much unauthorized laying of eggs in random places and roosting in trees at night. Uh, no. We will all lay where we can sell or hatch the eggs and roost in a nice, warm coop, or else. Two or three times a year, we have to have remedial lessons in the proper place to lay eggs and roost, and it’s not particularly nice for any of us, but necessary. They will all stay in the coop and eat grain and look longingly out the windows, glaring at us. If looks could kill! It’s supposed to take a week, but we always give in after three or four days.

Fall is almost here, so now is the time for us to decide which roosters stay and which go. I’ve been watching them all summer. I’m not against aggressive roosters, per se. If they protect their harem and keep geese and turkeys from picking on their girls? I’m all up for that.

However, if they corner a hen and rape her? I won’t stand for that. No rapists allowed. At least this year we don’t have a band of hooligans standing guard outside the coop doors, raping the poor hens who are just trying to go into the coop like good girls. Getting rid of them that first year was a very VERY good thing and hasn’t been repeated since.

When one of our hens hatches a clutch of her own, she automatically teaches the babies about going in for the night into the coop, and even teaches her daughters where to lay her eggs. We have a whole set of very reliable broodies, and I just love to watch them teach the babies how to find worms and eat weed seeds in the pastures. It’s sort of like watching fish and I have to pull myself away some days. They are so darn cute! I love the ones who are completely relaxed around me, too. We don’t keep spooky hens any more than we do spooky sheep. Life is too short.

One of the downsides at brooding baby birds separate from the rest of the chickens is having to integrate that cohort into the main body of birds. We often have chicks that we’ve hatched in the incubator that can’t be shipped for some reason. Sometimes, the buyer backs out. Sometimes, they hatch on a Friday or Saturday, so we can’t ship. I sort of love having them, but getting that cohort to become part of the main flock is a bit of work. They are quite happy to hang around by themselves, but again, they have to go where we will get their eggs and someplace safe and warm at night. Not in the trees! I am so tired of climbing trees to catch a damn chicken.

We also have some roosters who have garnished a harem of their own and taken up quarters in a shed. We really need some more coops. But in the meantime, we sneak out late at night when they’ve gone to bed, and put them all in the main coop to get integrated. We’ll cut down to just a few roosters over the winter. There’s no point in feeding roosters that we don’t need.

It’s hard to decide which ones to keep, though. So many of them are so pretty! We have near 100 hens at this point, so will probably keep five roosters.

This is of course the traditional day to put in tender crops in the north. Despite a cold wet spring, we were able to put in beans and other tender seeds two weeks ago. Lisa insisted that we not plant the tomatoes and peppers until the soil warmed up, but that happened this week when we moved directly from mud time to summer, with literally hours of spring. The Republican party has switched from claiming that global warming is not man made, to claiming that global warming is not happening. My growing season is a solid month longer than it was 20 years ago, and that’s with the coldest winter in a decade.

We’re doing quite well on planting this year, despite it being too wet to even prepare beds for most of month. The tomatoes went in today, leaving the sweet corn as the only remaining time-critical crop. That is going into a new area of the garden, which means I need to build it beds first. I’m taking a tip from Eliot Coleman and starting corn seeds in plug trays to buy us an extra week or so. The watermelon is sprouting in a plug tray right now, to go out when it gets vaguely established. I might just as well have waited the extra week and seeded straight into the ground now.

The winter storage crops still have to go in of course, but I have until the 4th of July for most, and till August 1 for the carrots. We built a lot of new beds last year, this year I’m just topping them up with compost. It makes a big difference.

Speaking of beds, we made a mistake when we built them only a foot apart. We got that idea from Eliot Coleman too, and it did save a bunch of space that we are short of. However, we missed the fact that his beds are temporary, mounded up by the tractor every planting, after he spreads the soil amendments. Ours are permanent, the wood lasts 10-12 years, and we can’t get a wheelbarrow between them, reducing me to 5 gallon buckets, which is painfully slow. We’ll just be a little less space efficient from now on.

We had a massive flush of Aspen Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus poppulinus) on three different dead popple trees this week. We’ve never had them before, but I’m now wondering about inoculating some logs. Fresh ‘shrooms in May are a big win. Few others are ready until July around here.

I also got a quick look at the bees last week, cut short by a shower that wasn’t supposed to happen. The original hive is thriving. I’m thinking of splitting it again, because I think it’s still planning to swarm. I need to take a better look for swarm cells. If I find some, I’ll try using them for another split. In the mean time, I added a honey super. The split shows a lot less activity, but there were a decent number of bees and a queen cell when I went inside. They had honey left from the deadout, and were laying down more, so I gave them a super as well. The package down here was just as nasty as the one up on pitcher mountain. I didn’t get a chance to look for brood. It started to rain, so after letting them get wet enough to not try to kill me anymore, I slapped on the second hive body and got out of there. Hopefully I’ll get back in to the two I didn’t finish with this week.

We had the first hatch from the cabinet incubator. 29 out of 73 eggs hatched, over a period of 5 days. Neither is a good result. I’m hoping it was because I used too many old eggs. We have duck and turkey eggs as well as a second tray of chicken eggs that should hatch this week. This second set of chicken eggs went in fresh. Hopefully that will fix things.

The turkeys are also beginning to hatch. The big white dogs seem to be earning their kibble, the hens are surviving nesting in the woods. We’re getting a very poor hatch rate here too, though. It looks like Randy and Dandy were too overworked this spring. The poor lads certainly looked it, and we’re getting three to six instead of eight poults per clutch. Next year we’ll try 10 hens per tom instead of 15.

Our two Midget White tom turkeys Randy and Dandy were clearly overworked this year. So far two clutches have hatched, in both cases yielding only three poults instead of the expected eight. Lisa read somewhere that a tom could handle 20 hens, so we felt fine with 15. This was clearly wrong. Next year we’ll try ten as a ratio. Meanwhile, Randy was stupid even for a turkey. He would not stay away from the setting geese. Rest in peace, dude.

We had five of our Toulouse geese set this year. One hatched 7, the other four are still setting. Unfortunately one of them abandoned her own nest and moved to the dead eggs on the nest that had hatched. (It’s in a much more desirable location.) I didn’t catch this in time. The goose on the deck (the one with the electronet fetish) seems to have lost her eggs sometime over the weekend. I am completely confused about this. We have 11 geese and 3 Great Pyrenees dogs. It just should not be possible. The dogs do like eggs, but not enough to tangle with the geese for them. (Smart dogs.)

The Partridge Chantecler Chickens have finally gone to a new home. That was an experiment that failed. If we try a second chicken breed again, it will be a non-flying large breed that we can pasture far away from the Icies. The roosters were nasty, they all preferred roosting in trees not coops, their eggs didn’t taste as good, and the had a very bland and boring personality. They did taste good, though, we’ll give them that, but they grew so slowly that you had to put up with nasty, fighting roosters. Climbing the crab apple tree in the evening to catch the birds and put them in the coop so we’d get their eggs was just not worth it.

We have six setting Saxony ducks, which should start to hatch any day, and more in both incubators. We’ve had to separate the drake from the rest of them, though, because as they’ve started sitting, he’s clearly not getting enough, and the girls were not being treated nicely at all. We were starting to see sores on the backs of their necks. Uh, no. That’s why we quit raising Pekin ducks. The drakes were total assholes. As soon as one of the clutches hatch, he is going off to freezer camp.

Clearly we don’t have this all figured out, which is too bad. We could sell a lot more birds than we have. This is the first year we didn’t bring any day old birds home from the Post Office.

We have a very nice flock of one year old Partridge Chantecler Chickens for sale. We have 12 hens and one rooster, Pierre, who we got last year as day old chicks from Ideal poultry. They lay a medium brown egg and we are getting a dozen eggs a day from them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with them. Our problem is having two very rare breeds of chickens that we would like to keep from intermingling. They both fly well. Right now, we are letting one flock out to roam each day, which to be honest, just isn’t very nice for either flock. They would both much prefer to be out and about, and who can blame them?

We’ve had our Icelandic chickens for much longer, and have put a lot of time, energy and money into breeding with them, and it makes more sense for us to concentrate our energies on them. Keeping the two breeds apart is almost impossible, even with clipping wings. They are very agile birds.

We can’t ship the flock, so we will only sell to someone who comes and gets them on our small farm here in southwestern New Hampshire. Make us an offer! They are lovely, nice birds, who laid really well all winter long.

No one has gone broody yet, but they are only a year old, so a bit young for that. We have eggs coming out our ears at this point and are going to stick a big batch into the incubator, so we’ll soon have chicks as well.

Lots of photos of them here

It’s a really good thing that chickens can’t count. I rely on that fact all the time!

A few weeks ago, I got a batch of Icelandic chicken eggs from David Grote. I had sent him some of mine last year, and we are doing the best we can to spread these genes around, you know? So we plopped them into our little Brinsea incubator, because it was still really cold here and I hadn’t seen signs of anyone of my hens going broody at all. We were still finding frozen eggs every morning, and I sure didn’t want to risk these eggs.

So we started hearing peeps on Friday. Yay! I’m always worried about eggs that go through the mail. Sometimes the hatch rate is horrible. So I started thinking about how I could convince one of my hens to go broody. I really really really like it when they raise the babes and I just get to be Grandma.

So on Saturday, I cleaned out all of the bushel baskets that we use for nesting boxes in their coop and put in lots of fresh hay. In one corner, I piled lots of extra hay in that basket and made a deep hollow nest and I piled up lots of eggs into a pretty pretty clutch.

I was sort of shocked when it worked! I’d kept checking, and about mid-day I noticed that one of the hens was making that funny noise that broody hens make when someone is trying to take their spot away. It’s almost a low growl.

So Saturday night, 11 chicks had hatched, and I waited until it was dark and put them under the broody mama. She had the fastest brood ever! She was so cute. Even though she was sleeping, as soon as she heard the babies cheeping she started making soothing mommy noises. (I forget where I read that broody hens can’t count the days they’ve been brooding eggs — as long as they’ve gone into that broody trance, this trick will usually work.)

I’ve kept them in the bushel basket all day and stuck a few more that have hatched underneath her over the course of the day. (Four more — good thing she couldn’t count how many I put out originally!) Tomorrow, we’ll unscrew the basket from the wall and lower them to the ground and she can start to show them around.

Man I love it when a plan works!

We keep a lot of animals, so our morning and evening chores are quite elaborate. Having two of us do them together feels sort of luxurious. I can’t really carry anything over about 25 pounds right now without my back hurting, so I’m able to do what I call the observation chores. It’s sometimes hard for one person to both do the food and water and also see what’s going on with the animals. When I was doing the chores alone, I made it a point to first feed and water, and then go through a mental checklist of what I needed to observe for each set of critters.

For the pigs, we look at milk lines to see who is close to farrowing. We have several sows getting quite close to farrowing right now, so we have to watch for the time to separate her from the herd. If we are missing a big pig, it could very well be that she’s had her babies so we go off to find her. If no one shows up for breakfast, it’s almost guaranteed that someone has had babies and the rest of the herd will often surround her for protection.

To get a good look at the piglets, I have to show up down there a few minutes before Frank shows up on the tractor with food and the feeding frenzy starts. I give lots of pets and cuddles, and try to pay attention to what’s going on around me. How many boys and girls are they? Is someone injured? We have a piglet who had a weird injury on his penis that we had the vet repair, and some days he doesn’t seem able to urinate, then he seems fine the next day. We are definitely on alert with him.

When I open up the door to the Icelandic chicken coop, I count them as they come out. If we are a few short, I look inside. Yup! There are three on the nest boxes. Fine. All is well! I collect eggs, make a note in my head as to how many. If I see the same hen on a nest for a few days in a row, I’ll know who is going broody. I’ll count the eggs underneath her, and when she gets to about a dozen, I’ll put a basket on top of her, too keep the other hens from laying there. I just have to remember to let her out every day for a potty run, a quick bite and deep drink. When she goes back, I lock her in for the night.

When I bring water to the ducks, I count them. If someone is missing, we know to go looking. It’s only happened twice this year. We lost one duck for some unknown reason, under the deck. No sign of injury. We also lost a drake, but that’s because the geese attacked him. Frank saw it happening and tried to intervene, but it was too late. We now have no spare drakes, sadly.

I’ll see the geese go walking by and I can’t help but count them. We should have 11 right now. Twice already we’ve been missing a few, so I go looking for goose eggs. It’s too cold for them to turn into actual goslings, but they sure do make a lovely breakfast! I have to beat the dogs to the feast. They also have a horrible record of picking good places to brood, often right in a path way that’s not being used now but will be soon or someplace where the roof will drip and water will puddle and drown their eggs, so I’m quite firm with taking their eggs and making them move their nest to someplace better. That’s always fun … setting geese are a bit cranky!

It’s hard for me to count the turkeys. This winter, we kept over 31 hens and 2 toms. They are quite independent and don’t always congregate as a flock unless they are really, really hungry. So on a really cold morning when everyone is STARVING!!!! I can get a good count. We have one right now with an injured leg, so check for her every day and treat as needed. The boys are obviously doing their mating job really well and their entire front sides are looking almost plucked.

Caring for the cows and sheep right now is the least time intensive of all the critters. We put out new bales of baylage every week or so. We make sure they have water and minerals. We count noses. In about a month, though, we’ll start lambing, and suddenly will be spending lots of time with them again. I love lambing season!

We’ve had Icelandic Chickens now for almost four years. Every now and then I get this very interesting pattern, and it’s been really rare for me. There was one in the first batch of eggs that we hatched from Lyle Behl. She looked so different from all of the other chicks, and I called her the masked one. She was my favorite not only because she was cute, but she was very curious and cuddly.

She grew up to be a gorgeous, sweet hen. She was the first to greet me when I’d come out in the morning and would often sit on my lap and let me pet her. Sadly, she was killed by the damn bear that got 20 of my birds when he ripped the door off of their coop, before we got the guardian dogs.

Her genes are still in my flock, though, and every now and then I’ll get another. Every time we’ve gotten one, she’s turned out to be a girl who grows up to look very much like my first one did, and they’ve all been nicer and sweeter than the rest of the flock. Always girls …

Until now! This last hatch we did for a customer in Keene had two of the little darlings, and I told her that they’d be girls, I thought. I also told her how rare they were for me. But both them turned out to be boys! She can’t keep all the boys she got, of course, and we took the ones she didn’t want back. I’m going to keep these two and set up a mini little breeding group. If the two boys fight, I’ll have to get rid of one of them, but so far, they are best buddies. We’ll see if that lasts. I have other roosters who get along fine with other boys.

I think I have four or five of these girls at this point, including one with a black crest, something I haven’t ever seen on any of the birds until now. I’ve also got one with a black beak. I can’t wait to see what I get!

We got asked yesterday how we decide what to feed to who from all of the foraged and found food that we bring in.

We don’t actually make a big deal about it. We follow a few basic principles and then let the animals tell us what they prefer. With all of the different species that we have, the only things we end up composting are citrus peels and coffee grounds. Having an idea what the animals eat in the wild helps too.

The two principles are No Cannibalism and Ruminants Eat Plants. So we don’t feed pork to the pigs or chicken to the birds. We wouldn’t let George eat lamb-flavored dog food either, even though he kept trying.

With 5 dogs and well over 100 omnivorous birds, pork goes away just fine. The chickens really like chicken but we do our best to keep them from stealing it from the dogs.

As far as the pigs, chickens and turkeys are concerned, that’s about all the care we take. We do deliberately give the birds potato salad and hummus, because otherwise we’d have to scrape the containers, which is no fun. The birds clean them right up for us. Potato salad is egg, oil (pressed from seeds) and potato. Hummus is chickpeas and oil. That is all stuff that wild turkeys and jungle fowl eat. The birds get first dibs on any seeds we get.

The dogs get meat, and whatever else they want. They love yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese and eggs. We feed them a lot of raw meat as well, plus keep the kibble dish full, too. Bagels that they manage to steal from the pigs are quite prized. We end up with a lot of ham salad sandwiches and containers of ham salad and they love those. Also, quiche is another favorite, even filled with broccoli.

The ducks and geese have favorite things, too, like grapes and watermelon. We drop whole watermelons from the balcony so it breaks up, and as soon as they hear the sliding glass door open, they come running. (It’s also really interesting how all of the different species learn what sounds mean what — the sheep know the goose word for watermelon and they’d like some, too.)

Pigs can eat just about anything. A pig makes a teenage boy look like an anorexic. The only issues we’ve heard of are that large quantities of potatoes and eggs must be cooked. (That is also true for people, in both cases.) That said, they do not like anything in the cabbage family. Cabbage and broccoli will be left until they rot. I’ve been told they might eat it if I cooked it, but why bother. The sheep will scarf it right down. They’ll eat any other vegetable, in moderation, say a bushel a meal. Any more than that goes to the sheep. They get any grain product we get that doesn’t go to the birds. Actual grain needs to be soaked to soften it, or all too much of it will go straight through the pig. We try to keep their diet fairly balanced, at least over the course of a week or so. They’ll happily eat yogurt and hay every day, but we make sure to give them lots of fruits and veg to go with that.

The ruminants turn out to be the biggest problem. They love grain, but it will kill them in not very large quantities at all. And yet we need to have layer and hog pellets to feed the birds and pigs, so keeping them from getting into the grain is a high priority. The bacterial population in their rumens is surprisingly delicate. We pretty much limit them to roughage. They are allowed fruit in moderation, no more than an apple or two each. So far we’ve had no issues from things like green beans or zucchini, but they only get them when the pigs are overwhelmed. They love broccoli and celery, two things the pigs hate.

We kept the Chantecler chickens locked in their coop for a couple of weeks, hoping to get them bonded both to the coop and to Pierre, the one Chantecler rooster we kept. Lisa optimized on ‘nice’ and ‘large’. I warned her about that, nice roosters get laid about as often as nice guys.

Saturday we finally caught the last of the Icie boys with their horned helmets and motorcycles, so on Sunday I let the Chanteclers out. Despite the miserable weather they trickled out of the coop and wandered about. It was sufficiently miserable that I let a few roost in the tree, hoping they would get the hint, and go back to their coop. No joy. Monday it stopped raining. By the time I went to close up the coop, every single one of them (including Pierre) was asleep somewhere else.

Today they didn’t even go back and check out their coop. They scrounged food and water from the other birds and bedded down outside again. Half of them were in the tree and quite happy looking, the other half on the bench on the porch, unhappy looking but not going in.

We grabbed them and threw them back in the coop. We have a problem here.

Some Icelandic chicks finally hatched today. Well, one hatched yesterday, and 8 more by mid-day today when I delivered them to Keene, and now there are 5 more, which she’ll come get tomorrow. (peep peep peep peep — not my favorite part of running the incubator, to be honest — I keep getting woken up at night and then have insomnia, ick.) I sort of love spreading the Icelandic Chicken addiction around, though. I really wish we had some new genes, but whatever. I love my little genetic drift. I can tell what some of the babes will look like when they grow up at this point. (We are selling them for $4 each. I already have the next batch sold as well, to someone who will be in NH in January so can pick them up. No shipping when it’s this cold!)

We also repaired some fence and finally brought the sheepies and Danny in to a paddock much closer to home. They can no longer put a hoof through the water in the swamp, so it was time to bring them in. It’ll be much easier for the Pyrs to protect them this much closer in as well. We still haven’t decided what we are going to do for their winter shelter. What I’d like to do is some reconfiguring to let them have the sheds they used last year, but only if I can figure out a way to feed the birds somewhere else. The sheep are insane when they know grain is being fed anywhere near them, and will bash fences until they can reach it. I’ve got a couple idea for how to do it and hope to convince Frank of one of them, soon, because building another shed where they are now just isn’t going to happen soon enough, and I want to stop fretting about it.

Now that cold weather seems to have really set in, we are giving the pigs big round bales of dry hay. They love it so much! They eat it, which really cuts down on everything else we need to feed them. But they also bed in it. The piglets had never seen so much hay in one spot before, and there was much running in circles and giddiness when I brought it over this morning. Too cute. (Also, now that we’ve pulled the back hoe off the tractor, it really wasn’t fun lifting that bale over the fence. We’ve got to get something heavier on the back end pretty quickly. I hate it when the tires on the tractor come off of the ground. Hate.)