Big and Little

Now that all of our hens are laying, we never know exactly what we'll find in the nestboxes.  The hens' ages run between 6 months and 4 years old.  Young hens sometimes lay small eggs and the older ones sometimes lay very large eggs.  Take a look at the big and little eggs we collected this weekend!

The Long Winter Begins to Fade

Its been awhile since my last post.  Things are quiet during the deep winter months and there isn't much to share.  The chickens fared well through the worst of the storms and cold and thankfully rodents weren't a problem.  (I guess our extra work paid off in keeping them out!)

Spring is just around the corner and the snow has begun to melt.  As long as the temperatures are above 20 degrees, I've been opening the coop for the chickens to get out, if nothing else for a change of scenery!

Today, temperatures reached 45 degrees, nearly swimming weather!  :)  About half of the chickens were out enjoying the sunshine and exploring today.  They normally avoid the snow, but when a patch of the white stuff is standing between them and freedom, they'll do what they need to do!

After such a cold and snowy stretch, its a real joy to see the chickens out free ranging again.  Even though much of the grass is brown, there are a few blades of green to nibble on. 

On another note, ALL of the hens are now laying, including the youngest of the flock who hatched last September.  Two of that group turned out to be roosters... and as long as they behave themselves, they can stick around.  Roosters can be quite protective of the hens in their care which can be a real help to a flock that free ranges.

Here's to an ever-warming season!  Cheers!

Our New Chicken Tractor is Complete!

What’s a chicken tractor? A chicken tractor is basically a moveable coop with an outdoor run. We decided to build a chicken tractor this year to use in raising our meat chickens. This enables us to raise them on pasture. Since the tractor has a set of wheels, we can move the tractor every couple of days to a new batch of grass for the chickens to work on. I have also discovered that meat chickens are pretty messy, so moving the tractor keeps their coop and run area clean and the droppings left behind fertilize the grass.

Our last set of meat chickens for the year are growing quickly. They reach butcher weight by 8 or 9 weeks. Raising them on pasture will reduce the feed cost slightly and provide them with a more varied diet. Since we don’t use chemicals on our property, we don’t worry about any impact to the quality of the meat.

Here are some pictures of the new chicken tractor. In designing the tractor, we wanted to make sure it was very sturdy and would provide the chickens a safe environment from predators while allowing them to scratch for bugs and eat lots of greenery. The tractor needed to withstand our weather which includes heavy thunderstorms at times and high winds. We won’t be using the tractor during the winter months, but it will be stored outside until next spring and a new batch of chicks arrive.

Here's our St. Bernard checking on the chickens.  All of the dogs are VERY interested in what's going on in there!

As summer comes to a close

In these last few days of summer and as we prepare for the winter months here in Wisconsin, I really love seeing my chickens out in the gardens. The vegetables are pretty much finished (except for the pumpkins) and the chickens take advantage of the bugs that remain… at least until the first frost.

Here’s a picture of one of our Production Reds on the front porch. She seems at home amongst the flowers and thankfully she wasn't interested in eating them!  I keep a couple extra bowls of water for the chickens out near the porch and shed. It takes a lot of water to create an egg each day!


Our weather is much cooler now, with daytime highs in the 60s and 70s. But in the "heat" of the afternoon, the chickens take advantage of the shade under the lilac bushes. There are a lot of good bugs to be found under bushes!

Tonight while doing chicken chores and getting the brooders ready, Jillian sang a song to our younger hens while collecting eggs. They seemed interested in kindergarten music. She picked up her first chicken (one of the 6-week old hens) on her own and did a great job, holding it correctly without any explanation on my part. The hen didn’t even seem to mind too much.

Tomorrow I’ll be picking up our last set of chicks for the year from Sunnyside Hatchery in Beaver Dam. We have used them for our meat chickens (their broilers are wonderful), but this time I also ordered 5 laying chicks. They won’t hatch until tomorrow and will only be a few hours old when we get them home. I set up a separate brooder for the laying chicks, since they eat a starter feed different from broiler chicks. Once they get settled in, I’ll post some pictures.

Full Circle

I started gardening when I was young. I don’t remember the exact age, but I have vivid memories of my mom’s small vegetable garden when I was growing up in the city. She grew the standards: tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini and brussel sprouts. It was hardly “farming”. When I moved out on my own (now as a young mother myself) I was able to talk the landlord at my apartment to let me have a garden. As long as it didn’t grow into the parking lot and wasn’t unsightly, he was fine with it. I dug out the grass of my new 3ft X 7ft garden by hand and “beefed-up” the soil by adding potting soil. This was by far the most well-tended garden I have ever owned. Weeding a garden this small was a piece of cake!
I planted tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers and even cantaloupe! This garden was the only one to actually produce a cantaloupe in all of my gardening years… and was by far the most tasty I’ve ever eaten. I had been officially bitten by the gardening bug… the only bug bite that I will remember fondly.

Fast forward to today. Our garden space now totals about 500 square feet. This is just for growing food. ( I’m not counting all of the flower beds.) When growing food on a larger scale, one of the questions that come to mind is “how do I fertilize a garden this large?” Enter our chickens. Not only do our chickens provide us with eggs and meat, but we get plenty of manure, too. During the summer, I leave one of my garden beds unplanted. As we clean out the chicken coop, straw and manure gets piled in this bed which works as a “holding bin” until the fall. Once the gardens are done for the year and plants removed, we pile the chicken manure and straw onto the rest of the beds. The final big “cleanout” of the coop in fall provides us with one last layer of manure.

We leave the manure and straw on the beds to compost through the winter. The top layer of straw on the beds doesn’t really break down, but acts more like a mulch. By the time spring comes and the temperatures are warm enough to work the soil, we can either till these beds or plant directly into the composted manure. The soil underneath the straw is black and full of nutrients for our garden plants. This year our sweet corn grew fantastic and even in a small space (4 – 5 rows about 5 feet long) provided enough for several meals. Our tomatoes, peas, pumpkins, popcorn and zucchini did quite well, too.

As our chickens free range into our gardens, they snack on bugs (their preferred outside snack) and weeds. They do eat a small amount of my garden plants, but with as much space as the chickens have to roam, the impact is minimal. While they’re out eating, they “drop” extra fertilizer in the garden which breaks down the next time it rains and adds more nitrogen to the plants.

The extra nutrients from the bugs and green plants eaten by the chickens help produce a better tasting (and healthier) egg…. Bringing the cycle full circle.