Day 19 - Chicks are on their way!

These videos were taken last night on Day 18. All in preparation of the birth/hatching of the chicks!

More Peepers, Coming Right Up!

How many people can honestly say they got EXACTLY what they wanted for Christmas? I CAN!!! My Honey gave me an incubator! Now I can raise my very own chicks! (Can you tell I am excited?) I have been doing some research on breeding chickens and have discovered I need to have 4 separate breeding groups which has one rooster and at least 8 if not 10 hens.

(This is Martha. She is a Blue Wheaten Ameraucana)
Why do I want to breed them, you might be asking. I am in love with the Ameraucana breed. They are docile, good layers, have great personalities and lay green or blue eggs. By breeding my own I will have a "closed" breeding system.

There is a terrible disease, Marek's, that kills the females just as they are about to begin laying at 6 months of age. There is a vaccine, but it is available in doses of 1,000 and is only good for 24 hours. My incubator holds 43 eggs. You can see that the doses are just not worth it. I would like my babies to be resistant to the disease. We shall see. I may change my mind 8 months down the line!

Before I can get any more invested in the breeding plans, I need to expand the chicken housing for the breeding families. Thankfully Farmer Jeff likes to build things!

Happy New Year! May all of your wishes come true!

Pleased as Punch!

The Ameraucana chickens have been featured quite prominently in my blog lately. I guess we are pretty enamored with them. Not only are they physically beautiful and have quirky personalities, they lay GORGEOUS pale green eggs.

We have been waiting, not very patiently, for the our Ameraucana hens to "come of age", i.e. start laying eggs. Just in the last 3 days have we gotten our precious colored eggs. I am especially pleased, okay, not just pleased but really over the moon, that one of the hens is laying a BLUE egg. They are the two smaller ones on the left and possibly the one on the upper right. I will admit, it is a VERY close call and hard to definitively say they are blue rather than green. In any case, we are TICKLED that the girls have started laying. If ONLY Duke HAD been Duchess and Sophocles had REALLY been Sophia, we would be showing off more green eggs. Such is life, yes?

On a completely different subject, Farmer Chef Jeff and I, along with a talented staff, successfully pulled off a Hawaiian-themed Christmas party Friday night, complete with saxophone accompaniment. That part was a bit surreal. Anyway, the party was a wild success. The only thing left over from the party were these beautiful flowers. Farmer Chef Jeff and I will be taking it easy today and tomorrow, only doing simple things like raking all of the leaves off the roof and cleaning the rain gutters!

Chicken Portraits

I spent part of my day taking "portraits" of the chickens. Now that we are selling eggs at Farmer's Markets, our customers want to see pictures of the actual chickens involved. Above it an arty photo of Napoleon, our first rooster, and a lovely metal sculpture we bought at the Windsor Farmer's market a couple of years ago.

The white chicken is Martha. She is an Ameraucana hen and lays pale green eggs.
The red girl in the middle shot is Ruby. She is a Rhode Island Red and lays brown eggs.
The next one with the wild hair do top notch is Sid (as in Sid and Nancy...yes, we have a Nancy). She is a Barbander and lays very pale brown eggs, sometimes bordering on ivory. More photos and IDs to come!