chickens
A Chickenless Life
Submitted by junglemonkey on April 21, 2010 - 9:47amWe gave up our chickens a couple of months ago because we have huge landscaping plans that involve taking down the old chicken coop. I thought it would be a relief. The chicken chores do take up a certain amount of time every day, every weekend and I thought that it would be a burden lifted from us.
It turned out that, while it did save us a few precious minutes every day, and a couple of hours on the weekends, there's a lot more to our adjustment.
Farewell, Chickens
Submitted by junglemonkey on March 14, 2010 - 5:07pmThose of you who check the Chicken Feed regularly have no doubt been wondering what happened to the chickens. It's been two weeks now, and they've not been outside.
Well, the fact is that the chickens have gone. The Pirate and I have been thinking about the next step in the Co-Prosperity Sphere's evolution, and we've decided that what we really need is more vegetables and fewer chickens. Makes sense, right? But the problem is that our little acre (and that's almost exactly what we've got here) has only one area that gets enough sun to grow anything - the chicken yard.
Hatches Battened
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 5, 2009 - 10:19amAbout two weeks ago, we gave away nearly two thirds of our hens. Let me just say, nineteen hens lay more eggs in a week than we eat in a month. The only way we could possibly keep up is if we were doing lots of farming or lumberjacking and using only non-powered hand tools to do it. Plus, November was approaching and 20 chickens make a lot of manure. Never mind that they eat a heck of a lot of feed.
After the Deluge
Submitted by pirateguillermo on October 14, 2009 - 10:56amIt rained yesterday. A tree fell across the driveway, blocking Peaches and Granny in. A tree fell across our road, a mile from our house, blocking me from getting home and cutting them out. The wind blew the carport over, flipping it off the truck. The wind also blew the gazebo around on the deck. When we all managed to get home, we put on grubbies and, in the failing light, cut a path wide enough for the cars to get through.
The power was out until 3 this morning. Of course, we are totally prepared for that.
Every day in every way
Submitted by pirateguillermo on October 2, 2009 - 10:41amIn the past week, the dogs have gotten even more enthusiastic about ratcatching. Esme has caught five out of six rats, and Dagmar has gone from being scared of the chicken house to being excited about going in and getting rats. The one that got away was excusable, as it was dark and they were out of practice.
Setting up the Chickenfeed
Submitted by pirateguillermo on June 18, 2009 - 3:03pmWe've set up a web camera to look at the chickens. It seems to be dropping packets -- some when it's mounted outside under the eaves looking at the yard, lots when it's mounted inside the chicken house. I suspect that, because there's no external antenna, the camera suffers more from signal attenuation than my laptop does (where the antenna is in the lid, behind the screen). Even the laptop has less than perfect signal in the chicken house, so that would make sense. Meanwhile, it's dark in the chicken house so even if the signal were great, mostly what we'd see is a black square. This does not get us any closer to seeing the rats getting the eggs and it doesn't actually get video of the chickens out to those curious folks who want to see them chickening around.
