Caught in the act

Caught ya!  Doesn't Oprah look beautiful in the nest?

She skipped Friday but gave us our 2nd tiny egg today.  This one is just slightly larger than the first egg on Thursday.  My husband is already asking when we can make breakfast.  :)

All of my friends and family know that I am a list keeper.  Unfortunately my daughters have inherited this curse too.  So I am going to start off keeping a list of the eggs we get each day.  The list will include what type of eggs are collected.  I am not sure if this is a list I will continue permanently, but it seems like it might be an interesting list to refer back to.  You can find our list in the top tabs under "Egg Count".  In the future I may use the list as a way of letting neighbors and family of when I have extra eggs.

Our first EGG!!!!

I was beginning to think it was never going to happen.  Maybe it was just a myth.  I mean, I have had chickens before, years ago.  I vividly remember those chickens laying eggs.  :)  Is it possible that all 12 of the chickens I got were just the "non-egg laying" kind?  My husband even started to joke around that I had deceived him about the "delicious breakfasts" we would have and that in truth these chickens were only here to be my fun pets.

It really happened!  And it is hard to put into words the pure joy I felt in finding this tiny beauty in the nest box.

I am pretty sure this special gift was laid by Oprah Orpington.  Her comb and wattle are more red than Gilda's.  And I am so happy that our first egg is from this special girl.  She has been the "first" for many things in our new hen house including the first to eat treats out of my hand.

I always thought our first egg might come from one of the Orpingtons.  And I had a hunch that the far North nest box would be the "favorite" nest box.  I am just so happy that she used the nest box with our pretty Christmas nest box curtains and didn't hide this beauty under the coop.

The size of our first egg was a little surprising to me.  It is truly the size of a small bantam egg.  I guess it has been too many years ago that I got our first egg from our first set of chickens.  Such a cute little thing.  Of course I know that the eggs will get bigger as she lays more and I am happy that they gradually work up to full size eggs.

So Hummingbird Hollow is truly now a Hen House.

Thank you Oprah for this amazing gift.  My mind is racing with recipes I can make and things I can bake. 

Augh! The white stuff!!!

First I have to apologize for being so quiet here on the blog for the last month.  It has been super busy between decorating the house for Christmas, making a delicious Thanksgiving Dinner for my family, and making lots and lots of Christmas presents.

And there hasn't been much happening in the hen house.  STILL no eggs.  :( 

I have however been super worried about the girls during this arctic cold snap we have had over the last 5 days or so.  We have had lows in the single digits and highs in the teens.  I don't think it got this cold all Winter last year.  

This is the first Winter with our girls.  And the first Winter that I have ever used sand in my coop for my chickens.  I love the sand in my coop!  It is truly so easy to keep clean.  But I worried that the coop would be colder with no straw.  But I have continued with my original plan and the girls seem to be doing GREAT!  The coop is very well built and certainly draft free.  But it has great ventilation with two roof vents and a vent on the north and south walls, as well as vents in the soffits.  We have NO heat lamps.  The only additional light we supply is a rope light that is on early in the morning and in the evening.  It is on a timer to go off and give the girls 8 full hours of darkness.  The girls all come running out in the morning when I open the run door and seem completely unfazed by the cold temperatures.
**Edit** - I almost forgot to tell you that the one other thing I am doing for the chickens now that we are having below freezing temperatures is that I give them a "late evening" snack every night.  At about 4:30 I take the girls either some stale bread, dry oats, cracked corn, or left over tortillas. (we always seem to have lots of these)  The girls are generally all in the coop by 5:30 each evening so a snack at this time catches them before they are roosted and ready for bed.  The idea behind the late snack is that the girls will have food in them that they are digesting through the night.  Just that act of digestion creates some warmth for them.  

The only thing they seem to absolutely NOT like is snow.  They try very hard to avoid the white stuff!

They go to great lengths to try to fly around the corner of the coop and over to the covered area of the run where there is generally no snow.  

I am afraid the girls are in for a big surprise if we ever get a true measurable snow.  So far this year we have had just a dusting.

How are your chickens doing with the cold Winter temperatures?

Making Flock Block Substitute

As I said in my post over the weekend, I am doing everything I can think of to get ready for Winter.  One of my Winter concerns is having nutritious treats for the girls.  It seems like we have lots of tomatoes and cucumbers and grapes during the Summer to give the girls but Winter will be a different story.

A few weeks ago I made the Peeps Pumpkin Pie recipe from The Chicken Chick.  Those are tucked safely away in the freezer for using this Winter.  Today I decided to make some Flock Block Substitute also from a recipe from The Chicken Chick.

One recipe made 4 pie tins of flock block.  They are still baking in the oven and smell FANTASTIC!

You can find the recipe that I used from The Chicken Chick at her blog here.

I made just a few changes...

1. I decided to bake mine in pie tins rather than 8 x 8 pans just because I had plenty of pie tins to bake 4 at once. 

2. I used 1 cup of Calf Manna rather than Omega Egg since that is what I have on hand.

3. I used 2 cups of water rather than 3 cups.  The humidity will affect this greatly so my advice is to add water slowly until you get the consistency that Kathy describes in her recipe.

Hopefully these flock blocks will not only be a wonderful healthy treat but will also be a bit of a boredom buster this Winter.  It will be nice to have treat options on hand for the days when the weather isn't so nice.

Do you make treats for your chickens?  I would love to hear about them.

More improvements and getting ready for Old Man Winter

Do you think we will ever be done making improvements to the chicken coop?  Will we ever really stand there looking at the coop and breathe a sigh of relief that we are truly, finally, totally done?

Somehow I think the answer is no.  We will never be totally done.  There will always be something more to do.  Please don't tell my husband.  :) 

Mostly I want to be ready for Winter.  We have already had quite a few frosty mornings and I know that colder mornings and nights are yet to come.  So the task for the weekend was to do some caulking and weather proofing so that the chicken coop is draft free.

We picked up a heated water bowl so I think the watering situation is worked out.  I am planning to water the flock outside this winter and the heated bowl will make that process easier.

For the nest box doors we decided that the best way to accomplish a draft free door was to add board inside the top latch of the nest boxes.  Works like a charm.

The tan boards toward the top of the picture are the draft boards.  They just cover the "seam" between the wall and the nest box door.  

In order to make sure our chickens get plenty of "light" I wanted to put our light on a timer.  This timer ensures that the girls get a full 8 hours of complete dark at night to rest, but enough light to hopefully continue laying through the winter.  And of course the timer means I don't have to personally go out to turn off the light.  :) 

Perfect!

Next task....finish the soffits on the north and south sides of the coop.  Darn, that will have to wait until next weekend.  We decided that these sides should have solid soffits rather than the vented soffits and that will require another trip to the hardware store.

Next on the list is to put up some boards to provide wind protection for the chickens when they are under the chicken coop this Winter.  Nope, that will have to wait until next weekend too. (Yes, another weekend of working on the chicken coop)

So, after a small amount of begging and pleading for my husbands forgiveness I talked him into making a ramp for the chickens to get down from the roost.  I was getting worried that one of them might get injured jumping down from the poop board.  They are truly clumsy creatures and I would feel awful if one of them was hurt.  Our poop board ends up being a bit high in order to have room for the metal  trash cans that hold their feed.  They don't have any trouble at all flying up to the roost.  It is the getting down that is a bugger.  

My husband built this ramp much like the ramp that goes down into the run.  A board was screwed to the front of the poop board with two wood shims so there is a small space to insert the metal piece that is attached to the ramp.  This allows for the ramp to be removed easily for cleaning. 

 I have no idea what these little metal plates are called.  But they are used sometimes when building roof trusses I think.  Anyway they work great because they can be screwed to the bottom of the ramp and the metal is bent so it slides into the "holder" above.

Success again!  I feel much better that the girls have a better way of getting down from their roost.  After the picture was taken we did add another cross board to the top of the ramp.  The space at the top was too big and the girls had to slide too far before reaching a foot hold.

You may notice in the picture above that the sand I use on the coop floor is swept away from the feeder area.  I do this because the girls make a bit of a mess when they eat.  With the sand swept away I can sweep up feed they spill and put it back in the feeder.  Much less waste this way and I don't end up with feed in the sand.

One last little improvement for the weekend.  I have been wanting to add some type of "pull" to make it easier for me to use the gate from the run.  I know, it is definitely NOT fancy.  But hey...it works!  And I no longer have to reach through the wire to lift the gate latch.

My husband drilled a hole through the gate post.  Then I tied a piece of rope onto the latch and put the rope through the hole and to the inside of the run.  Drat!  It didn't work.  The rope created too much friction in the rough wood and wouldn't slide freely to allow the latch to fall and hook into place.  Solution....a long piece of twist tie wire.  The plastic coated wire slides through easily.  I want to get some type of wooden beat to attach to the end of the wire so that it looks a little less "rustic".  But now it is so much easier to get out of the run. 

Of course the girls are always curious about what I am doing.  I couldn't resist taking this picture of Hazel and Oprah Orpington.  They seemed to be striking a pose for all of you but actually they were trying to get a good look at the camera just in case it was a treat.  :) 

All in all the coop is working wonderfully!  I love, love, love it!  And the girls love it too.  The new Cuckoo Marans girls are settling in well and will be needing some names soon.  They look enough alike that I probably need to get their leg bands on before I get too busy naming them. 

We got lots of things marked off of the "to do" list.  How is your "to do" list looking?  Are you ready for Winter?  

They're heeeeeeeeeeeeeere

Scared?

Oh, well don't be.  Even though Halloween is tomorrow they're not aliens, not ghosts, not even zombies.

Of course I am talking about our 5 new pullets.  Our Cuckoo Marans arrived today!!!!  And now our flock family is complete...at least until Spring.

These girls had a much shorter shipping time than the first pullets.  So they weren't nearly as hungry and their feathers were in much better shape than our first chickens.

The pictures really don't capture how pretty these girls are.  And of course they can't completely relax yet.  They have to be introduced to our first 7 girls and find their place in the pecking order.  I am really hoping that the process goes smoothly.  I am surprised at how small these girls look compared to our first pullets.  I guess that just goes to show how much the first girls have grown!

Have you ever noticed in life how everything HAS to happen all at once.  I called the post office this morning to make sure they had my cell phone number and home phone number so they could reach me when the chickens arrived.  And of course I got a call while I was on the way to the Orthodontist Office with my daughter.  I hated to think of the girls being in the box a moment longer than necessary.  Thankfully Taylor's appointment only lasted about 10 minutes.  Whew!  

Welcome to Kansas girls!  We are so happy you are here and hope you lay us some beautiful chocolate brown eggs VERY soon.

1st Dust Baths

Dust baths?  Really?

To get clean you roll in dirt?

Yes!  Well, if you are a chicken.

And watching chickens take a dust bath is one of my favorite chicken activities.  They kick and scratch and the dirt flies.  Today I got to watch a few of my chickens taking their first dust bath and of course I had to snap a few pictures.

Gilda was really into this dust bath.  She had her head turned and turned almost completely on her back to roll in the dirt.  Looks like Oprah Orpington would like to get in on this prime dust bath spot.

Look how much the girls have killed out the grass in the run area.  The grazing box is doing a nice job of protecting an area of grass for the girls to snack on.  That is Hazel on the grazing box.

All of this relaxing dust bathing was happening while I was inside the coop hard at work finally finishing the last of the painting.  Our new chickens are scheduled to arrive sometime this week and I really wanted to have all of the inside painting completed.

Whew...it took way longer to finish up the painting than I thought it would.  But I think it looks nice.

The nest box wall.

View from inside the coop looking toward the door and porch.

We didn't get the wood put up underneath the chicken house to give the girls some wind protection this Winter.  Maybe next weekend.  :)