Bird Bath

Chickens like to take dust baths, where they dig a hole in the dirt, and then fluff it all over themselves to scrub out any bugs/mites/etc that have taken residence in their feathers.

So our girls were digging holes in our yard for their baths, which kills off the grass and makes the lawn look funny.

The internet recommended that we provide them with a dedicated dirt box. Best is something a little bigger than a hen, with handles to make it easy to move. The answer seemed simple, and Dumplin seems to like it.

Alternative Chicken Herding

After the disaster that was day #2. Day #3 it was time for a different strategy.



The do nothing approach works rather well.

Chicken Escape

By popular request, we tried to make a video of me wrangling the chickens to bed. I'm pretty sure it turned out exactly as people hoped.



That poor child wasn't hurt, but he did get a rather unfortunate scare.

Day One harvest

Had to force the hens into their coop around 9pm last night. It'll take a little while to train some birds raised in a factory environment to live in our little tractor.

Around 10 o'clock, I went back out to check on the hens, and found another egg. This one appears to have been laid by a hen sitting on a roost, and it cracked when it hit the bottom. You can somewhat see the crack at the top of the egg on the right.


The first egg is being saved for when Tracy gets home, but you can't keep a cracked egg, right? So I had my first ever uber-fresh egg...certainly less than one hour old.

It was delicious. I sincerely think it was noticeably better than a normal egg...but I'll wait until we can do some blind side-by-side taste tests to be sure. It's all in the name of science.

Chickens!

We have chickens! Three beautiful Shaver Reds. Sadly they have trimmed beaks, but they are very pretty anyway.



Not only that, but I am the greatest chicken farmer in the history of the world: we picked up the chickens at 1:15pm, got them in the coop around 1:45pm, and had our first egg by 2pm!



Brittany thinks the egg is more interesting that the chickens.

Cedar Shingles & Winter Eggs

Our chicken tractor is looking nearly complete:

From Chicken Tractor

We still need to shingle the far side, put fencing over the door, and build a lockable inner door to keep the chickens in at night.

Good news for our more sensitive friends and relatives: it looks like we might be able to keep the chickens over the winter, rather than just cook them up as originally planned.

Chicken Tractor

Our chicken tractor is well underway. Sure, we could have just used a dog crate in a fenced in area, like many people do, or bought the plastic Eglu...but that just wouldn't be Tracy's style.

Chicken Tractor

(Click for more pictures)

With luck, we'll have our chickens next week.

Goodbye Shed

We decided to get rid of the old ugly shed at the back. With a double garage that we don't park in, we already have lots of extra storage, and the shed was rotting away at the bottom.