Chickens and Such

About this time last year I was writing a lot about the gardening and chickens and such. This year it feels like we are slow to start, but then again it is only June 1st. In Michigan our growing season is just really getting off it's feet. If you are a very dedicated gardener you might have seedlings going inside or have been planting outside, with great care, for a few weeks now.

I am not a dedicated gardener...yet. Small children make it hard for me be that dedicated. My time will come though.

We have been busy and the weekends do sometimes feel more crazy than the week days, and so is the nature of summer.

One of the more recent projects we undertook was building a chicken tractor! For those of you that are not savvy in the chicken department, a chicken tractor is a movable chicken pen! We've been wanting one since last spring when we first began our chicken adventures. The new baby chickens we took on this year (twelve barn yard chicken mutts) needed some new digs as they out grew the brooding box. We weren't ready to introduce them to the big girls as we have a pecking problem...and so we decided it was the right time!

Since these photos were taken Matt modified the brooding box so it is attached to the door and they have a place to roost at night, safe from raccoons. Our grand plan is to keep moving the tractor throughout the garden and let the chickens dig it up and poop on it...a bonus for our soil. We haven't planted a garden yet and may not do more than some cover crops. We joined a great new CSA this year, so we have lots of great organic veggies coming our way.
Our chicks from last year overwintered at a friend's farm south of here since we weren't living at the house. They keep roosters and our girls were pecked pretty seriously. Minus the roosters here we thought they would heal up, but once the skin is exposed they can't stop pecking! We're learning a lot about this issue and have found pine tar to be the best solution so far. We've been applying it every couple of days to the exposed skin and it seems to be helping.
They are laying, on average, six eggs a day (we have eight layers) and recently we had an egg that was HUGE. When cracked open, it had a double yoke! We couldn't even close the egg carton.
Building our homestead is a slow process and having babies along the way makes it even slower. We do see progress though and we're enjoying the hard work. We just recently bought a new garden tractor to replace our old one that finally kicked the bucket and it is making our lives much easier. As time goes on we'll get to where we want to be....or so I think, hope. A hoop house is in the plan and maybe a goat or two...