Friday, June 25, 2010

The First Two Eggs!

Gracie was thrilled to find our first two eggs inside the mobile chicken coop today! After 5 long months of caring for the chickens and waiting for the coop to be built we will now begin to finally enjoy the fruits of our labor! They are tiny pullet eggs right now (about half the size of a normal egg) but within just a few weeks we'll have full size eggs to eat and sell!

This egg scale belonged to our kids' Great-grandmother, Frieda Beckmann. The tiny egg is not even registering yet. (shown with the bottle of beer for comparison)
Posted by Picasa

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Luke and "Butler"

Luke is shown here with one of our roosters, "Butler". Amazingly, he can still catch him and Butler shows no aggression. In fact, after putting him down, Butler continues to follow Luke around.
Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Chickens In The Yard!

The girls are rangin' all over the place!

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Chicken Update!

So whatever happened with those chickens you ask??  Yes, with the birth of Nyla the chickens took a bit of a back seat, so here we are now with the flock at almost 16 weeks old!  We ended up brooding them in our basement until they were about 8 weeks and then moved the entire operation to the garage (got too stinky for the basement!) Scott and the kids built  a pen with high, cardboard walls to contain them until their new home was ready.  The "egg mobile", built by our friend Stefan Penas, was delivered to us in early May and we moved the chickens out to the farm on May 13. The egg mobile has been moving around the farm every 5-7 days since then and the chickens are thrilled to be foraging on pastures with real, live bugs! We should have eggs by the end of July so stayed tuned for news on that!  Let's get caught up with some photos.....
Gracie with the chickens in our garage!

The coop arrives at our house.

Gracie is checking out the inside. There are 8 nesting boxes and 4 roosts.

Gracie is sanding the windows (they are from the old hog house at the farm)

Windows get a fresh coat of white paint.

Coop is complete and ready to move to the farm!

Chickens are loaded and ready to leave. Check out those nice windows!
Egg Mobile arrives at the farm!

Chickens aren't too sure yet.

Luke helps some find their way outside. The rest quickly follow.