Welcome, April!

April showers bring May flowers!

What beautiful weather we had this first day of April! 62 degrees! This is the warmest day we've had in the last 6 months. So warm, in fact, that we were able to take the little duckies (who aren't very little anymore!) outside for the first time!

The little ducks had quite an adventure indeed, Drumstick tried to bum rush them, and Specker tried to mate Duckie (who is presumably male based on his call and what appears to be a drake feather...). Needless to say, he got chased away across the yard and has decided he wants nothing to do with ducks anymore! The hens were indifferent, and only Opie tried to sniff them. We don't have their pen completed, but they definitely needed some time to stretch out in the sun! 

I raked out the perennial area of the herb garden, too. Oregano, Thyme, and Chives are doing well, and Sage finally appears to be coming around. Hoping the Tarragon and Mint made it, but see no signs yet... The Lamb's Ear and Plantain are already emerging in the yard, too.

After the sun went down and everyone was tucked away, I put up the second greenhouse shelf we bought this week. So many seedlings, so little space! I put the cover on the second one, hoping it will hold in enough heat to get the rest of these peppers to germinate, as well as the tomatoes I'm going to start in cling wrap covered egg cartons when I'm done here!

On a side note, I found 2 of the 5-week-old chicks out of the box and one perched on the side this morning... They are pretty much fully feathered, but not quite ready to go outside yet, either. How are your animals and seedlings doing? Let us know in the comments!

If you'd like to see additional, full sized photos of today's adventures, please visit our Spring 2015 Album HERE. 

I'm also active nearly daily on Instagram.

Duckies!

Saturday afternoon, after our 4H meeting, we stopped off at Tractor Supply... and picked up 2 more residents, Pekin Ducks!

This is our first time raising ducklings. They are quite a bit messier than the chickens, they love to slop around their water! They're still pretty shy, but we're working on that. In a few days or so, we'll be able to let them go for a little swim in the bathroom sink. Ducks are sold "straight run" meaning we do not know if they are male or female just yet. . Regardless, I want to name them Duckie and Andie after the characters in Pretty in Pink! 

It's a good thing we bought our chicks when we did, they were already sold out of the Ameraucanas and Jersey Giants at Family Home and Farm. Here's a short clip of everyone this afternoon. The chicks are getting wings already! Duckies are getting a few little tail tufts:

Baby Chicks 2015

Last night we purchased our 2015 batch of baby chicks! 6 more hens will be joining the egg laying ranks this summer! We got another Ameraucana, another Black Jersey Giant, 2 more Rhode Island Reds and 2 Barred Rocks. We were kind of hoping to find breeds we didn't already have, but we've been happy with all of these over the past couple years, too. The company 4H orders from in May has Buff Orpingtons and Silver Laced Wyandottes we're eyeing, too...

Caring for baby chicks is fairly easy. The key is keeping them warm and safe, with a steady supply of fresh water and food. Start up cost, including the birds, is under $50! Sure, buying the fancy waterer and food dispenser is convenient, and a plastic bin may be a little easier to clean up, but they are not necessary.

You will need:

Baby Chicks
Cardboard Box or Large Plastic Tote
Pine Shavings
Heat Lamp w/ Bulb
Shallow Water Dish w/ Marbles or Purchased Waterer
Shallow Food Dish or Purchased Feeder
Chick Starter Feed (we use unmedicated)
Duramycin - 10 Powdered Antibiotic (optional)

Below is a photo of our set up this year. We use a purchased waterer, as we have to refill it less, but you can also use a shallow bowl filled with marbles (to prevent drowning), and a cut off an instant soup bowl for food (couldn't find our chick feeder!). We set the water on a salad plate to prevent chips from getting into and soaking up the water. We've always just used a cardboard box, but a plastic tote, or even an old galvanized water trough works! You'll want about 1/2" or so deep layer of pine chips in the bottom for bedding. Keep the box away from drafts.

As you can see, we secure the heat lamp to a dining room chair. You will want the temperature inside the box somewhere between 85 and 95 degrees for the first week or so. If they congregate directly under the lamp, and refuse to leave the huddle for food or water, it may be a little too chilly for them. Adversely, if they are as far as possible from the heat source and panting, raise the lamp. Put the food and water a little ways from the lamp to encourage movement.

Personally, we put powdered antibiotic in the water for the first week we have them, to address any illness they mave have gotten from other chicks, or during the stress of travel. After the first week, and for the rest of their lives, they will only be treated with medicated water in the case of illness, never as a preventative measure. Nor will they be fed any sort of medicated feed!

If you want your adult chickens to be friendly, handling them gently several times a day is the key. My adult birds come when called, many seek out human attention on their own, and the majority can be carried around without any complaints (with a few exceptions, roosters and dominant hens are less likely cooperate...) by doing so. Be exceptionally vigilant around small children and cats or dogs who are not familiar with baby chicks when handling them.

As soon as they get their first set of feathers, you can remove the heat lamp. Eventually, they will be moved to a bigger/longer box, which we create by cutting the ends out and taping them together with packing tape, with chicken wire laid over the top to prevent jail breaks! As soon as the weather breaks, we'll set up a temporary corral in the yard and allow them supervised forraging time a few hours a day. If you already have adult chickens, be sure to keep the younger flock separated from them until they're ready to live in the coop full time. (But, that's an entirely separate issue we'll address when that time comes!)

***All this said, A lot of people have expressed interest in laying hens, but before purchasing, be advised that chickens only lay eggs for 5-7 years, but may live in captivity several years there after. I have heard that animal shelters have begun seeing more and more spent hens. Either resolve yourself to humanely butchering, or plan to keep the birds into retirement. Baby chicks are cute, but they soon grow up! Venturing out into subzero temperatures 3 times a day to refresh frozen waterers and raking out poopy, stinky straw once a week or so isn't exactly fun. You may have problems finding a vet that handles poultry. You may be required to research and provide medical care on your own. Don't go into it lightly!***

BOOKSHELF: The Backyard Homestead

Click to view book on Amazon.com

THE BACKYARD HOMESTEAD: Produce All the Food You Need on Just a Quarter Acre

Edited By Carleen Madigan

*Eat from the garden year-round with fresh veggies and homemade preserves.
*Make omelets from eggs laid by your own chickens.
*Pick fruits and berries from your back door.




The Backyard Homestead is a good resource for beginner and intermediate level homesteaders, or those contemplating a move to the country and starting a simpler lifestyle. Within it's 367 pages is basic information concerning growing vegetables, herbs, and fruits, as well as caring for your own livestock for meat, milk, and eggs. Everything you'd need to know to eat your own homegrown food year-round!

The book opens with "The Home Vegetable Garden". Starting from planning your garden, to starting seeds, to DIY plant supports, to harvesting, and finally seed-saving and preserving, the entire life cycle of the plants are touched upon. A good basic foundation is presented, including a "Vegetables A to Z" section giving specifics for various common vegetables. The information presented is more than enough to get a new gardener headed down the right path to success.

As far as preserving, hot bath canning is touched upon briefly, with no mention of dehydration. If you're looking for books specifically concerning food preservation, I'd recommend The Dehydrator Bible: Includes over 400 Recipes for dehydration information, and Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving concerning pressure canning.

The second section, "Backyard Fruits and Nuts", gives basic information about several different types of fruits including strawberries and which to choose for your climate, choosing and caring for various berry bushes, choosing and raising grapes for wine and preserves making, and suggestions for deciding what varieties of fruit and nut trees will work best for your orchard. Proper pruning of all bushes, vines and trees is covered. There are even wine and cider making directions!

The "Easy Fragrant Herbs" section covers very basic cultivation of 32 common culinary and medicinal herbs, and although includes some tea and vinegar recipes, doesn't touch much on the medicinal applications of those herbs. I've found The Complete Book of Herbs: A Practical Guide to Growing and Using Herbs and The New Healing Herbs: The Essential Guide to More Than 125 of Nature's Most Potent Herbal Remedies to be valuable reference guides if you're looking for in-depth information about specific plants, both cultivated and wild. Rosemary Gladstar's Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner's Guide: 33 Healing Herbs to Know, Grow, and Use provides an excellent introduction and overview to beginner herbalists on how to administer various forms of treatments, as well as information on 24 common herbs. It includes 124 medicinal recipes, too!

"Homegrown Grains" was of particular interest to us. We are currently purchasing corn and hay for our animal feed. It would be nice to supplement some of that with homegrown product! We've never attempted to grow grains ourselves, other than a few stalks of corn (with little success). There is a planting chart, which will certainly come in handy. The chapter focuses on corn and wheat, and covers properly drying corn, threshing wheat, using a grinder and bread and pasta making. Many of the questions I've had regarding wheat growing were answered. Growing hops and barley for home brewed beer was a welcome surprise at the end of the chapter!

After the plants presentations came "Poultry for Meat and Eggs". It's important to select breeds suited to your purpose. Meat breeds are larger, and often produce less eggs than laying breeds. This section does a fairly good job at covering the common chicken breeds in the US, although there is no mention of climate hardiness. Raising turkeys, ducks and geese are also referenced here. Collecting and preserving eggs is thoroughly discussed, but home butchery of meat birds is left out. Collection of feathers for down is touched upon, though. There are plans included for building a small portable suburban-type chicken coop that will house 2 or 3 birds, but would recommend doing a thorough web-search before settling on a design.

"Meat and Dairy" section is what you'd expect- Goats, Sheep, Cows, Rabbits and Hogs. Interestingly enough, there were no plans presented for building a basic shelter or fencing for the animals. Breed selection for meat or milk is covered, as well as proper milking technique and safe milk handling etiquette. Making various cheeses and butter is touched upon.  If you're interested in specific cheese making recipes, Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses is a great guide.

Again, home butchery is vastly under-represented, simply covering how to cut the meat and package it for freezing or for smoking after you pick it up from the slaughter house. There are plans for a simple smoke house, and recipes for sausage and jerky.  If you're looking for an in-depth guide to livestock, I'd look elsewhere. There are many very specific books available out there for the type of animal you're interested in raising. For the stouthearted, there is the Home Butchering Handbook: A Living Free Guide (Living Free Guides).

The final chapter, "Food from the Wild" lightly touches on beekeeping, foraging for wild edibles, and gathering maple syrup. Very basic information is presented. Again, I'd look for specific reference guides for these particular subjects. Especially concerning wild edibles. A good reference guide with color photos that is tailored to your specific area is the best choice. There are indeed plants out there than can make you very sick if you make an identification mistake!

In the appendix, there are several web resources given, as well as further reading suggestions (some of which I have already mentioned!) on various specific subjects. As of writing, I have not reviewed them all yet!

Over-all, I would HIGHLY recommend this book to BEGINNERS, and to intermediate gardeners looking to expand from a simple vegetable or herb garden to a larger scale, self-sufficient homestead. It's a good starting point. People who've been homesteading for a while will probably already be familiar with much of the information presented here. However, it'd be a great book to have on hand to lend should a visitor become interesting in what you're doing, too!

Have you read this book? What did you think of it? Comment below!

MORE Eggs Coming Soon!

I got a "little" surprise in the corner of the barn this morning! A small brown "first egg" belonging to either Ginger or Chili, our Amber Link hens from the March 1 group!

Compared to a normal sized egg. 

Upon closer inspection this afternoon, we found 2 more smaller brown eggs in the barn nest (yes, some of them have found a corner they like to lay in...), suggesting that perhaps BOTH of them are now laying. We missed collection for a few days while we were out of town this weekend. We didn't expect them to start for another week or so!

Besides the discovery of the 3 small eggs, one of our Ameraucanas (Caramel) has been neglecting the coop at bedtime the past 2 nights. The first morning, she was already pecking around in the barnyard when I went to let everyone out. This morning, she was in the barn. I suspect she is sitting on a nest somewhere overnight, although we've been unable to locate it yet. 

A similar incident happened last summer when Athena (who we now call "Broody Hen" because she likes to sit in the coop on everyone else's eggs...) disappeared several nights in a row. Eventually we discovered a nest full of 19 eggs behind our large Hosta next to the back door. She had been hiding in plain sight!

Either way, by the end of this month, we should have an additional 3 doz. free-range eggs per week available for sale locally, some of which will be light blue (Ameraucana eggs)! If every hen lays every day, we're looking at a total of 105 eggs weekly! Contact us HERE if you're interested.

The soon to be laying ladies and Specker.

On a side note, we've been looking into the Michigan Cottage Foods Laws and picked up some paperwork from our local Farmer's Market regarding perhaps opening a stall next spring! Stay tuned!

The Saga of Specker...

When we purchased 3 little yellow chicks at Tractor Supply this past spring,  we were assured they were all "Amber Sex Link" pullets (young females) . After all, "sex link" chicks are always born one color or the other depending on gender, right? Well...

Specker is much larger than other hens of the same age and has a different color pattern.

For the first month, all 3 little fuzzy yellow chicks began to grow in white feathers and all looked identical, although one did have a noticeably more developed comb and a few more spots than the others. As one month turned into two, "Specker" (who was originally named "Cinnamon for the reddish spots) began to outgrow the other two and had much larger leg circumference than all the others! Her tail feathers were coming in completely different as well.

Specker's tail is downward curved and much fuller than the others'.

Well, we just figured she was maturing a little faster and thought nothing of it 'til... We heard crowing... Not a completely developed, wake the dead type typical crow, but a lower pitched scratchy sounding racket unlike any other song or call we've heard from our other adult hens. We thought "This is PROOF that Specker is a Rooster!". Well, after some researching, I discovered it IS possible for hens to crow, too! 

So, it was back to the drawing board. "Spurs!", it hit me. Surely Specker has to be a hen, there are no spurs! I lied. Upon closer inspection, there were 2 tiny, barely visable nubs on it's legs. MUST be a rooster! Right? Nope. There are cases of hens having developed tiny spurs, too... 

Specker is now about 14 weeks old. Back to square one again... We're more confused than ever concerning this chicken. Hen? Rooster? Who are you? Is it possible that sex linked chicks can be born the color of the opposite gender? I'll be sharing this around hoping for an answer from someone more experienced with this breed. If you happen to have any advice, or know of someone who can give us an answer, please share!

Brown or White Eggs? What's the Difference?

I've received a few questions lately regarding the difference between white eggs and brown eggs. Are brown more nutritious? Do white chickens lay white eggs and brown chickens lay brown eggs? What causes the difference in shell pigmentation? 

Firstly, there is absolutely no difference in the nutritional value of a brown egg vs. a white egg. The difference is nutritional value depends upon the hen's diet. Free-ranged birds eating bugs, seeds, and weeds will offer up the best eggs, followed by a hen only fed organic chicken feed, and lastly commercial hens who are kept in cages and only eat GMO by product-feed.

As to determining what color egg a hen will lay, look no further than.... her earlobe! Feather color has absolutely nothing to do with egg color, although breed does. A hen with a white earlobe will lay white eggs, and a chicken with red skinned earlobes will lay brown eggs. There are white hens who will lay brown eggs (such as a White Wyandotte)  and brown or red hens that will lay white eggs (such as a Red Leghorn).

Pigmentation is deposited on the egg while forming. Brown pigmentation is called ooporphyrin. In some cases, such as with our Ameraucana hens, there may even be a bluish to green to olive brown coloration. That pigmentation is known as oocyanin. There is no pigmentation deposited on white eggs.

As to why Americans generally associate brown eggs with small local farms and white eggs with factory outfits, I can only guess. In general, commercial outfits choose White Leghorns because they are compact, eat less, and are consistent producers of large white eggs. On the other hand, heritage breeds like Rhode Island Reds are hardy, cool weather tolerant, do not require much feed, and fairly steadily lay large to extra large brown eggs.

So, the next time you get that token white egg in your carton, don't feel slighted. There is absolutely no difference between them!