Fresh Eggs Daily®: How To Brew Chicken Poop (or Horse Manure) Fertili...

Fresh Eggs Daily®: How To Brew Chicken Poop (or Horse Manure) Fertili...: If you garden and raise chickens, you can forget about having to buy Miracle Gro or fertilizer ever again. It's so easy to make ...

Bumblefoot in Chickens... A great link...

http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2011/07/bumblefoot-causes-treatment-warning.html

A trinity of daisies... and Fresh Eggs...

Photography by: Catherine-Anne Redparth of Catherine's Country Cottage/Catherine's Country Quilts

BIG SMILE...

SOLD!... Two boxes of eggs!... 'The Egg Shed' is working! One very happy girly! Catherine...x

The Egg Shed...

" The Egg Shed "

This is just the bare shell... more to come, later...

And so it grows!

Having heard people say things like: 'My mother started with six and now has two hundred.' with such a matter-o'-fact tone, I can now see how one starts with six and then ends up with two hundred!

I started with six, two years ago... and suddenly, I find myself with fifteen... that is... forteen hens and a rooster!

And another thing; how does one go from really not liking marmalade, to loving it? Toast and marmalade is slowly becoming a favourite...

Life is fun-ny!
Catherine...x

Eggs...

The Egg Shed... Part II...

Good Morning!

'The Egg Shed' is up and running...

Still working on this project... I need to add cladding around the back and sides, in order to protect the eggs from the sun and rain... a work in progress!

For now, I'm happy with this!

Catherine...x

Which egg?

Question:
Which one of these girls has the least experience in laying eggs?  In other words, which egg indicates the youngest layer in the brood?

Answer:

The smallest yolk.



Two hens, an egg... and then... Miss Inquisitive...

Easter Tea... Looking forward to it!

The three little eggs were layed by my sweet little new hens.

The hens are only 20 weeks old and they are lovely, a great joy!

Rooster... & Patient...

When one goes out for a drink in the local pub, one never knows what could happen next… Yesterday, hubby had been rehearsing a wedding with a couple getting married today and phoned me up to say to meet them all at the pub, across from the church. I did so and after the soon to be married couple and their family left, we met up with our neighbours who were there, too. We were chatting about our hens, which we both keep and I was saying about how my girls (hens) were pecking each other, literally to death, when… a man sitting at the bar next to us politely interjected and said, he had two Bantam Cockerels who needed a new home, would I and my lady friend be interested! No charge! Well, we both jumped in with a resounding ‘Yes!’ and will be fetching them this morning! Hopefully my ‘hen-pecking’ days will be over! Watch this space…

...Say ‘Hello!’ to Arnie, my first ever cockerel – a Bantam… Isn’t he the beezneez!

Here he is with the girls…

2 Sept 2012

And here is my little patient who is now the third of my ‘hen-pecked’ victims… I don’t think she is going to survive… so sad! She’s mainly staying inside the sick bay… But yesterday, Arnie was introduced to the remaining three girls one of whom is the bully and he sorted her out so swiftly… so, hopefully that will be the end of the bullying. Fingers crossed+

My poor little girl… x

4 Sept 2012:  My little baby girl died in her sleep last night… xxx

Poor little thing!

Last week was not a good week for me and my ‘little baby girl’. One of my hens had caught a fright, according to a small-holder across the road from our place. Her little comb had gone blue, she barely pecked at food or drank water and was hunched up most of the day looking very sad. I had made two trips to the vet, who prescribed two different forms of antibiotics and near to £100.00 later, there was no sign of improvement, in fact she just got worse over the period of two weeks. Finally out of desperation, a lady at a nearby agri-store suggested that I go see the chap across the road. He said that the girls were molting and that my poorly little one had suffered a fright at some point which caused her heart to start failing. After looking around the hen-house and run he gave me some very simple tips for small adjustments in diet and surroundings but on the whole he thought I was doing well where the hens were concerned. We both looked at ‘little baby girl’ and decided in the end the best thing would be for the chap to ‘take her with him’ and end her suffering. I felt so awful - I felt I had failed her but he said there was nothing I could have done to prevent the situation, it was all part and parcel of keeping hens. He said that as long as I was treating the animals with respect and looking after them as best I could, that was the most important thing. And he felt that I had done just that. He said that birds are generally fragile by nature and that this sort of thing was to be expected. Sob!