The weeks have clicked by so quickly that there really wasn't much time for writing or keeping track of things. But things ought to be settling down into some sort of pattern, only time will tell what that pattern might eventually come to look like.
Since learning of our good fortune (the sale of our house) two days ago we have been spending time building our new deluxe chicken coop. Prior to this we have been using a large coop we found at Costco as our first chicken experiment, the plan being to learn about chickens before moving to the Farm and building a larger flock. We have arrived at that point, so a large coop is needed.
We decided to base this new coop on a trailer I had once used as a landscape maintenance trailer tool carrier. Since I closed that twenty year business I had no use for the trailer but figured I'd find some use for it. The new coop seemed a likely thing.
This new coop is eight feet long and four feet wide, and about a foot and a half off of the ground while sitting on the trailer. There are five large nesting boxes which sit next to a transom door so that we can collect eggs. There is an automatic chicken coop door at one end which opens in the morning and closes at night, and this sits on a larger door which allows us to clean the coop as needed. But cleaning is also thought about as a daily thing.
My building style is eclectic. I get some wood and hardware, then begin building. This process isn't as haphazard as it looks. I have a plan, but it's just not on paper. The general shape is defined and thought through properly before building starts and I have a vision in my head which informs me as I build. The particulars are not considered, but things I build usually turn our fairly well and do the job they are intended to do. We bought four large oil drip pans (the sort you would use under your car to keep oil off of the floor) to put down on the floor of the coop. These protrude slightly for the side of the coop so that we can pull them out of the coop to clean things easily. We will use construction sand on the pans because: the chickens like it, it is cheap, and when used can be added to the compost pile to make good soils for growing.
The nesting boxes are nine inch by fourteen inch Teflon coated baking pans. Large enough to make the hens happy, mobile enough to allow us to move a broody hen to the brooding coop (the old Costco coop modified for brooding) so that chicks can be made in the safety of a fenced off area. These pans also are easily cleaned, but we will keep nesting materials in them instead of sand and clean them more often. Clean eggs needn't be washed and washed eggs have to be refrigerated. So the eggs will last much longer and be fresh longer at room temperatures. We will refrigerate the eggs anyway because people have become accustomed to the practice. But it really isn't necessary to keep farm fresh eggs chilled.
The chicken crop we are working toward is intended to primarily produce eggs for eating, selling, and hatching into hens for laying. And to do this well we will need fifty, or so, hens.
About seven weeks ago we bought ten new chicks, each about three inches tall. Since we had always thought that our favorite variety of chicken is the Rhode Island Red ,we bought five of these. But since we got our big rooster Biff (the Buff Orpington), and we liked his size and looks, we also bought five of these. All of our new chicks are purported to be females, but there is about a ten percent chance of at least one young rooster among them.
If we get a new rooster, the plan is to castrate the thing to make a Capone. A Capone is a large roasting chicken, a style which fell out of favor in the United States a long time ago when people gave up home raised chickens. When a rooster is castrated (at about four months of age) they retain their primary sexual characteristics while maintaining the size of a male chicken. If this is true we ought to be able to produce a ten pound roaster rooster, perfect for the holidays. The surgery itself is fairly simple. The testes are located under a wing and there are few problems with pain or infection, so the castration isn't anything like castrating a mammal, and less messy. A Caponized rooster doesn't compete with the breeding rooster so there is no fighting, or competition for females (which is very hard on females). I believe that, since people are again raising their own chickens, Caponized roosters might make a comeback and become a commonplace market crop, probably for holiday eating.
We moved the chicks out to the broody coop last night and moved the big chickens to the new coop. The chicks could not have been happier because they have been cooped up in a small plastic wading pool since arriving on the Farm, but the big chickens did not like being moved and fought back. We spent about an hour last night trying to convince the big chickens to get into the new coop, but eventually had to give up and throw them in bodily. We will trying to let them get themselves back in the new coop tonight, but throwing chickens is an open option too.
The chicks will stay locked in the brooding coop for a few days, to get used to being outside and around big chickens. The big chickens will hang around in the new temporary chicken run getting used to having the chicks around. We hope this will keep the violence to a minimum. Chickens are hard on each other and if they were all mixed to early one or two might be killed.
This weekend we will open the gate to the brooding coop and mix them up. If all goes well we will find eggs showing up in the new coop in about three months. But as with all things, time will tell what the Farm has planned.
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