ilultham

 This posts contains pictures of dead animals, if you don't like that then please don't click to read more of the article.  Despite the bad weather this weekend just gone we needed to prepare the chickens for the avian flu lockdown. This meant lots of shuffling of chickens to different pens and the processing of 6 cockerels. The girls, as ever, were keen to help. We've got it down to an art now, so long as the water is at temperature we can do six birds in about an hour - which was a good thing as it was pretty cold on Sunday!  If you read this blog then you'll know that having the children help is nothing new, in fact I've got to the point where I won't do it without them if I can help it. They work hard, are good company and make the time fly.  I haven't weighed the birds yet but I'm so pleased with the size of them. Full breasts and great legs, one of these birds will be our lunch on Christmas day. I love that they didn't have much fat inside them...

Argh! Like buses, broody hens always seem to come at once. The irony of these four hens from my breeding pen of four Indian Game hens is that if they're all broody none of them are laying any eggs!   Also not sure sure the nest box can take them all in there at the same time! It must get pretty warm. With broody hens I tend to leave them pretty much alone but I do chuck them off the nest once a day, I even do this when they're sitting on eggs, as they sometimes won't look after themselves by feeding and drinking properly. Also lets them do a big poo away from the nest - which is a good way to help keep things clean.  Anyone else have too many broody hens at the moment?

We're certainly taking advantage of having our own breeding flock at the moment! More eggs hatched this week. From 25 eggs we had 25 hatch but unfortunately two chicks weren't good. but that's still some great odds. A dry hatch is the way to go, no messing with water. Switch it on and forget it until it's time to get them from the cradle 2 days before.   These are all Indian game and the plan will be for most of them to go in the freezer unless anyone wants to buy hens. So for once I'm hoping for lots of cockerels!  The 6 juveniles hatched out 3 weeks ago got moved into another pen, we had to borrow a heat plate for a few more weeks but they're not using it much.  They've been loving the grass, and so spend a fair bit of time squaring up against each other - does this mean more males I wonder?  My youngest has been spending hours just watching the chicks. It's funny as we hatch so many sometimes the children don't pay that much attention once they...

So this week the poultry could come back out and free range! Woop!  It hasn't been too bad as I have lots of pens, but I was desperate to get the ducks out of the polytunnel!  They had really trashed the place! I got their coop outside and they've been sunning themselves out on the long grass, basically loving life!  I managed to spend a few hours in there today to find the paths again! Now I have to decide what I'm going to do to prepare the beds. Part of me doesn't want to add anything - I have a feeling that the duck muck will be potent enough - so I think that just turning it over a bit might be enough (it's pretty compacted from them walking on there for 3 months).   I'm looking forward to seeing this filled with tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer! The children's all-you-can-eat buffet!

Now I would have preferred a better hatch rate but considering the incubator jammed and it was some days before I realised it wasn't turning I'm surprised we got any! So we had 7 hatch, one unfortunately had to be dispatched but the 6 that are left seem healthy and happy.  No matter how many times we hatch chicks out I'm always excited. These are some pure breed Indian Game, after setting up the breed flock last year (and doing some miles to do it!).    We'll have to see what we get from this batch. The hens they came from are mixed colours run with a dark coloured cockerel so it'll be interesting to see if there is much of a mix. We might put another set of eggs in the incubator straight away to hatch some more, as these are much slower grown than Ross Cobbs we will need to keep some hatching through the year to supply us with meat.  Anyone else hatching eggs at the moment?

 This post contains pictures butchery of poultry, so if you're not someone who wants to read about that then I'd suggest you skip this one. Theh boys from our Indian Game x Colobian Plymouth Rock crosses we hatched out last year have reached around 24 weeks of age and it was time for them to join freezer club.  I probably should have done this a few weeks sooner, but so long as I rest the birds once prepared and cook them properly it shouldn't make much odds, they're still plenty young enough and we do prefer to have to chew our food!  The girls have also really started to earn their keep in this job now. I got set up (water boiling, big chopping board cleaned and ready) and when they came out to help we started to process the birds. I'd catch a bird (one would open and close the gate for me) then dispatch and leave for it bleed and clean the meat. Once I had about 3 birds done I'd scald them and leave them for the girls to start plucking while I dealt with the ...

These photos popped up on my timeline today and I thought I'd share them with you all.  Some earlier chicken keeping.  After I had left the family farm and my wife and I we living in a little village just outside Evesham. This was a time before children and I honestly have no idea what we did with out time!  We had a good sized garden that I was slowly turning into a farmyard! The rescue hens we originally got were in the small movable ark (the one I fixed up last year in fact) but were slowly destroying the lawn daily.  So my brother came over for the day and we made them a chicken run between the lawn and the veg garden. It worked well to separate up the garden and give the chickens a bit more space.  Once we had it fence the birds loved it.   The next week I built a better coop for them and one that the eggs could be collected without having to even go in the pen.  I loved keeping chickens there, My one neighbour, who we got on really well wi...

With this Avian Flu lockdown we've been having it's been tricky to keep the chickens clean with their much reduced pens sizes. I've been using my wood shavings from my carpentry, but I only produce so many and they do soak in far too easily with all this wet weather we've been having.  So I put in a message to a farming friend to see if he would be happy to sell me a few bales of straw.   He only had big bales, but luckily I managed to get him to deliver it and sheet it up until we could use it.  Then I didn't want to use it all at one time. So I hammered a pin through it to be able to retie the string in the middle.  Luckily this worked really well and I could straw down all 8 poultry pens!  So lots of happy chickens and ducks after my little trip round all the pens. I think straw wins out when it's really wet like this as it forms a mat that the animals can stand on. I'm almost looking forward to putting all this on the compost heap when the lockdown for t...

  Growth is way slower on my Indian Game x Colombian Plymouth Rock meat birds when compared to Ross Cobbs but they are such different animals. Also although growth is slower, at 5 weeks they're only half way through their second bag of feed - Cobbs would be on the 5th by now. And just a picture of on of my Indian Game cockerels - they're just built like units! I love this breed. These pen is pure breeds and I'm hopfull to get some really good birds from them next year.  What meat crosses would you like to try? 

This year we've been plagued by bad hatch rates, I've kept changing my methods but I think having posted eggs really doesn't help things.  These chicks are from our own eggs, with a Indian Game cockerel over some Colombian Plymouth Rock hens.  What a difference in hatch rate!  I put in 16 eggs and it looks like we'll get 15 chicks (one is still hatching at the moment - as I write this we have 14 chicks). Two are Indian Game bantams which are still a useful bird to hatch out. The one egg I knew hadn't developed at 10 days so I had already discounted that. This was with a completely dry hatch, no water added at any point during incubation.  I love how this is our 6th or 7th hatch this year and the kids (and me) are still super excited about it. I'm hoping these birds grow quickly and have a good size to them. The plan is to kill them at 18 weeks(ish) although I might keep a few hens and cross them back to a different Indian Game cockerel to see what happens to the...

The bucket nest boxes I originally put in the Heras Panel Pasture Pens never really worked very well, They just weren;t quite big enough and could cause hens to break eggs. But because I used these pens more for grow outs it didn't matter too much and I changed the one I used for the layers into a bigger nest box like the one in this post.  Currently I have all three of these pens with potential laying hens in. So it was time to upgrade the last two pens to have proper nest boxes, which can even stay in when raising meat birds in there as well.  I had decided on a blue food barrel as they are easy to clean, about the right size and cheap enough. It almost seems like a waste, but they only cost about £4 and if I was to build it out of new wood it would cost far more.  It's fairly simple to make. Cut just a barrel and take the middle section out of it, leaving the sides intack. I do these cuts with a thin metal cutting disk in a small angle grinder - creates a lot of plast...