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Archive for 'Chickens'

New hens

I found this group of 20 hens destined for slaughter do to their "advanced" age of 18 months. They are some sort of improved Rhode Island Reds. They lay a huge brown egg. They cost me $2 each. With 7 mouths to feed now, including Grandma Ginny who would happily eat 6 of

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wang wong

Plucking Chickens

The Small and Beginning Farmers Association of New Hampshire (SBFNH) owns bird processing equipment that once you’ve been trained on it, you can reserve it when you need it and bring it to your own place to process your own birds. We’d been looking at building our own plucker in particular, because the stuff

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wang wong

Fowl Nutrition

Lisa and I both noticed that the eggshells have been getting a bit thin in the last week or so. I hypothesize that this is because the hens have switched from living on layer pellets to foraging which they find far yummier. However layer pellets are fortified with calcium while bugs are apparently not. I

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wang wong

The sound of spring on our farm.

Flickr is now allowing short video clips. I finally figured out how to make my camera take a video and what software to use to get it to Flickr. (All by myself! Go me.) If I can link them properly in the same fashion, here are some clips from yesterday. I still need to get several critters to perform on command, so stay tuned, and hope for better weather. It’s horribly windy and cold out there today.

wang wong

Snowy Saturday

Hermione finally had her piglets yesterday, 119 days after coming home from East Hill Farm. Nominal pig gestation is 115 days: She pushed it as hard as she could and of course had them in a snowstorm. The good news is that all is well, six live piglets that she is feeding and looking

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wang wong

Spring Goes Sproing

Spring is oh so slowly coming. The twice weekly storms are more rain than snow, and I can leave the hose out to water the animals. We had the same temperatures in December, but the December sun was not enough to thaw the hose in the afternoon, while the March sun does.

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wang wong

Waste not, want not

I’ve been calling around to various places, looking for stuff to feed the pigs. Left over stuff, stale bread, etc. We’ve been getting left over bagels from Bagel Works a couple of times a week, and boy do the pigs and chickens like that! But with feed prices as high as they are, we

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wang wong

Hi ho!

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go! When we do morning chores, one of the things we do first is open up the hatch on the chicken coop, then jump back, quickly, because they are coming out, and coming out fast! No matter how cold, these Icelandic chickens are out and

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wang wong

Midwinter Bee Update

We’ve had a few warm days this week, and the bees are flying after six weeks or more cooped up in the hives. I was thrilled to see that the hive I thought would be dead by Christmas is still alive, if weak. They must have a queen after all. I gave all four

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wang wong

Chores, and playing

Bjarki might have met his match. The pup is just a biting bundle of energy, and today they were both play play play all day long. She only took a couple of little power naps, and always wanted to go outside for more. She’s doing pretty well on the don’t chase the chickens front,

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wang wong