Friday, January 23, 2009
Cascade garden
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Morning, girls
Monday, January 19, 2009
Chicken video
We let the chickens out of the pen this weekend so they could walk around the garden. Here's what free-range chickens do when they get the chance.
Chicken in sun 2
Monday, December 29, 2008
Rats!
Well, we have a rat problem.
We should have known. It started a while ago, when rats got into our 50-pound bag of chicken food in the garage. We should have known that 50 pounds of poultry feed in a paper sack would be tempting for any varmits around. Still, we solved that one pretty quickly by putting the food in a plastic tub with a snap-on lid. End of story.
Well, not quite. I went out on one of our snow days and discovered rat pellets in the chicken's food trough underneath the coop. Because of the snow, it was pretty easy to figure out where they were coming in -- there was a hole in the snowpack where they'd dug through it and into a gap in the coop's outer wall. I put a few bricks in place there, but the next night they repeated the trick by digging into a different area.
Since then, I've started taking the food out of the coop and putting it in an airtight bin on the porch. Annoying, but I figured that would solve the problem. However, when I went out the other night at 5 p.m. to shut the chickens up for the evening, I found rat droppings in the food. They'd either gotten into it during daylight hours or right at dusk, in the hour of darkness before I removed the food.
Greg bought the latest in rat-catching techniques, something that some people we met at a party told us all about. (It was a good party, really, even though we spent a lot of time talking about chickens and rats.) The trap is basically a piece of plastic coated with uber-sticky gel. The package even touts a "natural anesthetic" in the gel, presumably to calm the rat in its death throes as it discovers it is permanently adhered to a piece of plastic.
We'll see what he finds in the trap tomorrow. Here's one thing I cannot do -- I can build a chicken coop with power tools, but I cannot deal with a rat.
We should have known. It started a while ago, when rats got into our 50-pound bag of chicken food in the garage. We should have known that 50 pounds of poultry feed in a paper sack would be tempting for any varmits around. Still, we solved that one pretty quickly by putting the food in a plastic tub with a snap-on lid. End of story.
Well, not quite. I went out on one of our snow days and discovered rat pellets in the chicken's food trough underneath the coop. Because of the snow, it was pretty easy to figure out where they were coming in -- there was a hole in the snowpack where they'd dug through it and into a gap in the coop's outer wall. I put a few bricks in place there, but the next night they repeated the trick by digging into a different area.
Since then, I've started taking the food out of the coop and putting it in an airtight bin on the porch. Annoying, but I figured that would solve the problem. However, when I went out the other night at 5 p.m. to shut the chickens up for the evening, I found rat droppings in the food. They'd either gotten into it during daylight hours or right at dusk, in the hour of darkness before I removed the food.
Greg bought the latest in rat-catching techniques, something that some people we met at a party told us all about. (It was a good party, really, even though we spent a lot of time talking about chickens and rats.) The trap is basically a piece of plastic coated with uber-sticky gel. The package even touts a "natural anesthetic" in the gel, presumably to calm the rat in its death throes as it discovers it is permanently adhered to a piece of plastic.
We'll see what he finds in the trap tomorrow. Here's one thing I cannot do -- I can build a chicken coop with power tools, but I cannot deal with a rat.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Gertrude doesn't make it
Sadly, one of our chickens died on Christmas Eve.
Gertrude, the little bantie, had been moving slowly and acting a little off ever since the cold weather hit -- perhaps longer than that, now that we think of it. Her comb had lost its bright red color and turned pink and gray. On Dec. 23, we found her lying on her side outside the coop in an awkward and ominous position. We took her into the house and tried to warm her up in the laundry room, but 24 hours later she died. We buried her under the dogwood tree.
We'll never know why she died. We did have an epic stretch of cold and snowy weather, almost historic by Seattle standards, with five rounds of snow and temperatures into the teens. Still, the coop temperature always remained above 32, and Greg worked hard to clear the run of snow and give them extra food and treats, including warm oatmeal every morning.
When we embarked on our little chicken project, one of the books I read said that when you begin keeping domestic farm animals, you're inevitably going to have to deal with life and death issues more directly than when you have pets living indoors with you. You're not likely to take a chicken to the vet and you may not know something is wrong until they drop over. They're exposed to the wind, rain and cold, and their environment can only be made just so clean and sterile.
Gertrude was a sweet chicken, but she was the least productive layer of the flock, giving us only about a dozen eggs before she stopped laying for the season. We always noticed that she seemed less "social," if you will, and less aggressive about eating. Maybe the cold was not a factor, and she was just in poor health all around. I guess we'll never know.
Gertrude, the little bantie, had been moving slowly and acting a little off ever since the cold weather hit -- perhaps longer than that, now that we think of it. Her comb had lost its bright red color and turned pink and gray. On Dec. 23, we found her lying on her side outside the coop in an awkward and ominous position. We took her into the house and tried to warm her up in the laundry room, but 24 hours later she died. We buried her under the dogwood tree.
We'll never know why she died. We did have an epic stretch of cold and snowy weather, almost historic by Seattle standards, with five rounds of snow and temperatures into the teens. Still, the coop temperature always remained above 32, and Greg worked hard to clear the run of snow and give them extra food and treats, including warm oatmeal every morning.
When we embarked on our little chicken project, one of the books I read said that when you begin keeping domestic farm animals, you're inevitably going to have to deal with life and death issues more directly than when you have pets living indoors with you. You're not likely to take a chicken to the vet and you may not know something is wrong until they drop over. They're exposed to the wind, rain and cold, and their environment can only be made just so clean and sterile.
Gertrude was a sweet chicken, but she was the least productive layer of the flock, giving us only about a dozen eggs before she stopped laying for the season. We always noticed that she seemed less "social," if you will, and less aggressive about eating. Maybe the cold was not a factor, and she was just in poor health all around. I guess we'll never know.
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