Supersized egg!

Posted by louisa on Monday 9 August 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

After a run of just three eggs a day nearly all last week, then three eggs and a small pale one yesterday, we’re back to four eggs again now – and boy, one of the girls is over-achieving!

The smaller egg here weighs around 60g – which is the large end of medium and a typical size for our girls – but the big one weighs over 90g! No wonder I was woken up by some loud bwarking this morning! According to standard UK egg sizing guidelines, anything over 73g is a XL-sized egg – this is quite a bit over 73g!

I suspect Mrs Mauve is responsible for it – she’s quite a bit bigger than the other girls but she’s still only a young one, 26 weeks old max, so she – and her eggs – might get bigger still. Yesterday I was working in the garden and they got a lot of greens/veg – I’ll have to keep a check on the treats/super-large egg thing is causal or a coincidence.

Read More

Chicken update: one month in

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 3 August 2010 in chickens | 5 comments

Apologies for the radio silence for the last few days – a combination of illness, internet downtime and a visit from my mum & dad. Because of the first and the third things, I’ve not been up to much – just pottering and keeping the garden/animals watered. I did though start a crochet blanket (using Attic24’s granny stripe pattern) with the wool I dyed at the start of June – it’s working up really fast and looking great!

Anyway, I intended to do a quick chicken update last week so I suppose I should get it ;)

The chickens have been with us for over a month now and are very well settled in. We still haven’t named them but we have ringed their legs so we can tell them apart and the colours have become defacto names. The Greens – Lime & Dark – are the more confident of the four, Blue is quite friendly but always squats when we go near her (said to be a submissive or scaredy thing) and Ms Mauve is the biggest but shyest one.

Read More

Busy Sunday

Posted by louisa on Sunday 25 July 2010 in cooking, eating, growing | 0 comments

Today, I’ve:

• Built a cold-smoking cabinet/mini-smoke house
• Cursed the sun because just as I finished the latter, it came out and made it too hot to cold smoke cheese without it melting all over the place
• Cleaned out the chicken coop
• Hung out a load of washing, which, of course, caused the sun to go in
• Jumped for joy because the lack of sun meant I could start smoking
• Started smoking three types of cheese (more on this in another post)

Read More

Growing vegetables for chickens

Posted by louisa on Thursday 22 July 2010 in chickens, growing, wild food | 1 comment

As I mentioned in my post about the economics of getting started with chickens, we’re hoping to feed the chickens a combination of bought-in food (nutritionally balanced layers pellets) and “free” food – scraps, foraged stuff and things we’ve grown especially for them in the garden — and it’s the latter I want to think about now.

Before they moved in, I had started growing some stuff for them (specifically radishes because they’re such a quick crop) and I’d left some lettuces in the ground for longer than I would have done normally, because I thought they’d like them as a snack. They didn’t. The radishes were slightly more successful but only for the green tops, not the red roots – which would be great if we liked radishes because we could easily share but since we don’t, it seems inefficient to grow them.

So anyway, I’m trying to find crops that I can grow for them to supplement their pellets. They’re currently snacking on borage (which they’re eating in the somewhat blurry pics here) and bolting spinach. I’ve got some perpetual spinach & chard growing too – we’ll use some of it, but it’ll be mostly for them. I should be able to start picking those in a few weeks. Around the same time, we’ll be harvesting carrots so they’ll be able to have the tops from those. For late winter/next spring, I’ve sown kale & spring cabbages, and there should also be lots of brassica leaves/surplus — but there is a bit of a gap in the middle between the autumn and late winter/spring harvests.

Next year, I’ll be more on the ball and have early winter cabbages ready to feed them then but now I’m trying to plug the gap with quick-grow stuff. Any suggestions? I’m too late for planting comfrey for them but there still maybe a little time for clover?

I am going to keep foraging for them too, with the rule that unless I can identify something so definitely that I’d be confident to eat it myself, I won’t feed it to them. It’s a cautious route to take – probably missing out on a lot of good stuff for them – but I’d rather be cautious than have a poisoned chicken. They very much like nettles which is a good thing given how many we have around here! I’ve been wilting them to lessen the sting but I’m tempted to dry a lot now to have for over the winter.

Read More

Chicken update: one week on

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 7 July 2010 in chickens, growing | 1 comment

I’m not going go on and on and on about the chickens but I thought I’d just do a quick update because it’s a week now since we got them – and we had a good bonding day yesterday.

The as-yet-still-unnamed girls seem to have settled in well. The first couple of nights, they needed a little encouragement to go to bed but now they go of their own accord. They were also sleeping in one of the nestbox in a big heap too but now they seem to be using the perches more.

Diet wise, they’ve shunned some of the scraps I’ve taken down – the bolted lettuce has been mostly rejected – but they like leftover pasta and nettles (which is good because there are *loads* in the field next to our house but I’m going to get better gardening gloves before I pick any more as the ones I had one yesterday weren’t good enough and ow-ee, stings all over). They’re eating borage leaves in this picture, which were also popular – handy since we’ve got a healthy patch of them in the herb bed.

Read More