Community Garden Broilers

For the last two years I've raised broiler chickens in my community garden plot. This year I'm doing it as a cooperative project with 3 other people. We're growing 20 Cornish Cross together in the community garden. They are 7 weeks old and when I weighed one today. It weighed 7.25 lbs. We won't be processing them for 2 more weeks. Too bad because they are plenty big enough right now. We may have to change the slaughter date.

Bees Building Comb

I got 2 hives last year and 3 this year for a total of five. In one of my new hives the bees are building their comb in the wrong place. It's all my fault. I was short an inner cover and they built up up up. This is going to take a while to clean up and probably neither the bees or I will be totally happy with the process.

Back to blogging

Well... After a year an a half of no blogging, I'm hopefully starting again. There are many reasons blog posts can dwindle, but for me it was a good reason. After the birth of my new grandson, I was helping my daughter and son-in-law out with day-care for Nicholas about 20 hours a week while they were both at work. It was lots of fun, very fulfilling and exhausting! He is quite attached to me from all our time together and is now a fun-loving toddler of almost 18 months and the apple of my eye. Hopefully he will soon start to "help" me in the garden and tend the chickens.

Cold and Frost

Lately it's been cold. Cold enough that my car window has frost on the inside, as does my house and many other places that have breathing beings inside creating moisture on very cold windows. Frost seems to form in many patterns. Here is the feathery type as seen below on my bedroom window in the morning.
There is also a swirly type as seen on this chicken coop door. It's not my chicken coop door, but I wish it were, because I think it is a beautiful door with character. As always click on the photos if you want to enlarge them.

Nicholas

Nicholas, one day old

I'm now a grandmother. My daughter and son-in-law are now parents and my mother is now a great-grandmother. Meet Nicholas, born December 19th, 8 pounds 14 ounces, a health baby boy

Nicholas, home with Mom by the Christmas tree

hatching chicks

About three weeks ago I got a new incubator. I'm planning on doing some hatching in the spring. The incubator, a hova-bator 1588, holds 42 eggs, but I thought I'd give it a little test run with 8 eggs. Because I have no rooster there would be no point in using eggs from my hens, so I headed over to Codman farm where I volunteer, and collected the 8 eggs you see below. They are all shapes, sizes and colors and I think they are a photogenic bunch of eggs. I discovered that one was cracked a bit at the pointy end. All of them went into the incubator anyway.
Three weeks later 6 of them hatched, including the cracked one. Below you can see a chick emerging from an egg. This is actually the egg that was cracked. I really didn't think it would make it, because early on it appeared that the egg leaked a very tiny bit. I can only assume that the leak got plugged very soon and things progressed. I had heard of repairing cracked eggs with wax or clear nail polish, but I decided to just let it be and see what happened.
Below you can see the 6 chicks that hatched. The yellow one in the back corner is the one from the cracked egg. The other egg that I wondered about was the very small egg. It did hatch a small chick. I think it may be a bantam and is kind of cute with feathered legs.
Below is a close-up of the cracked egg after I took it out to candle. It was then that I discovered that it was developing so back in it went. After the hatch was over,I checked the two eggs that didn't hatch. One was not fertile and one had stopped developing after about 8 days. I'm quite happy with the new incubator and look forward to hatching more in the spring.

First Snow

It's a damp raw slushy day out, just right to stay home and bake for Thanksgiving

Today is the first snow of the season. It's the slushy kind. not the nice fluffy stuff and won't add up to much. It's predicted to be in the 50s for the next couple of days so I guess it won't even last the week. Here it is not really unusual for it to snow on November 20th. What is unusual this year, is that the leaves just don't seem to want to fall off the trees. You can see a Norway maple, and on the far left some mulberry leaves still hanging on. There are also crab apple and beech leaves still on trees in my yard. The tree in the background, an ash, always drops its leaves early and is the only one bare now. It looks like I'll be raking leaves in December when it will probably a colder than I would prefer for this task.

A Blue Egg

The type of chickens that lay blue eggs are called Easter Eggers. They are Araucana mixes and can lay blue, green, brown or white or a blend of those colors depending on the genetics. The gene for blue eggs is actually dominant. It is a seperate gene from the ones that control white or brown egg color. So the egg can have both blue and brown color. That can make them look greenish or kakhi.

I was wondering if this hen was ever going to start laying. She finally did start at 7 months and I'm really happy with the color of her eggs. The photo shows it next to a brown egg my Plymouth Barred rock layed for comparison.