A few days ago, we marked it on the calendar, we allowed our broody black orpington hen to sit on some eggs.  I was saving eggs from Lexi’s show chickens, because I knew they would be Silver Laced Wyandotte crossed with Big Blue, and I thought I might like to hatch a few.  But since she was insistant about setting, I decided to give her a few.  I have her 6 eggs, 5 SLW and 1 unknown that was laid that day.  The next day we noticed the unknown egg was cracked and removed it.  Today is Day 4 on her eggs and she’s still happily setting.  The photo was taken yesterday of her setup.  We have everything she needs within reach and I bring her treats regularly.  Unfortunately, I still have to check for eggs underneath her because the other hens have NOT yet figured out that they should be laying in the other nest boxes.  If broody makes it to week 2 and we candle the eggs with success I’m going to go ahead and block her area off from the others for the last week.  I put the hen house thermometer probe underneath her, because the weather is turning cold.  It’s reading a toasty 101.2F and from inside the house I can tell when she gets off the eggs to walk around.  So far she is taking about a 15 minute break each day, the probe temp drops to the low 80’s while she’s off the nest, and warms right back up when she gets back on.  I’ve had to readjust it a few times but mostly it doesn’t seem to bother her.

This last few days I’ve been on a hunt of course as well.  It seems every type of poultry I like is rare or really rare and nearly impossible to locate!  That being the case I’m going to be doing some collecting this year for next years breedings.  I’ve found my source for Blue Orp hatching eggs and am still hunting for a source for White.  A new friend contacted me this week too and was looking for a few of each kind.  I thought it would be easier to find black or blue but it truly wasn’t!  It appears we’ll both be waiting our turn in line, like everyone else.  Each year, these chickens are harder and harder to locate.  All the more reason to allow them to breed and share the offspring with others.

I forgot to put up the brace on the door of the aviary, and this afternoon when I went out to check for eggs, I found Black running around the yard after Wattles. Apparently their bantering through the door was enough that Black pushed the door open.  Wattles is a bit bloody, apparently they were fighting for at least a few minutes before I got out there.  I’m not sure who was winning… it didn’t seem like either of them were really into it honestly.  One would flare up and peck at the other and then they would turn around and run the other way; taking turns on who was the aggressor.  Well, it was easy to catch Black in this condition as they were oddly calm.  I put him back in his pen and braced the door and Wattles went back to harassing everyone through the fence.  He’s DESPERATE for some girls.  I wish I could find a couple of girls for the yard, but at this rate it’ll be months before I can grow up a lady friend for him.  I’ll have to keep on it, perhaps I will remove some of the extra hens from the Mystery Pen and make that an all Black Orp Pen instead.  I’ll definitely have to wait until the weather is better at least, these ladies have never roughed it outside in the elements, and I’ll have to consider how to make a nest box for free-ranging hens too.

The 10 mile long yardsale is coming up soon, I’m sure I’ll find lots of goodies there this year.

I updated the site with pictures of my hen house & construction.  I don’t have any real photos of the aviary under construction as it was really really simple and went up in a couple of days.  I’m going to add some photos of the inside as soon as I can.  I also added some photos and information on how I’m shipping fertile eggs if you would like to read more about that.

The cold weather is supposed to continue for a few days, but then the gloves are off.  Spring is only a few days away at this point, I’m ready to start my indoor seeds, all but my Sweet Potatoes are here and I just can’t wait to get some plants growing!

What a GEORGEOUS DAY IT WAS TODAY! Whew!  No really, just fantastic.  Sunny, cool breezes, warm to almost hot at times in the sun.  What a great day for working around the yard and getting some things done, which is exactly what we did! Breeding Pens have been arranged and the chickens have been divided.  All in all I gotta say, all the cooped chickens took it really well!  All recovering from the shock of being moved, in fact in Pen #3 there are 4 hens huddled in the corder on their new nest baskets, and in the aviary Coop #2 everyone is sleeping in a huddle ontop of the blue storage bin that I have in their for them to nest in for a while!

While all that went well, swapping Big Blue out for his brother Black did NOT go as well as we hoped.  Sure Black was happy to get himself a flock of ladies, but Blue was NOT HAPPY to be suddenly sharing the yard with Wattles, our favorite Buff Orpington Rooster, he’s almost a year old now and has pretty much had run of this place since he got here.  Well.. next to Blue, Wattles looks like a midget and we had to stand by with only minor intervention and let them “establish the new pecking order” unfortunately once they started to draw a tiny amount of blood we pretty much cut that off.  I know they have to do it at some point, but they did argue for about 15 minutes, Wattles DID seem to want to mostly give up, and so I’m going to accept that as progress.  I mean it’s unrealistic for me to expect them to work it all out at once without killing one another!  They have no logic, they are only instinct.  So Wattles has already backed down a few times, we’ll let them cool off and try to let them around eachother again but be ready to seperate them.  We don’t want any blood if at all possible, and that’s my top priority.  SO… I scooped up Blue and my daughter grabbed Wattles and I put Blue in the Freedom Coop and closed up the plastic to encourage him to stay a few minutes (it’s totally open really and just has plastic draping around it) and hurried to help my daughter setup Wattles on the front porch under the table of showbirds.  It’s one of those 6’ long work tables you can fold up and put away and he’s been sleeping under there on the coldest nights with a red flood light & a pile of hay, so he’s familiar with the setup.  About the time we got him closed up in there sufficiently so that he can’t break out (using an old screen door to block off the table along the front because the side was already closed up to keep him warm those nights) anyway about that time Blue made his way out of the Freedom coop and was assessing his new situation, trying to figure out how he might make his way back into the hen house or aviary.  It was a whirlwind kind of day really.  We did all of the just before sunset so everyone wouldn’t have a lot of time to fuss, and so far that seems like it was a great idea.

We also put 6 eggs under our Black Orpington broody hen!  She has been trying to incubate eggs for almost 2 weeks now, so focused.  I noticed that she even started sleeping in the nest boxes even though we always remove the eggs.  So I decided to give her some eggs to hatch and see how she does!  By all strokes of luck she fortunately picked the “broody box” to set in, I suppose that is kudos to the designer  which is me of course!  It’s a two seater so to speak and now I’ve removed all the hay from the other side and that’s where we’ll put some food & water for her.  When it comes time to hatch, IF we get that far, her box can be seperated from the rest of the hen house safely, without disturbing her or the chicks!  Turns out it was a great design after all!  Well, I don’t have high hopes, I’m sure the weather will go into a winter freeze in the middle of this and really the hen house is an open design so it’s likely the eggs will not be able to stay as warm as they need.  But.. the idea of freshly hatched chicks by my own hen is just too appealing to not let her try!  What if she’s not in the mood later on?  Maybe she’ll love sitting on eggs so much she be my third incubator!

On a whole NUTHER note, I have received my first order for Gold Lace Orpington Project Eggs!  It’s not paid for yet of course because it’ll be a month before I know for sure that the matings are taking, well maybe only 3 weeks really.  But I am very excited to have someone interested already in working on this project!  I think it’s fantastic if I can spread these around and other people with different or better resources can avoid this first step and get on with step 2!  That’s fantastic in my opinion.  I have my fingers crossed that we will just magically yield LOTS AND LOTS of straight combs with pink leggs.

I still haven’t heard from Sandhill Preservation but I’ve learned one thing in the poultry industry, patience is a virtue!  Lots of waiting when you get involved with chickens!  Wait for chicks, wait for them to get feathers, wait for them to lay eggs, wait for crowing, wait for fertile eggs, wait for incubation, wait for chicks and start all over again!!!  LOL  If you want a special breed, gosh forbid, you’ll have to do some more waiting!  Like I’m waiting now, waiting to get a reply, waiting to hear if my order has been accepted, waiting to recieve my new turkey poults and white orpingtons one day hopefully this summer.  Waiting, therapy for someone like me with little to no patience in the past.

Well, thanks to Daylight Savings time it’s now 1:09am and I’m just now getting tired.  Why do things have to change? I was JUST getting used to that, but alas, life is a rollercoaster, and nothing remains the same. Well.. get out there and start tilling your gardens people!  No better time than the present, unless your farther up north, in which case I say MOVE SOUTH, I did, it’s worth it!

Yesterday started out pretty rough around here.  First we woke up about 1/2 hour late, but that wasn’t the worst part of course becase that isn’t THAT big of a deal.  So I rushed outside to put the two buff cockerels moving to a new flock in North Carolina, into a crate for transport only, when I opened the coop door, it was like a horror scene.  Apparently they decided that enough was enough and they were tired of living together.  Unfortunately, one was much better at getting his point across.  Long story short, only one rooster went off to his new home in NC and the other is in a clean cage on our porch nursing his wounds.  Today it looks as though he’s dipped his head in some kind of tar due to all the coagulated blood & scabbing that has started.  I want to keep him here until he at least LOOKS better.  He’s crowing and doesn’t act phased but wow does he look messed up.  It appears that the bulk of the blood came from the back of his head where his comb was being ripped off his head.  I really can’t tell yet but I have hope that it’ll all heal back up pretty well and he’ll only have a few scars to show for it.

Just a few days ago www.backyardhatchery.com went online and started accepting signups.  We are already doing well in a couple of the search engines, getting search result visitors within a week or two is fantastic results.  It really pays to have great hosting and a good network available for publicizing.  Here’s the first banner I made for it:

Tomorrow I will start “spring cleaning” around the farm.  We were building late into the fall last season, well beyond comfortable temperatures for construction.  That being the case, all but the tools we used, is still right where we left it.  Incidentally the entire area is one unfinished construction site, materials included, just piles of screen, welded wire, scrap wood and so on.  I also need to get into each and every chicken enclosure that has a dirt floor and take up the top few inches of sand and soil, and replace it with fresh.  The first up is the “Roosters’ Coop” which will be used this spring/summer/fall as a breeding pen, heck I might even turn it into a four season enclosure for a flock, as it’s becoming clear that by next winter I will have to have a very different setup than I did this year.  I will seriously need to slim down roosters, and choose a breeding project to move forward with… one project.  Well.. one chicken project anyway, I’ll still have to have my turkeys!

Until next time… don’t forget to bookmark my new site www.BackyardHatchery.com where in under a year it will be the most difinitive easy to use online resource for locating local poultry breeders!!

So here I am, making another entry in my farm blog, when I should be doing ‘other’ things. No, I’m not neglecting the poultry, just the laundry  and maybe a few dishes for the moment.  But there are things to tell, and so I must write!

We are NOW members of the NPIP
#63-301
(National Poultry Improvement Plan)

All fowl on the property were tested today for Pullorum and Typhoid and so now we know for CERTAIN that we can safely ship fertile & hatching eggs as well as live poultry (delivery too) anywhere we want, pretty much.  There are some states that have laws against this… I will have to research this in depth as I am ready to start shipping eggs. Our first 4 dozen will go out over the first 2 weeks of March.  Generous ‘testers’ have volunteered to receive a dozen eggs each and incubate them, keeping the offspring is the bonus here. What this will tell me is 1) How well am I packaging the eggs? 2) How responsive and perhaps careful are my own post offices 3) How fertile are my eggs. Everyone is well aware that these are all Mystery Chicks and it matters not what their genetic makeup really is.  Scroll down a couple of posts to see our very own first hatch of Mystery Chicks. Plus its fun to share your bounty and these little guys and gals are adorable!!!

My little hatch is doing well… I put the pine shavings in today under their feet and added a thin towel ontop of that to keep them from eating all the shavings!  This way.. they see a few pieces here and there around the edges and before long they’ve messed with a few pieces and quickly learn that it’s not food.

It’s almost sunset here in the Smokies, I wouldn’t know it if it weren’t for the sun peeking out behind the clouds now at the end of the day. We got quite a bit of rain here early in the day and it’s drying up fairly quickly.  They are forecasting a quick cold spell for over the weekend, I guess this is to be expected during Pre-Spring… but nothing too major I don’t think; no frozen waterers anyway.  Well.. I’m off now to collect my last round of eggs from the hen house & to check on my light, it didn’t come on today.. perhaps the bulb has burned out.

I wouldn’t suggest that you get used to me writing every day because with a farm & family this size, there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of free time!  But I just had to write, the feelings moved me.

I’m sitting here at my computer, listening to the 7 Roosters crow, over and over they compete with eachother, sometimes taking turns and others in unison.  All I can think is HOW GREAT IT IS that we found a home & a flock for 2 of them!  I was scrolling through the Asheville, NC Craigslist the other day and saw someone wanted a Buff Orpington rooster.  Lucky me because I have at least 3 extra and would love to find them homes instead of moving them into the freezer. Two are moving to North Carolina, only about an hour away from home really so it will be a short drive. There is a flock of lovely girls waiting to meet them all around the same age, and the’re move date is on our calendar. We’re excited to see them off and have 2 less crowers on the property! The downside is that I think the rooster that lives with those two must’ve heard the news because he started to turn on them yesterday, attacking one of them! Thankfully I was out there and witnessed the brutality and promplty scooped the offender up and moved him into our single rooster house.   He can stay there until I get his coop cleaned up for spring & the two leftover guys moved out. Then I’ll introduce him & the girls to the new place all at once.

The weather is AMAZING today.. the hen house thermometer reads 75.4F and the sun is shining and there is a slightly warm breeze every so often. It’s just honestly the most beautiful day we’ve had in a long time.  I have one of those remote readout thermometers that sits in my windowsill and the temperature probe is in a shady place inside the coop. It helps me keep an eye on the conditions in there even when I’m inside working.  Before we built the addition onto the hen house, what we call the “aviary”, it was important to keep track of the heat because the chickens had no escape from the brutal heat of summer. Now that the aviary is out there I know they can get outside at least and don’t have to worry about them being too hot unless it’s just BAKING outside.  Well.. it’s back to work for me, I’m doing some more reading on Turkeys.. a very new but good friend Steve from S and S Poultry in North Carolina has pointed me toward an old but very informative book on turkey raising.  There is always more to learn, and oddly the older materials seem to be the most informative and well written.

First I have to start out with a photo of our first hatch, because they are SO cute! Here are the Mystery Chicks

Aren’t they adorable???  This has got to be THE BEST WAY to start Pre-Spring Ever!! If you remember I have declared winter OVER as of yesterday in favor of Pre-Spring, and the weather today surely did cooperate.  Warm and breezy and the thermometer read in the mid 60’s all day. Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend much of the day outside as I had lots of computer work to get done today and didn’t want to be too far away from the new babies.

Tonight I finalized our 2009 Garden Plan and ordered the rest of the seeds & plants we will need, except for two things I’ll have to find locally; celery & onions. I’ll have to check the Co-Op next time I’m over there, perhaps next week to buy an extra bulb for the brooder in case mine goes out. So… here is the list of this years veggies

1. Spinach
2. Mustard Greens
3. Cucumber
4. Green Beans
5. Cauliflower
6. Broccoli
7. Tomatoes
8. Corn Bi-Color
9. Corn Yellow
10. Carrots
11. Green Peppers
12. Iceburg Lettuce
13. Watermelon
14. Sunflower
15. Spaghetti
16. Squash
17. Sweet Potatoes
18. Pumpkins
19. Cantelope
20. Parsnips
21. Peanuts
22. Leeks
23. Yukon Gold Potatoes
24. Celery
25. Onions

The garden already has Strawberries, about 30 plants… and then there is the Blueberry & Raspberry bushes both of which look sad and will likely need replacing this year.  I have pretty much decided to go ahead and get some big well started bushes to replace them with and hope I get the best results with that, instead of the ‘stick’ I planted that doesn’t look like it’ll make it.  Most everything will go into the ground 2nd week or so of April to make sure we’re past the possibility of frost. A couple of things I’ll be starting inside in just a couple of weeks and move them out in April.  We’re borrowing a tiller from a friend and in exchange we’re going to pass along quite a few of our extra seeds, and hope to get all of that done by the end of March.  That gives us enough time to start transferring some of our compost & add some chicken manure to the areas we’re going to turn over.  I can’t wait to get started. I hope your planning your upcoming harvest, the time is now!

Our first clutch of the year hatched yesterday, 7 healthy little chicks are now snoozing in thee indoor brooder. It was a great way to kick off PRE-Spring!  Since actual spring still has a few weeks to go, I’m going to call this next few weeks PRE-Spring.  We expect springtime conditions about half the time, so that should work out fine.  Later this week the highs will be in the 60’s and the lows in the upper 40’s.. that’s like spring here!  My freeranging rooster Wattles will certainly be glad for that. The last couple of nights he’s been camping in a pile of hay underneath the table of show birds on the front porch. The freezing temps have done a number on his comb and even his wattles, and just for the record, mild frostbite doesn’t look fun.

If you’ve noticed our Google Calendar you’ll see that on Friday we are schedule for our NPIP Certification!  This is exciting news as we want very much to be responsible & productive.  Two of our guys were tested last year at the Cocke County Show and they were clean, so I expect that everyone here will be as most came from hatcheries or known quality breeders. For a small fee we will now become part of the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP).  The purpose of this program is to maintain flock health nationwide and a continued effort to keep Pullorum or Typhoid infected poultry from infecting other poultry. This will mean for me that I can safely sell excess stock, baby chicks and fertile eggs without worry, and that others can receive those without worry of infecting their flock with one of those deadly diseases.

Photos of our new hatchlings will be posted as soon as they fluff up!  Until then, I’m off now to take boiling water out to all the frozen waterers & refill feeders for the day.

Today is Day 18 on our first clutch of the year, and so out of turners and into an egg carton they went.  We are using an egg carton for hatching for the first time, last year we had a few unnecessary losses due to eggs rolling around & chicks drowning.  I am hoping this egg carton method, discussed heavily at BYC, will be a better alternative for us. I think part of the issue is that we use egg turners which keep the eggs upright during the entire incubation period, and then previously on Day 18 we would lay them down for hatching.  I always felt it was wrong to change the orientation on them at the end like that but it is what the instructions say to do.  It’ll be a couple of more days before we learn how well this will work, I’m 99% sure that all eggs are alive at the time of setting into containers for hatching.

The weather is playing tricks on us this last couple of weeks, a typical Smoky Mountain end to Winter.  The tulips are growing and the grass is poking up in clumps here and there, but alas the lows tonight in the mid 20’s states that old man winter is hanging on a little too tight.  But I trust the tulips & the grass, they know better than Punxatawny Phil OR Jim Cantore where the climate is concerned and the Tulips say SRING IS COMING FAST!  YAY.

The website is going up little by little today and it’s a very exciting day! It took a very long time to arrive at the name “Dawn on the Farm” and in fact one of the gals I work with sometimes on ad campaigns & websites came up with it!  It just sort of rolled out of her and I stewed on it for a couple of weeks before I decided to go ahead with it!   Truth is I have been trying to come up with a ‘farm name’ since last summer and really didn’t have anything to show for it.  I was hesitant to use the word ‘farm’ since I have such a small parcel of property, no red barns, nothing stereotypical of a farm… but in it’s own way.. it is a small farm and so I finally decided it would be ok. So.. I was careful when I made the logo to not include barns, but chose to include the horses we can see from our house that live across the street in the rolling hills. I also decided to go with a white rooster in my logo, even though we don’t currently keep any white fowl, that’s because when you shrink the logo up tiny… colored roosters blend too much into the green hills and become unrecognizeable!  I also hoped that the white rooster would be more recognizeable to the general public who may or may not know that chickens come in an array of colors!  The hen & chicks I had to draw myself and I think I did pretty well for cartoon art!  Working in Illustrator CS is a challenge, and I’ve had no formal training, only years to bumble around trying to figure things out. I love the colors of the logo too, happy bright & fun. A little blue bird sits on the letter N in my name & he’s a nice touch.  Its not too busy, but busy enough!  Here’s a larger image of all my hard work… it took a whole day to get this done

So, Welcome to Dawn on the Farm!  I hope you enjoy the website, it’s a labor of love!