chicken snacks!

What can chickens eat you ask?  Question answered!
Also, on that note...we're always accepting approved leftovers/salad leftovers/compostables from your house! Feel free to drop them on our front porch!

It's Beggining to Look a Lot Like EASTER!

Happy ChrismaHanaKwanzaka to one and a Merry Non-Denominational Winter Solstice to the all!

Although what little winter we've had this year so far hasn't been rough for us it seems to have been rough on the ladies. Ever since the fall equinox we've noticed a dramatic, although somewhat expected, drop in egg production. We knew with the diminishing hours of daylight there would be less egg laying going on. What we didn't expect was for it to almost dry up completely.

Not knowing what to do we went and brought 6 new ladies into the flock. These ISA Browns are egg laying machines. Nothing stops them. Even at the worst of times we're seeing at least an egg every other day from each of them. While we are thankful for the presence and production we have learned that bringing them in when we did was probably not the best thing to do.

By bringing in the new girls we didn't solve the problem of why egg production was so low and, in fact, added a new stress on the rest of the flock by forcing them all to establish a new pecking order with 6 new birds. We went through long stretches where those ISA Browns were the only girls laying at all.

Then it happened. A sad day. A bird had passed from age and illness (much of our flock is over 3 years old, many of them I'd suspect are well over 5 years). The mean old bird who we affectionately called 'Broody Moma' after her propensity to brood all day and being one of the higher ups in the pecking order was gone and with her passing a valuable lesson has been taught.

We've learned just how much damage a broody hen can do to a flock, particularly when it dominates everyone's favourite nesting box. Most of our two dozen plus hens only use one or two of the nesting boxes and when that box is occupied, well, not much happens with regards to egg laying.

It has been a couple weeks since her passing now, and the ISAs are well integrated into the flock, so I believe the rest of the girls are getting back to themselves and the Easter Eggers are proving it. Today we had a half dozen eggs with many the breeds representing. We got two dark chocolate eggs, a couple of pink one, a green, and even one of our highly sought after blue eggs.

It's been a wonderful first Christmas for us on Lil Acre Farm, and even the girls saw fit to give us the gift of Easter Eggs again.

They're back!

The return of the Easter egg! Haven't seen one in about 2 months!

Keeping the ladies healthy!

3 new things we're gonna try to keep the ladies healthy!  I have 5 lbs of garlic in the cellar that I have been trying to make use of, so here's a good way to do it!  I'm thinking of floating the crushed cloves in their water as the method of choice for us.  We also have a 20 lb bag of DE that we also need to bust into and start using!

Thanks to Fresh Eggs Daily for the reference!

http://www.fresheggsdaily.com/2012/01/holistic-trinity-acv-garlic-and-de.html

A sign for Lil Acre!!!!!!!!!! way tooooo excited!

We ordered a custom sign for Lil Acre Farm...it arrived today...I loves it!
Big tree represents our beautiful huge maple in the backyard with our 2 swings in it, chicken...that should be self explanatory and then the flower at the bottom is a Lily, as this is all about her and her future.

Ordered from Barn Country Creations in Aylmer, Ontario.
https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/BarnCountryCreations
Yes, I do have a current Etsy addiction....

CAN'T WAIT TO POST IT AT THE ROAD!!

Oh Christmas Tree!

One good thing about having a sick kid is that it gives you some free time to catch up on blogging while you're home from work watching Pocoyo with her snuggled up against you.

This was a busy weekend with lots of projects. We had the flashing around the chimney redone. Hopefully it won't leak. Blew all the leaves and pine needles (at least five years worth!) off the roofs of the house and barn, cleaned out all the eaves troughs, hung an 8ft light above the workbench in the garage.....and cut down our first real Christmas tree!

Grandpa is always willing to lend a hand, this time by bringing over the chainsaw and doing the honours of felling the tree! Thanks Grandpa Stew.

Dad and Lily dragging the big tree back to the house. Lily is an excellent little helper on Lil Acre Farm.

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Had to stop and inspect the ice rink we built last week.   'Put me in coach!'

A little big....where did Grandpa go with that chainsaw?

There we go, all trimmed up and decorated!

Thanks again for dropping in.

Feeling Festive!

So I have used the molting season to my advantage!  This is the brown one, pre glitter...also made one with black and white feathers and added glitter....will add the glitter pics soon!  Plan to make more...just have to find the time to get out there and gather more feathers!

Winter for chickens

Have had lots of questions about how we're keeping the chickens warm...lots of people wanting to know if we're using a heating lamp, no we're not as they are unsafe and there's risk of fire and injury to the birds.   We are using the deep litter method this winter.

Pruning Prunes

Better late than never but here are some pictures from last weekend. We were plagued with colds but that didn't stop us from getting our fig tree and raspberries winterized.

We had to do some research in what to do for a fig tree, but in the end it seemed pretty simple so we gave it a shot, and just in the nick of time as we had our first snow this week and a nasty bit of ice rain this weekend.

Here is our fig all pruned and bustled up against the cold...

Our raspberries are in a bit of a sorry state. We don't know how old the patch is but it looked like it hadn't been pruned in years. We had to do some looking into what to do for the ever bearing variety we have but it too didn't seem too complicated.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like we have many shoots for early spring berries this year, but there should be lots come fall.

Unfortunately none of our fruit or nut trees look ready for pruning, although they too are all in desperate need for it. We might have to look into pruning them in the dead of winter. In the meantime we still have lots of leaves to take care of.

Leaves...

 More leaves...

Sick and tired daddy and daughter relaxing in front of 'Finding Nemo' after a long days work.

Thanks for stopping by :)

Poor little guy...

Found this little guy in the nesting boxes yesterday

feeling festive!

The winter season is upon us!  Got our first snow last night!  More pics to come soon of winterizing at the farm!
This weekend I was feeling festive and put together a little seasonal decor made up only of things found around the yard/garage....this included birch cuttings from the birch tree in the front yard, evergreen cuttings from a bush in the side yard (it needed a good trimming anyway, used to hit me in the face when I walked around there), dried hydrangea flower bunches from the bushes in the front yard and some nice pine cones from the thousands in the yard.  Old antique sleigh, black pot and berries were found hanging out in the garage from the last owner, so that was cool.

Fire

Fire - I has made it!

Now to get one going in the garage :)

Helping Hands!

This weeks Helping Hands winners are:

Grammie Kim - For watching Lily and giving us time to get some work done!
Pepe Mike - For the help with the roto-tiller and roto-tilling!
Aunt Sheri, Aunt Jennifer, Dora and Grampa Stew for the pumpkins. The Ladies love 'em!

A Peak Inside...and some more Outside

Last weekends activities and posts have lead to some questions that some of this weekends activities and pictures should help answer. Some people were a little confused, and rightly so, in thinking that the 'winterizing of the coop' project showed all of the 'coop'. Really, all that was shown was the run. Rest assured, the ladies aren't relegated to braving our Canadian winters or polar vortexes outside surrounded by a few bales of hay.

This week, among many other things, we took the hen house down to bare bones to give it a good cleaning before winter. We also flipped the door so it opens outwards and put in some boards that will allow us to start using what is known as the 'deep litter' method of dealing with chicken waste.

Here are some pics  to show what we've done....

Removed all the old litter and scraped down all surfaces.

Here's there little sliding drop door to the run. It's connected to a cable that can be used to raise or lower it from outside the coop. We had all the girls stay in the run for the duration of the cleaning.

A heat lamp was left by the previous owner for use with chicks. We plan to keep it around for those super cold days we see every so often.

 Added a couple of plastic nesting bins for testing purposes and started refilling with pine shavings.

Nests packed with straw, pine shavings and golf balls

We removed one feeder that just kept getting filled with poop. The ladies will have to learn how to share this one until the big remodel comes in the spring.I have some big plans for the reno so stay tuned for that!

By the time we're done adding shavings we should have 8 inches or more on the floor, hence the boards across the door. Karen or I will do a write up on the deep litter method in the future for those of you curious about chicken poop (I bet there are tons of you lol).

We also managed to get some more work done outside....

Strawberries covered with straw.

Veggie garden tilled. This one earned my dad the 'Helping Hand' award. Not only did he get a beat up old roto-tiller I found on the side of the road up and running, he dropped it off, and after showing me how to get it going he decided to do the whole thing. Guess it was more fun than it looked!

That'll be all the pics for now. Don't want to use up my whole month of bandwidth in just one day! However, please feel free to leave any questions, comments, queries or concerns!

low egg season has begun??!!

So our egg production has taken a drastic shift downwards...which is making us rather sad and upset...could be related to weather of course as in fall and winter egg production always goes down but I also just read this article about adding new chickens into your group and am wondering if this is what's going with us.

Stress

Just as we are less productive when we’re under stress, so are laying hens. If there are dogs and kids chasing them around the barnyard, or predator attacks, things of this nature, your chickens will be living in a state of fear and won’t feel the conditions are right for laying eggs and raising a clutch of chicks. It’s also important to note that if you purchase laying hens or point of lay pullets, they will lay a few eggs after bringing them home (the ones ‘in the works’ before they left their previous coop) and then they will stop laying for a couple of weeks. So expect a dry spell with new hens. In general, keep them happy and stress free for the best egg production.

How to clean and store your eggs

For those who get eggs from us, here's a good article on proper cleaning and storage of farm fresh eggs from backyardchickens.com

http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/cleaning-and-storing-fresh-eggs

:)

Winterizing Continued

We're reaching the end of another productive weekend, yet somehow still have so much to do. The chickens wind break has been finished. I think it looks good and natural, the straw will definitely get used and not end up in a landfill like plastic sheeting would. Here's the finished product (sans winter roof). What do you think? As an added bonus, this wall has encouraged some of the chickens to use the higher perches we made previously so that they can see out over it.

We finished pulling out the remnants of this years veggie garden and boy was there a lot in there. More varieties of vegetables than I could have guessed were in there. Huge portions run wild with various herbs. We uncovered grape vines, goose berries, and a fig tree all being choked out by trumpet vines, morning glories, and clematis. There are also half a dozen rose bushes if anyone is interested they're free to a good home.

Cleaned Up Garden

Newly found Goose Berries and Fig Tree

The pumpkin patch is also done. It just needs to be tilled when we do the veggie garden, but the berry patch needs to be covered in straw still and the the raspberries appropriately pruned.

That's all for now. Thanks for looking :D

Winterizing chicken coop

Winter is around the corner; some people get excited about that and some people dread it. I've discovered that the only thing we get is a lot of work to do in the fall. We've spent hours upon hours cleaning up the gardens and still have hours and hours of work ahead of us. We can spend a whole day and it looks like we've barely made a dent. Going to have to call the the grandparents to watch Lily next weekend so that we can make a concerted effort on them.

Today we got started on winterizing the chicken coop. Here's our before picture.

We got the old ford loaded up with 10 bales of straw (all my little ranger will hold). That should be enough to make a nice little wind break wall along one side of the coop. We're going to get another truck load tomorrow so that we have enough for the two sides in the above photo. There is already a fence along the far side so right now I'm not too worried about wind coming in from over there. The ladies are very cold tolerant, but wind is another story altogether.

Here is a pic of the truckload of straw. Just as we were getting ready to leave the farm where we picked up the straw a big gust of wind blew a bunch of straw through my open passenger window. I think there ended up being as much straw inside as there was in the back.

Here's a picture of the ladies hanging out. I'll get some more shouts of the coop up tomorrow after I get the rest of the straw home and the wind break set up. Also going to make a peaked roof out a tarp to keep the snow out of the coop as much as possible. The work never ends lol.