Martha

Martha is my Ameraucana hen and coincidentally a rescue. When I got her last year her entire saddle (back) had not a feather on it from being picked on by an alpha type hen at her previous residence. Now look at how healthy she is. I guess she had to catch up with a molt and has never gone broody on me yet. Just getting to the point where she'll let me pet her back and has always eaten from my hand.

My hens eat organic pellet's (to reduce waste) mixed with food grade DE on occasion, they free range in the yard and I am sure they consume a considerable amount of bug matter and grit, plenty of my garden (of which they can reach), all of the scraps that we do not consume, organic plain yogurt and probably an occasional lizard or two. She certainly doesn't turn her nose up to much.

Getting Caught Up!

Not too sure where time has gone, like the entire school year! WOW. Where to begin. I left off with some new pullets getting ready to lay so they are graduated to HEN status. All four (Sonny, Esther and Jean pictured) of them have started to lay on a daily basis, all light brown eggs. The hens come from a leghorn hen and pekin bantum cock. All are beautiful hens and very social and loving and on occasion naughty. School has become a fun teaching environment for me. Kindergarten has an egg section that they study and I have been invited into the classrooms this year to speak about being an urban farmer, specifically hens. Currently waiting on 38 eggs that are sitting in a kinder incubator--we'll see how brooding goes in my kitchen this time around. Should be interesting, to say the least.

The gardens are doing well. I have a raised bed in the back currently with red leaf, arugula, broccoli and a couple potato varieties. The new bed out front has tomato plants, pole beans, okra, cilantro and jalapeno's. Seems to be working well out there catching a good portion of the southern sun exposure and knock on wood, no javelina visits. For those of you who do not know what a javelina is...it is a peccary not a pig but looks like a black boar. On the edges of town that are opened to the desert they come in to forage on the flowers and plants that people try so hard to grow. Pretty aggressive and very protective of their young. I wouldn't want to be confronted by one!

Composting is very beneficial in our family. First of all, nothing is wasted in this house. What little food is not consumed goes straight to the hens with the exception of onions and potato skins. No protein goes into the compost heap but I have been experimenting with old socks, t-shirts and of course Sun Chip bags and I think I even threw in an old silk scarf. Pulled out the better part of a yard of black gold not too long ago and the trees and veg gardens loved every bit of that nice amendment. This is a fun adventure and some great learning for the boys. Being Sicilian, I grew up in a garden and have nothing but great memories!

I am really trying, not too hard obviously, to find the motivation and time to build a new chicken coop. Maybe it just isn't the right time as they, all ten of them, seem pretty cozy in their little log cabin BUT...a packrat has spread the wrath of destruction throughout their current residence. Just in case you were wondering, pack rats gnaw on pretty much everything. I found the finger of a glove inside the coop where a little pack rat was hulled up inside of an old "H" block. Needless to say I was happy to introduce him to his or her maker with no remorse.

Almost Ready to Lay

Well, we have our flock reduced to 10 now. After finding out that Chicken Little was a little fella...we found a great place for him to live with his two brooder-mates, Maggie and Jasman. They didn't come from the same hatch but grew up together so I really thought that it was best to not separate them. A really nice lady from the South Tucson took them in and is giving them a great life. Thank you so much Julie.

I am getting ready to do yet another modification to the hen house. I am going to take another Little Tykes playhouse (cottage, if you will) cut out the south wall and attach it to the other Log Cabin. Then, I will reconfigure the inside of the house with a couple more nesting boxes and some new and improved roosts for the girls. Want them to be cozy and safe and certainly protected from the elements.

We have added a new bunny, Lovehearts, to our small farm outside. He is a nice addition to our family so far and hopefully teaching the boys a little more about how much care and love animals NEED. Although I am seemingly the primary caregiver to Lovehearts the rest of the family is pitching in. I will post progress to the add on as I get going.

Acceptance...

Life is good on Ranch de la Richter! I have introduced 4 new hens that are 2 months old now to the rest of the flock. The eat, sleep and roost together. As you can see in this picture Ms. Claus, the Araucana, is teaching little Sunny how to dust herself properly and completely obliterate my mulch. The older Aunties are doing so well with the little ones. Aside from a little henpecking at night when they goto roost they are doing great. I think the only problem, which really might not be a big issue, is that the older hens want to eat all of the 'baby food'. I think they are just pigs with wings. Anyway, I am really pleased with the way things are going here. Maxie, our 2 year old Shih Tzu, thinks that perhaps she is some kind of herding dog or a chicken for that matter. Wherever they might end up Maxie is always somewhere in the mix. I don't know if it is the free chicken poop snacks that they leave laying around or if she really enjoys playing the part of a chicken. At any rate it is really cute.

New Family Members/ Coop Ad On

Where do I start. We have been very busy with our little urban farm. Our class project hatched 17 chicks and we kept 6 of them for ourselves. 2 Roosters (the two dark chicks above) from our 6 went to a nice new home today in Rio Rico, Arizona and I am looking forward to keeping up with their lives. So now I am left with 4 new hens. They are beautiful and developing their own little personalities. We also have had a very broody Buff Orpington who was sitting on a baseball. Wow- did that baseball get some big love from her. I think she sat on that thing for a week before I started to feel bad about denying her maternal/hormonal needs so I got a half dozen fertilized eggs from a farmer around the corner and slid them under her. Talk about content and dedication. We ended up with 3 more chicks from her hatch a couple of weeks ago and they are beautiful. Last week we also took in a pretty little chick from another class hatch. Life is good in the chicken department.

To make room for our new family members and to make it easier for Vanessa while we are gone this summer I put an addition on the coop. About 8x12' and used all materials that I essentially went dumpster diving for, alley hunting and freecycling. All but the shade cloth that was so necessary to buy at ACE. Don't want to come out to fried chicken this summer- it will be brutal heat for them but this area was built under a Palo Verde tree (about 30-40' tall) and provides ample shade but you can never be too careful. The shade cloth will also act as a line of defense for any predators. Knock on wood, we have been doing very well with the exception of an occasional annoying pack rat. Snap trap loaded with peanut butter seems to handle that problem pretty well.

Off to bed. Still love being a chicken lady and taking a bunch of crap from my dear friend Brooke in Cape Coral, Florida. Seems like she is awfully hungry for chicken wings on a frequent basis.

HoooRay! An incubator batch with Emmett's Kinder class

Donor Roo- Pekin Bantam, Egg donors...Araucana and Leghorn. What do we get? 16 beautiful, fuzzy, fat and healthy little chicks! We have found 8 of them great homes and I am going to take my chances with the other 8. Any Roo's will need a good home- perhaps not in a stew pot. This is just like having a baby. I am going to introduce them to the outside for a bit this weekend.

This is really working!!

Life as a micro farmer is really working beautifully for our little family. Gardens are thriving, only because Mother Nature and El Nino are in our favor for moisture right now. Our hens are really doing well and seem to be a happy little netork not to mention really hard workers. Our newest hen, Martha, who I swapped a bag of feed for is a great little layer. She is an Amerucana who was being pecked on her back by her henmates and all of her feathes have about grown back. She is still trying to figure the human element out but coming around nicely. She actually ate some yogurt from a spoon in my hand yesterday and I was elated. Silly, hugh? Just want her to feel safe around me and not to think I have a butchers knife behind my back.

Egg production is good. We are getting between 5 and 6 eggs per day. With that we have been feeding our family quite nicely and able to supply a dozen of eggs every other week to two rotating customers. One of our hens, Joo Joo, has decided that she is a lap chicken and favors Emmett petting her little neck. She will sit and let him pet her and close her eyes for a quick nap in the safe hands of a very able boy. Harrison, who is three, wants to try and jump over the hens and I know that this will result in sure death. He cannot jump over a crack in the sidewalk let alone a living creature.

I am thinking about expanding the size of my coop by half and need to build a better entry for the human folk to clean it out- oh, and exterminate a pack rat who has decided to eat a hole in the side of the playhouse. Bad rat! More later