I learned something new

Apparently I've been candling wrong.  Tonight, we candled a few more eggs to see how things were going after after a couple eggs, I decided to try the light coming from a different angle.  

It was amazing.  We could see a mass and movement in nearly every egg!  I was squealing like a little kid!

Of the 14 eggs that are in the incubator, we saw signs of life in all but three of them.  One of them was completely stuck in the egg turned and I was scared to break it by pulling it free and two of them were almost see through.

I decided to run out to the coop to check on the eggs under the hen and I snapped pictures of those eggs.  Four of the six showed signs of life.

This is a bad egg

This is amazing!  It was so cool to see them moving inside the shells!  Now I feel like I need to do a lot of research on what I need to do to keep them alive until hatching.

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The First Candling

We finally candled the eggs that are in the incubator.  The eggs have been in the incubator for 7 days and the eggs themselves are between 10 and 14 days old.  I'm no expert when it comes to candling but I know we should be able to see some solid forms inside the eggs at this point.  While we did see some signs of life. we didn't see very many.

We candled the New Hampshire eggs first.

Egg #1 definitely showed signs of life.  The dark mass in this picture was moving around, coming closer to the shell and then back towards the center.  We also saw some of the lines that I believe are veins.  It was a good start to our candling adventure.

Egg 1

Just asking for trouble

A friend of mine emailed a few of her chicken people (that includes us) to see if we wanted to order any chicks for an April delivery.

This is going to be trouble.

The place she is ordering from has some pretty birds that I have been interested in so I know I will end up getting some.  I'm not not sure what the smartest move is.  If I wanted pure bred birds to breed, I need to keep them in separate chicken runs so they won't mix and have mixed breed birds, but if I do that, then I should focus on just a few breeds and I like having a pretty variety.  Decisions are tough.

The breeds I am looking at that I think I would like to have are:

Columbian Wynadotte

Black Jersey Giant

Silver Laced Wynadotte

How can you not see how gorgeous these birds are?  They're all known for being good egg layers too.

The only other one they had that I have thought about is a Blue Orpington.  I have a few Buff Orpingtons now and I think the Blue's are pretty, but they're also $13 more than the first three that I like and I feel like I'm not that serious of a chicken breeder.  I'm not a chicken breeder at all!

Blue Orpington

Tomorrow we are going to a chicken show for the first time.  It's about an hour away but I thought it would be interesting to see and there is a chance I could buy something.  I don't think it is too likely, but there's always a chance.

Molting looks like Murder

BigRedToo has been molting and I have to say that she looks horrible.

Even her tail looks like a chopped off stump now

Even seeing all of the feathers on the ground in the coop is frightening at times.  

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The goats are at it again

 A couple weeks ago I accidentally cut the electrical cord that was going out to the coops for the lights and water heater.  I hadn't gotten around to fixing it, and that was clearly a good thing because I found the cord like this:

 Seriously goats?!

Still on Day One

When I woke up this morning I checked the incubator and it was only at 80 degrees and 80% humidity.  I got some of the water out and turned the heat up before running off to the gym.  When I came home an hour later the temperature was finally almost right!  99 degrees and 60% humidity meant I just needed to bring the humidity down.

But then I looked at the second thermometer that was inside the incubator.  It was well over 100 degrees!  The humidty gauge was obviously broken on this one, but which thermometer was right?!

Who knew eggs could cause this much stress?!

The oldest text me to say the eggs had arrived today.  I believe my response used the word "CAREFULLY" several times when I told him where to put the boxes.

When I got home there were two boxes waiting for me.  One of them was decorated so cute.

It was like opening a present.

A Neighbor's Old Farm

Yesterday, we went to a friends house to pick something up and realized that he lived on an old farm. While his house is in normal condition, the rest of the barn and the original house on the property were completely abandoned. The oldest and I were completely intrigued and luckily he let us go crazy exploring.  Maybe this is only fascinating to country people, or maybe just to me.

There was a very cool chicken coop that was in completely usable condition as well as two outhouses (not sure that they were usable though!)  The farm was used for dairy cows and some parts of the land are still used for them to graze.

When you want to hatch special eggs

I have promised myself several times that I would not get more birds unless they were purebred birds. I did a little research and thinking and decided that having chicks now, in the winter, would be a good idea because when they are ready to start laying in 6 months, it will be spring. The problem is that our eggs are "barnyard mixes" and local breeders have let their birds all roam together for the winter and so their eggs aren't pure bred either.

Someone recommended that I buy some on Ebay, and that is how I found myself in a bidding war for various chicken eggs tonight. I haven't been on ebay in at least 8 years!

We won 6 (or more) New Hampshire eggs from a German bloodline.  These were two of the pictures that the sellers had posted.

And we won 11 (or more) Silver Laced Wynadotte eggs from the Foley bloodline.  These were the pictures they had posted.

I can only hope that they all arrive in one piece, that I am smart enough to handle them carefully, and that between the broody hen and the incubator that we have a good hatch rate.  If we can get just half of them to survive that would be about 9 chickens, and so maybe 4 hens to add to the flock.  

I'm also planning to pick up some other chicks from a local seller next weekend.  

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Tucking the girls in

One of our youngest girls has decided to go broody.  Every night for almost a week, I have found her in a nest box on the eggs from that day.  I keep taking them from her because we need eggs to eat, but she won't budge.  The last few days there haven't been very many eggs and I'm wondering if she's scared the girls off.

I think this was only confirmed tonight when I found an egg on the ground in the coop.

Apples are done

It took me a couple weeks, but we finally got all of the apples that we were planning to preserve taken care of.

We bought 5 bushels of York, Granny Smith, and Ida Red apples from a school fundraiser.  The apples came from a local farm.  Five bushels was a lot more than I originally pictured.  

One bushel

 We couldn't even fit them all on the breakfast table.  We had three on the table and then the bags were on the benches with the other bags we had left over from our previous canning experience the week before.

Peeling by hand wasn't so bad once I set up a system like the week before.  I would peel a large pile into a big platter and then go take care of those apples.

I started with apple pie filling.  I had to order more of the cornstarch-like product that is needed for canning and I was sure to order a lot so that I'd always have some on hand and then I got to work.