The chicks are a week old

Posted on March 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

Well, one of them is. Most will be one week old tomorrow. Here they are on Monday, when most were 3 days old. They’re still at the “bundle of fluff” stage, but growing rapidly. We’ve progressed from food and water in a saucer to a proper chick feeder and drinker.


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Signs of Spring

Posted on March 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

Suddenly, the allotment has sprung to life. We’ve waited two years for this, but 2012 may just be the year of the first asparagus crop!


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Picture post: hatching eggs

Posted on March 24, 2012 | 1 comment

I’ll start with a sentimental picture of adorable fluffy chicks, so that everyone can say, “Aaaaah”.

But the point of this post is simply to show eggs as they hatch. I managed to record all of the final four of our hatching eggs. Two on Friday lunchtime, one late afternoon, and the final one on Saturday morning at about 8am.
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Hatch!

Posted on March 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

It’s been three long weeks since we put the eggs in the incubator to hatch, and two weeks since we candled them for fertility, which brought the numbers down from 17 to 8.

I haven’t messed with them since then, and just let the incubator do its work. Every hour the eggs were turned, to the accompaniment of a little happy egg turning tune. Then on Tuesday evening, the incubator switched into hatching mode. The egg turning mechanism switched itself off, the temperature dropped half a degree, and the humidity rose to 60% to emulate the conditions for hatching under the broody hen. Friday (today at the time of writing).

Thursday evening, a day ahead of schedule, this little chap was born.


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Incubation 8 days in

Posted on March 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

Well, we candled our eggs after 8 days. I suppose that it depends whether you’re a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty sort of person as to whether the results were good or poor. Of our 17 eggs, 8 are developing normally.


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Our first egg incubation

Posted on March 3, 2012 | 2 comments

I’d planned to have started incubating our first batch of eggs by the end of February. If all three hens were laying, we should be able to collect 14 or so eggs in a week, which would make a reasonable load for our 20 egg incubator.

Alas, only senior hen is laying. The other two have seemed on the brink of starting to lay for weeks now, but no actual action. So I ordered eggs from two breeders, one in Lincolnshire, the other in Argyll & Bute. So there are 6 each of theirs plus 5 of ours in the incubator.


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Has Bean Coffee & Gadgets

Posted on March 1, 2012 | 1 comment

I do enjoy a nice espresso. In fact, I have to admit that I enjoy even quite ordinary coffee. In one job that I had I was much amused to find that staff at the local Starbucks had nicknamed me “Double Espresso Macchiato”. You know you’re an addict when …

Home brewed coffee can be a world away from the High Street coffee chains. A much-loved Gaggia Classic lives on the worktop in the kitchen, and I normally have some decent-ish beans in the fridge. But this Christmas, I was given some presents that have taken the coffee experience a big step forward.


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Catching up with the chickens

Posted on February 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’m afraid that I’ve rather neglected the blog in recent weeks, so this is something of a catch-up. The snow and very cold nights inhibited the other two hens from coming into lay, so we still only have senior hen laying at a steady rate of two eggs every three days. The much milder weather that followed the wintry spell hasn’t yet persuaded either of the others to start again, although all three are the object of much attention from the cockerel.


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The first egg of 2012

Posted on January 22, 2012 | 1 comment

Well, it’s finally happened. The chickens are coming back into lay, and on Saturday, we got an egg.

The first egg of 2012 in the nestbox


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Chicken Project 2 launches

Posted on January 9, 2012 | 1 comment

And so, the new year being a time for firm resolve, Chicken Project 2 is under way. We’ve been extremely pleased with our Flyte so Fancy house and run, and we’ll need another one alongside the first.

Here’s the site:

Looking from the south at the empty bed that the new run will occupy


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