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Muddy Valley Farm

~ Life on a tiny west coast hobby farm

Muddy Valley Farm

Monthly Archives: January 2018

Midwinter on the Wet Coast

28 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Equines, Farm Life, Seasons, Weather

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It’s the muddy season here in our west coast valley and we’ve had a typical winter so far, with an early taste of ice and snow, and an ultra-rare white Christmas that dissolved by Boxing Day. Many rainy cloudy days have come our way, punctuated by occasional blustery sunny afternoons as one storm blows out and the next pushes in. Today we are enjoying another Pineapple Express, straight from Hawaii, carrying lots of moisture and balmy morning temperatures of around 8 degrees Celsius.

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This soft grey Sunday morning, the tapping of my keyboard is echoed by the raindrops falling on the skylight, skittering down the roof, collecting in the gutter and gurgling through the downspout into the full rain barrel. Spilling through the overflow valve, the rainwater sinks into the lawn, and trickles down to be gathered up by our little amazon of a creek, who roars with the excitement of it all as she industriously delivers her storm water bounty to the Colquitz river and then down to the Salish Sea.

On the rare occasions where the sun does come out, the barnyard crew is electrified, as if they all have solar panels embedded in their backs. George’s blanket comes off and he rolls exuberantly in the surprisingly still dryish winter paddock.

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The chickens run around like, well, chickens with their heads cut off, gorging on the creepy crawlers who have likewise ventured out to soak up the rare sunshine.  The feeder is heavy with uneaten crumbles at day’s end, spurned in favour of tender grubs and new shoots of green green grass.

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When I can escape my obligations, I rush outside too, shake the earwigs out of my folding chair and set up in a sunny patch to watch the fun, cup of tea at my elbow. The flock is looking great, well rested and in their fresh new feather coats, moulting season finished, and egg production just starting to ramp up. They are rejuvenated and ready to go, poised to meet spring’s unstoppable urges, to lay prodigious numbers of eggs, and hatch prodigious numbers of chicks, ready to keep pace with the year’s coming leap forward into fecundity and abundance.

Spring! We can hardly wait!

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This Year’s Rocks

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life

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2018 Plymouth Barred Rock breeding trio

Just look at them. Aren’t they lovely? I got lucky with this year’s Plymouth Barred Rock breeding trio. Much better quality than I’ve had before. 💕

When I was a child, we kept a flock of red hens for eggs. Boring birds. My dad, raised on the farm, knew the value of a rooster, and he got one for free from the guy who sold us the girls. Mr Rooster was a magnificent Barred Rock, with profuse, finely barred hackle and saddle feathers, bright yellow legs and gleaming, intelligent eyes. Truly a barnyard king.

So, of course, half a lifetime later, when I started keeping my own flock, I had to have some Barred Rocks. To my delight, I found some at my very first chicken swap. When I got there, I spotted a twelve or so year old girl, perched on a picnic table with a cardboard wine box in her lap, in among the crazy chicken ladies and their stacked cages full of squawking sale birds. A passel of leggy Barred chicks were curiously peering over the box edge at the busy scene and cheeping amongst themselves.

Ten bucks each, she wanted for them. Could I have three for twenty five I wondered? Sure! Eyeing them critically with what I hoped would pass for some degree of expertise, I picked out three with nice big head-dots and excitedly rushed them home to join my six black rock and cinnamon queen sexlink chicks. I was jubilant.

I found out much later, after two of three turned out to be boys, that the bigger the head dot, the more likely a boy. Barred Rocks are, to the expert’s eye, sexable at hatch via head dot size, and when they feather in, girls are usually darker than boys too. Girls inherit one barring gene, plus a female sex gene, from their barred moms, while boys inherit two barring genes. Barring genes are “sexlinked”.

I should have chosen darker barred, small head dot chicks. By choosing big head dot chicks, I had improved my chances of getting boys. Ah well, I’ve learned a lot of chicken facts the hard way. Experience is a good teacher, although not the gentlest.

I now understand why my long ago childhood flock had red hens and a “Barred Rock” rooster. If you cross Rhode Island Red roosters with Barred Rock hens, you get black chicks, sexable at hatch. The boys have…yup, you got it…white dots on their heads, and they feather in barred. The girls have no dots, and grow up to be incredible black sexlink layers.

Cross that same Rhode Island Red rooster with “white” (carrying the silver gene) hens and you get prolific red sexlink laying hens like we had, and white or lightly barred boys. The supplier my Dad got our birds from was producing red and black sexlink laying hens with his Rhode Island Red roosters and Barred Rock and white breed (Plymouth White Rock or Silver Laced Wyandotte etc.) hens. Our “Barred Rock” rooster was a sexlink too, receiving two copies of the barring gene and no female sex gene from his Barred Rock mom.

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Foghorn Leghorn. His white tail is a disqualification according to the SOP.

The less impressive of my boys went to freezer camp, the girl grew up to be a gorgeous pullet, only to be lost to a predator at point of lay (my first chicken tragedy) and we named the best boy Foghorn Leghorn. As flock patriarch, Foghorn fathered lots of chicks, then moved on to a new home with KO’s flock, after I decided I had hatched enough stripy chicks.

I had scratched my Barred Rock itch, and by then I had learned a thing or two about chickens too, including how to measure quality. My cardboard box chicks were not exactly finely bred, to put it politely. So I sold off Foghorn’s progeny, and moved on to other breeds.

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One of Foghorn’s kids

Last summer, on a whim, I bid on a Barred Rock hatching egg auction and won a dozen eggs. I knew their breeder, having hatched some spectacular Silkies from her eggs the year before. I had a great hatch and as they grew I could see that these were an entirely different kettle of fish than my first Barred Rocks. Armed with my hard won knowledge involving much consultation of the SOP…the Standard of Perfection, I grew out and selected the best of my five roosters, and the best two of my five hens.

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This year I shall hatch their babies, and keep only the best boy, breeding him back to this year’s hens in 2019.. That might seem incestuous, and it would be for people,  but line breeding, as it is called, is perfectly acceptable in the chicken world. Line breeding reduces the chances of sullying your lines with unseen problem genes. Some say you can line breed for twenty generations before significant issues develop. I won’t line breed for that long though, in 2020, if I’m still working with the Rocks, I will try to source some new ones to add genetic diversity.

For now, I will just enjoy these spectacular birds as they roam around the barnyard.

Hatching Season!

14 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Equipment, Farm Life, Seasons

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Way too much hatching went on around here last year. Four hundred chicks 🐣 are a lot of work, even if they are cute. Plus I already have one full time job, I don’t need two.

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Fifty or so sold at day old, and a bunch more when they were off heat at six weeks. Most of the roosters became food, which meant all the work of growing them out. I pushed a lot of wheelbarrows last year, did a lot of scraping, shovelling, cleaning and repairing. And hauling 20 kg feed bags home from the store, and out to the barnyard, and tipping them into the bins, and feeding and watering too.

This year I plan to slow down. To hatch less and offer hatching eggs for sale more. I might try shipping eggs. Maybe. People are asking, but shipping seems like a lot of work too, so maybe not.

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Last year’s first hatch was on December 29. This year, tomorrow is day one for my first batch, hatch day will be Feb 4. Haven’t I done well at restraining myself thus far? I am pretty proud of myself for holding off, actually.

I’m happy with my breeders this year too. One advantage of hatching 400 is selecting the cream of the crop for one’s own pens. Lots of people hatch way more than that in their quest for the best. I’m small potatoes in the chicken breeding world, and that’s ok by me. I suppose I am only a moderately crazy chicken lady.

The two Hovabator Genesis 1588s got plugged in on Friday, and left run for a day to shake down. One is running slightly warm and the other slightly cool, but both are steady as she goes. Good old Hovabators. A tweak to the temp setting for each, and then fill them up with eggs. Wyandottes, Silkies, Black Copper Marans and Olive Eggers, plus a few randoms from the Bantam pen, split evenly between the two ‘bators. If an incubator fails, I will only lose half of each breed. Learned that lesson the hard way.

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Uh oh. I can feel it now, getting stronger. Anticipation, excitement, that intoxicating promise of limitless possibilities. Like an addiction. Oh dear, I’d better settle down. I AM going to take it easy this year. I am going to remember all the work I’ll be in for, if I keep the incubators full all season.

21 days to wait now, seven till I can candle to check fertility – the first milestone. My resolve will be most sorely tested on day 18, when I move these eggs to the hatcher. And the incubators are emptied. Devoid of life. Mutely pleading to be stuffed full of eggs and launched on another magical 21 day journey ending in a joyful bursting out of exciting new beginnings.

 

 

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There’s DH, checking out operations. I call that picture “oh boy, here we go again…”

Yes, it is going to be a challenge, being rational about hatching season. Wish me luck.

Coming Up Short

06 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Seasons

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Bugs and tender new grass are scarce this time of year, and the other day I noticed my laying flock starting to argue at their morning feeder. That, of course, inevitably means that the hens on the lower end of the pecking order get shortchanged.

Keeping the feed supply steady keeps egg production steady, so I added a couple big dog bowls to the pen  and started to fill them too each morning. By nightfall, they have been emptied and kicked around, and are usually sitting upside down. When I go out to lock up, the big feeder goes in a metal garbage can (it’s a rat abatement thing) but the empty dog bowls sit out all night.

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This morning, I had hung out the big feeder, but not filled the dog bowls yet, when I let the flock out of the coop. Twenty-five ravenous little feathered dinosaurs ran outside, eager to break their fast, and David Cassidy, my sweet, petite Swedish Flower rooster, immediately started making a big fuss. First he let out his “Look ladies! Tasty morsels!” call, but quickly switched to his “hey, what the heck???” complaint.

I turned around to find him glaring right at me, indignant as only a proud rooster can be, as he used his feet to try to flip over the purple dog bowl. It looked for all the world like he thought if he could get it right side up, it would magically fill with food for his ladies.

Oh, and also? It was all my fault. Apparently expectations have been set, and I need to do better and get breakfast served! Yes Sir Mr Cassidy! Right away, Mr. Cassidy!

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Gingerbread Man

04 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life

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My cookie cutter collection gained a very special, precious addition today when the parcel from my cousin A arrived. ❤️ My cousins are so good to me.
This jaunty gentleman was my grandmother’s. She has been gone for many years. ❤️ I am beyond thrilled.
He looks to be vintage early to mid-century, so he is much older than me, and I’m no spring chicken!

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He spent his life in a northern Alberta farmhouse, pressed into service to make cookies for my Grandpa, Grandma and their seven children who are children no longer, but well into their seventies, most of them.
I remember making peanut butter cookies in Grandma’s big wood fired kitchen stove with my cousin S, but I don’t remember using this guy.
I don’t have one like him in my collection either, and that is unusual. With more than 150, it isn’t often these days that I come across a new one.
Cousin A knew where he belonged. ❤️

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