Our first baby chick hatched today — a cross between our Green Queen an the Bresse rooster. There was an egg that pipped earlier, but that chick didn’t make it (one of the small, first eggs laid by one of the Bresse hens). This one, however, hatched overnight!
What a week! The Rhode Island being snatched up by a dog kicked off a week of losses here — one of our egg layers, Tilly, died on Monday. She was one of our smaller, cuddlier chickens. One of our hives has no bees. And today another egg layer, Soaring Eagle, disappeared. Hopefully she’s out in the woods somewhere and will be by the coop in the morning. Or she made a nest out in the woods. She’s a Jersey Giant, but our smallest chicken. Instead of growing, she put her energy into being a magic chicken. And she was our very cuddliest chicken. Fingers crossed for her …
Yesterday, one of our Rhode Island Red’s got taken by a dog. I was walking the chickens from their coop into their tractor. Like normal, most of them cannot find the door and walk a loop around the tractor looking for a way in. I get the food sprinkled around the grass and fill up the water bowls while they work out how exactly to get themselves into the thing. I saw a light brown animal out of the corner of my eye behind our large oak tree. My instant thought was “bugger, a baby deer … we’re about to get run over by an upset mommy deer!” — and then this dog streaked over. It didn’t hesitate even when I yelled, it nabbed a chicken, and then it took off into our woods. Now I’ll have to wake Anya up so we have two people herding chickens into the tractor!
One of our chickens, Astra, has become broody. We had been getting her out of the nest once a day to eat/drink/defecate and collecting the eggs. But it’s getting on in the year, and we wanted to raise more broilers. We decided to take this opportunity to hatch some new chickens — not all 100% American Bresse, but still chickens. It seems like the chickens have a really cool agreement that she’s in charge of incubating eggs. She sits on the nest all day, but seemingly gets up and allows other chickens to lay eggs that she’ll keep safe.
Anya counted 12 eggs under Astra — 2 from Sunshine (Buff Orpington), 4 from Queenington (Green Queen), and 6 from the Bresse. She’s got each egg marked so we can collect any newly laid eggs … and we should have new chicks in about 21 days — around August 3rd. We’re bringing her food and water a few times a day, so (hopefully) she’ll stay healthy over the next couple of weeks.
It strikes me, every time I talk to someone from the auditor’s office or the building department, that county officials must talk to a lot of people after-the-fact … like they built a shed, someone noticed it, and now they’re going through the permitting process for that shed. Because they always seem surprised that I’m in the planning stages of a project and am ringing them up to make sure I’m doing all the right things in the right order.
My note-to-self for the day — while the Medina County Building Department does permit fences over 6′, they do not require anything for agricultural buildings and fences. If you’ve got an agricultural exemption from the Township for a building, they’ll happily agree that the fence around / next to that building is for agricultural use as well. (For non-agricultural fences, you fill out the residential building form and specify the perimeter of the fence for the sq ft area and not the square footage enclosed by the fence).
Thus, I’ve concluded that the steps to build a bigger chicken coop and a pasture are:
Our coop and greenhouse shouldn’t need a permit from the county because the size is under 200 sq ft.
We’re planning out a pasture for the chickens and turkeys — mostly back in the woods so they’ve got plenty of cover, lots of tree detritus to scratch at, and shade on these hot summer days. There are plenty of options for fencing — and a big jump in prices between 5′ and 6′ high fences. We’re thinking about overlapping two rolls of fence to create a cheaper version of 6+ foot high fencing — it’s $120 for two 3′ rolls v/s $160 for a single 6′ roll. Even a 3′ and a 4′ roll, creating a higher fence with maybe 6″ of overlap, is $140. Securing the two pieces along the entire fence line will be increased effort, but rolling out 6′ of fencing seems like it might be a lot of effort compared to rolling out a 4′ and a 3′ roll.
The strawberries I planted two years ago are starting to produce! Anya picked fourteen ripe strawberries a few days ago, and she found a handful again today.
The decoy garden is doing well — some of the plants have started to seed, and the radishes have little flowers. The real garden has started to sprout too — Anya’s seen rabbits munching on the decoy garden. Hopefully the deer do so too!
We’ve created a beautiful wood-chip covered trail in our woods — this has transformed the mucky maple harvest path into a usable trail and made collecting sap a lot quicker/easier (and less muddy!). This year, we’re working on extending the trail along the east side of our property. This will provide easier access to the maples in the back woods as well as the apiary. So far, I’ve cleared a bunch of honey suckle, multi-flora rose, wild raspberries, and general forest undergrowth. There’s a path angled off of the original path, a right hand turn, and a winding path along the eastern side of our property. Once we get it cleared, we collected a huge pile of wood chips from the Metro Parks this year that we’ll use to cover the trail.
Some of the hops are starting to grow side-arms to produce cones …
