What do you do when you have about seven broody hens? (No, we don't eat them...they are very tough.) We give them guinea eggs to sit on! If you're new to our website, then you may not know that it was our small flock of lavender guinea hens that spurred our interest in poultry and organic farming in the first place, so as long as they behave themselves and eat their weight in ticks and leave the tomatoes alone, the guineas will have a place on our farm. So, after Mr. Hook Organics discovered the guineas' secret nest of eggs, he put about 18 of them under our broody chickens. The guinea eggshells are so thick that we couldn't candle them well to see if anything was developing. But...twenty-six days later, they began hatching! Twelve adorable keets hatched...not bad for grain-powered incubators! Check out the cool video we made below. Above, our little white silkie hen is pictured keeping her 12 adopted guinea babies warm and cozy. Her small size is perfect for fitting in the plastic brooder tub in the barn, and she is very tolerant of the babies climbing all over her. She's a very protective and attentive mother. In a few weeks when the guineas are fully feathered, we will let them live outside in the coop with the other chickens. Eventually, we will remove the guineas from the chicken coop to coop train them to live in the guinea shed - with their neglectful parents. You may be wondering why we don't just let the guinea hens sit on their eggs and raise their own babies. Well, we tried that last fall, and out of 12 that hatched, all but three were dead in a couple days, so we took those inside the barn under a heat lamp. I had read it before and didn't believe it, but guineas are truly very bad mothers. If there was a fowl version of child protective services, they would have been on our farm removing the keets the day they were born! The mother took them out in the cold, wet grass instead of keeping them warm in the coop until they were bigger. Live and learn. Now, we use our broody chickens as both incubators and brooders, and it is working well.
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When we built the chicken coop last summer, I convinced Mr. Hook Organics to make it about three times larger than we thought we would need (patting myself on the back for thinking ahead). After all, we agreed that we would only buy 12 chickens. Oh how naive were we, considering we live only 20 minutes from Meyer Hatchery. Chickens are like potato chips; you can't just have a few, but they're so delicious! Well...it's barely a year later, and we (and our 60+ chickens, turkeys, ducks, and guineas) have outgrown the coop - say what?? Well, crap, now we have to build a new one. So, the beautiful little chicken coop shown above, with the cute little cupola on top, is about to become obsolete. Perhaps we will use it for naughty chicken time-outs or for breeding my cream legbar hens, but I just can't fathom selling it yet. On to the new building. This time, I want a full blown, honest-to-goodness, B-A-R-N. One about three times larger than we think we'll need, as Mr. Hook Organics has a long-standing habit of filling every out building and empty space in our yard with his "junk." A metal pole barn is in the works, and I am begging for a concrete floor that will make cleaning the coop so much easier. We plan to have a separate pen for the laying hens and meat chickens/turkeys, a pen for a couple poison-ivy-eating goats, and space for my small Holland lop rabbitry, Hook's Hollands. We broke ground this weekend, and wouldn't you know, we got three inches of rain overnight, turning everything into a muddy swamp. This pleased the kiddos...and the ducks.
As Mr. Hook Organics works on the structure, I am set with the task of selecting the siding color. Easy, right? Well, I made the mistake eight years ago of picking mint green siding for our main barn (thinking it would coordinate with our house...it doesn't), and now I have to look at this eyesore with regret every day. This time, I want a neutral color that doesn't scream redneck. Of course, they don't have the same cream color siding we have on our barn roof, so I need to introduce yet another shade to our hodge podge landscape. On a positive note, I have some sweet solar lights to hang on the new barn. That's not redneck, is it? |
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AuthorIt all started when my husband ran over a guinea. Yep, it wasn't bluffing. In my search to replace it, I discovered a major hatchery just a stone's throw away from our farm. They sold chickens that laid green eggs...what??? We bought six hens. A year later, we have about 50 chickens, 20 turkeys, 15 guineas, and 5 ducks. My husband and his father also farm our property, and we're trying to do everything organically. Archives |