Week 10

Ten weeks. They grow so fast!

The hens are on their pullet grower feed now, and have been for a few weeks. It's a mash, organic, and I get it from the Larsen co-op here in town. I've been giving them the monstrous zucchinis that people, with that pleading look in their eyes, give me: "Can you make bread with this, or something?"
Or something.
The chickens love them.
The yellow squash need to be split open, but the green zukes go in whole and they just have at them.
I'm also tossing them the left over bread from the Chez, with the occasional dab of yogurt and cottage cheese. And all the kitchen trimmings that they can handle.
Even still, they're going thru the mash at an alarming rate. I have to try and get over to the Arnott mill for some organic oats to mix with their feed, to slow them down a bit.

Update on the runty bird: I scoop her up every once in a while and make her sit with me, just to get her out of the pen. The other birds are after her on a regular basis now. She's spunky, though, and manages to duck under the big birds and sneak her way to the food dish. When she gets caught then there's hell to pay, but in the meantime she eats as fast as she can.
I might be a little soft on her. What can I say? I'm an American. We love the underdog. Errr... underchick.

Pretty as a picture

What a show-off, eh?

What my chickens had for breakfast today

I don't want to sound ridiculous, but this is really what my chickens had for breakfast today:

Shredded organic raw kale
Thinly sliced Granny Smith apple
Chopped organic tomato scraps
Organic yogurt a bit past its "best by" date
a brown, fair trade and organic banana
chopped organic green beans

Plus their regular organic starter crumbles.

Happy lucky chickens...

Runty chicken

Little chicken is, obviously, on the front right. If you look closely, you can see that she's not feathering in at the same rate, either. The larger birds have more white in their head and wing feathers. Little chicken looks like how they all looked a couple of weeks ago.


There's one hen that's just not growing at the same rate as the other birds. I've only noticed in the last two weeks and just three things have changed in that time frame:

• they moved into their big coop,
• I switched to large waterers and feeders,
• and we switched to the organic feed.

I seriously doubt that it's the coop. And I doubt that it's the feed. The rest of them are thriving on it.
It might be that since the water doesn't get changed every day now (which is supposed to be okay), the dirty water is getting to her. So I added vitamins to the water again, and I'm going to change it at least every other day or daily if it looks like it needs it.

It might just be a runty bird. It's the one that's always had a couple of wing feathers hanging down at an odd angle. So she's somewhat damaged. And if she had any kind of existing stress, -- like from the wing injury -- it may have made her susceptible. There was one bird that got caught between a waterer and the wall of the brooder. When I found her she was still trapped and soaking wet. Maybe this is that bird.

Being small is no big deal unless the other birds start to pick on her. The questions are is she ill (doesn't seem like it -- her activity is normal), and will she lay eggs? Time will tell. If she's not producing, then there'll be a decision to make.