March 25, 2011

New Kids on the Farm

"Japan" (named Japan when she was born because the marking on her side sort of looks like Japan's flag. She was named before that country's recent tragic troubles) is a 75% Boer / 25% Nubian doe and she just had two new kids a little bit ago, both girls! One black and one light red one. These two new girls might be keepers, time will tell. These are Japan's first kids.

March 09, 2011

Suspicious - Farm Photo of the Week

Yea, the other goats wanted me to ask what you are doing? And why did you not bring treats??

March 07, 2011

Eggscellent Eggs

"Cinnamon" the chicken must be eggshausted these days. She has laid an egg every day but two since she suddenly started laying the last week of January. So far we have got 36 eggs and I find that to be eggstraordinary considering they are all from one single chicken. She has only missed two days since she started but she even made up for those days by giving us two eggs the day after one missed day and a large double yoked egg after the other.

We named her Cinnamon because according to the people we got her from she is a Cinnamon Queen chicken. She is our first chicken so we don't have a lot of experience with them yet but I would definitely say if you want lots of eggstra eggs this would be one of the good breeds to get. We were not even sure if she was going to lay eggs since we didn't know how old of a girl she is. You can read my other post about when we first got Cinnamon by clicking "here."

She is really an eggsceptionally calm and friendly chicken and will even take food from our hands. So what is on the chicken menu today? Let's see, there is always chicken food from the feed store available but we have also been giving her some other treats. Today it looks like a tomato, some salad mix, a handful of multi-grain cheerios and a piece of whole wheat bread (I only give her bread every 3rd day or so and not too much.) Oh and her yogurt, I can't forget that because it is her favorite, she loves the stuff.

All her veggie treats are under the bread and cheerios but she goes straight for the yogurt first.

I am a little concerned about her because she has had a persistent "messy" bottom, though she seems healthy otherwise. She has a good appetite, is active and laying eggs every day. No rattles to her breathing or discharge of any kind. I read on the backyard chickens forum to try giving her some plain yogurt for this but so far even though she loves it and eats a couple spoonfuls almost every day it hasn't helped the messy bottom situation. I read it could be mites and all chickens are very prone to them so I bought some powder for that. We have washed off her backside twice with warm water when it got more messy and smelly (add "washing a chicken's butt" to my list of things I never thought I would do before country life!)

She is really a wonderful chicken and we like her so much and are very happy to have her around. I never knew chickens could be so personable. We would like to figure out what we need to do to help her with that little back end issue. So we could use some help from all you experienced chicken owners if you have any suggestions or know what might be causing this, any advice would be very much appreciated. I try to avoid using antibiotics if at all possible but could it be time to try something like that or is this not that abnormal for certain individual chickens? Her eggs are always very clean.