Snoskred – Life in the Country

A couple of my chicken friends and I went along to the Goulburn Poultry Auction last Sunday. If only I had 10x the room, I would have arrived home with a massive and very pretty rooster, some gorgeous Australorps, a Brown Leghorn hen and about 20 bantam game birds of some description or other. There were a lot of gorgeous game birds up for auction there. Nobody knows why that kind of bird is so attractive to me. It is just the way the cookie crumbles.

But as I only have a little space in the coop and run, I came home with Blackie and Floppy. These were named by the other half. I have been oddly silent on the naming front. I thought names would come to me but they have not.

Blackie is a Bantam Rosecomb. She is a shy girl who prefers being up on the roost to socialising with the other girls. Given some time I am sure she will get used to the others and get down to interact, scratch, peck and chase mealworms. Until then she is getting spoilt with room service.

Floppy is a Bantam Ancona. She stood out to me at the auction because she kept trying to jump into her water cup. She has shiny black feathers in between her white dappling. Personality plus!

She had some rip roaring fights with the Light Sussex on Sunday, to the point that the other half climbed into the coop to referee for an hour or so. Since then things have calmed down a fair bit and I believe they have sorted out the pecking order. I can’t be sure who is above who at this stage, it is hard to tell.

Light Sussex looks so innocent in this photo however she had climbed up onto the roost after one of those fights which would not be out of place in a chicken action movie. She is still a bit pecky with the two new girls, but nowhere near the flapping screaming tooting fights we saw on Sunday. She was bottom of the pecking order before the new girls arrived and I am pretty sure she wanted to make sure she didn’t stay there. She has grown a lot in the last 2 weeks.

These top of the pecking order ladies sat by and watched the fighting, barely batting an eyelid. They know they are top chicken. It is an attitude. And look how meaty their little chicken breasts are getting.. their chicken feather outfits don’t meet in the middle anymore.. plenty of mealworms, spinach, treats and scratching about. When they jump down from the roost you can hear how meaty and well built they are from anywhere in the house, they make a discernible landing thunk.

Light Sussex with Red Comb in the background.

The girls happily doing their doings while the garden is being watered.. It looks warm but this past week has been awful weather – atrocious winds and icy cold. It never got to 6 degrees in Goulburn on Sunday and the winds were scary, roaring and rattling the sheds. I am so over these cold winds. I want to be able to go and sit in the yard and enjoy watching my girls.

This morning I awoke to a happy – our first egg! I don’t know who laid it.

Finally, the run and coop have been mated together. We could not have had a worse day for it with winds reaching up to 100kms an hour. It was craizy scary around here tree wise, with a lot of branches falling including one falling across my newly planted seedlings this evening.

Here are some pics of the completed coop & run. Sorry these are iphone pics, not the best I’ve ever taken.

Purple comb was the first one to venture out bravely into their new scary world.

The chookadoos finally braved the scary winds and came out to check out their new outdoor area.

It was really windy from so many different directions they weren’t quite sure where to look.

Red comb showing you why I fell in love with her.. and Light Sussex in the background looking for mealworms!

I try to give them a new and different treat each day. Today was a pear, fresh baby spinach, curl worms from the garden and mealworms to lure them out into the run. They enjoyed the pear enormously but it took them most of the day to eat the majority of it and they have some left for tomorrow – the baby spinach did not last very long at all. The Light Sussex eats all of the curl worms while the other girls just eat their heads and leave the rest.

Not only did we get this job completed today but I also finished weeding and turning the garden bed, planted the lemon tree which had been waiting for a shovel in order to be planted, planted over 30 new seedlings including rainbow silverbeet, lettuce, parsley, cauliflower, kale and strawberry.

All this in huge winds. I feel like I’ve eaten about a kilo of dirt and sand. I also feel extremely well satisfied with myself.

I have never tried yogurt before. I was a bit wary of it with the whole culture of good bacteria thing. It was a mental thing that I couldn’t seem to get over.

I read that chickens enjoy eating it, so I decided to buy a little tub of plain yogurt. Not just any cheap yogurt but locally made and very excellent yogurt according to a friend of mine who likes eating it.

Into a newly recycled hommus container I placed a few spoonfuls of the yogurt and then I made the terrible mistake of licking the spoon. Wow, this stuff is tasty, thought I. Maybe I should give this stuff a go. Especially some of the stuff with fruit. But first, the chooks got their yogurt. It was hilarious to watch them eating it. So I thought I’d share.

Yes, that is yogurt on their beaks!

There were times when all 4 of them were trying to eat out of the container at the same moment, which caused general clucking havoc and flapping of wings and freaking out. Unfortunately I didn’t get pics of that, I was too busy laughing!

That is the container once they were done. Note the beak marks!

I had to head out again a bit later and I picked up some yogurt with bits of real strawberry in it from Aldi. Love at first spoonful. I went back today and bought every other flavor they had, and will be trying them out over the next few days. I had citrus cheesecake tonight, it was *awesome*.

I also ended up at Bunnings today buying a bunch of seedlings to plant in the garden. They are all things chooks enjoy eating.

Early mornings because I can’t sleep in knowing the coop is poopy.

A yogurt addiction.

GARDENING.

Who the heck am I and what did they do with Snoskred?

Is completely exhausting.

I had no idea there were so many chores – enjoyable as they may be – involved in the owning of chickens.

Life has changed somewhat. My morning routine used to be – recliner with coffee – breakfast thingy – check messages. It is now outdoor coffee & breakfast thingy, check chickens.

It is then clean out the coop time. The girls like to poop. They especially like to poop while sleeping on their roost. There will generally be a line of poop that coincides with where their butts hang off the roost which needs to be scooped and sifted.

I was initially doing this with a rake and sort of similar to how to scoop out kitty litter but the other half came up with a much better idea. The floor is sand. He saw me doing my thing and said.. you need something like panning for gold. So he went inside and got one of our older colanders. We had 3 of them and two were recently brand new so the older one is now the poop sifter. It works a treat! The sand falls through and the poop stays in the colander which I then empty into my bucket.

Then I head off to the garden to grab a couple of leaves of spinach which I throw onto the freshly sivved sand and half a cup of free range scratch mix. The girls go a bit nutty at this point. They love the spinach but the chooky chocolate known as black sunflower seeds fights for their attention.

While the girls do this, I hunt through the sawdust in the laying boxes to look for any poop there may be in there. It isn’t as easy as sifting the sand so it takes a little longer. Plus I am keeping an eye on the girls to make sure they’re not thinking of using the hatch above the laying box as an escape route. Generally they are not – they are busy with the food.

If it is a sunny day and I don’t have to work, I might at this point put the girls into the cat carrier and take them over to the temporary free range hut for a bit of free ranging. I have to stay there with them to make sure no roaming cats appear – we have several that visit our yard from time to time – but that is no chore. I enjoy watching them scratch and dig and do what they do.

If I do have to work or they aren’t going to freerange because I am on painting run duty, I’ll make sure they have something interesting to keep them busy. They had a cauliflower for the first few days which they pecked into an alien landform. I baked some pumpkin for them. They’ll get some slices of apple when I’m setting up the meal worm farming tomorrow. There may be warm oatmeal. I didn’t like it, but that does not mean it should go to waste!

That is now the story of my mornings. As it is so long, I’ll keep the story of the afternoons and evenings for another post!

The girls as yet do not have names. I am waiting for inspiration to strike me. In the meantime I am calling them all chookadoos. Here they are free-ranging. First the Light Sussex with two of the English Game birds..

Next up, the 3 English Game girls.. Red Comb is at the back, and the two purple combs are in the front.

What’s that about a meal worm farm? I hesitate to mention it because I am pretty sure I won’t be the only one wanting to set one up.. Have a read of this thread in particular the posts by Jocler and Glennie.

I’ve been feeding the girls meal worms a couple of times a day and they adore them. It creates quite a frenzy and the chooks are at their noisiest, trumpeting, bok boking and sharing the joy of eating the mealworms vocally with the other girls. I figure I should start farming them or else it is going to become an expensive habit..