Candling

So we candled some of the eggs last night, we were excited to see, well, if we could see anything.  And on a few eggs we could see vein development!

I am going to attempt to take photos and if they turn out I will post them. 

Still a long way to go before baby chicks and so many things can go wrong between now and then.  In addition to us not knowing exactly how efficient Little Roo is, we also have the fact that our girls are still young (under a year). 

A friend of Vic's wants to trade some of his eggs for some of our green eggs that he can incubate.  This will give us a chance to bring in some new blood.  He has totally free range chickens at his place south of town.  They just wander around and from what I understand his girls raise their own young and he has not had to do much over the last few years except collect the eggs.  Shane estimates he has around 40 chickens running all over.

On a sad note, Shane decided he just can not continue to butcher the baby bunnies.  We put an ad up on craigslist and have someone coming at 10 today to get all the rabbits, including the triplets.  I had wanted to keep the triplets (the breeding trio) so just in case times got bad we could attempt to raise them for meat again.  But deep down inside Shane is a big softy.  Even Vic said he can't butcher them either and the cost to hire someone would make for very expensive meat.  So we will focus on our chicken and turkey girls.  Once we are done with these eggs in the incubator we are still talking about getting some quail eggs and giving them another try. 

We also hope that we can incubate some baby turkeys once our girls start to lay their eggs.  At this point the turkeys are just freeloaders like the rabbits.  If we are successful with turkeys then instead of having turkey only once a year we will be having it once a month!  Yum, that is my favorite meal!!!!

Web site

Just letting you all know that if you go to www.triplezfarms.com you will see I have a temp page up!  I wrote this page from scratch and I am very proud of it.  I still have LOTS of work but at least there is something there! 

I was so excited and so I called the boys in to see my master piece and Sky responded "that is it?"  so I pulled up my source code to show him the work it took to get that up and he was less then impressed.

I am going to (slowly I am sure) get my site up and running and in my mind it will be the coolest thing EVER!  Partly because when I first met Shane I thought programming was too complicated.  I took 1 programming class back in the 80's and it was so confusing.  I never thought I would ever be able to create my own site from scratch.

Wanted...dead

Ok, now to start with DON'T LAUGH!

This is Tom and Tom's days are numbered!

I went out to give my chicken and turkey girls their daily treat of bread, flax oil, yogurt and various left overs from the fridge and I bent down to pet Birdis and Tom pecked my hand and it really hurt, left a mark but did not draw blood.  I swatted at him and told him to go away and started petting Birdis again and Tom came up to me and hit me in the face with his right wing.  My eyes started to water and the pain was unreal!  I got up and kicked at him but felt off balance and disorientated so I came into the house and called for Shane.  Sky came and took the fresh eggs out of my hand and Brady said "told you we should have had turkey for new years".  All the men were ready to take Tom out right then and there for me...my band of protectors.

Here is what IS going to happen.  As soon as we have turkey eggs hatched and know we have a male Tom is dinner!  My hopes are that one of the eggs from Jenny will be a male then we can use that tom with my pretty turkey girls.  These 2 turkeys are so mean!  my girls are the sweetest things ever and I really worry that Tom and Jenny's bad behavior will rub off on my girls since it is obvious that my girls good behavior isn't going the other way!  If I can get my hands on another Tom before then...who wants the drum stick?  I would like to get some babies out of this tom before then but since turkeys don't continually lay eggs I have to wait until they decide the time is right. 

So today I got beat up by a turkey.  My nose still hurts and pain radiates out from it in a headache.  We need to be careful not to turn our backs on this guy!

A lesson in chickens

Hello, we have embarked on a new adventure!  We have revved up the incubator and are attempting to hatch our first batch of chickens!

Step 1 was to be sure our eggs are fertilized.  I have only seen Little Roo "get busy" once so we cracked open one of the eggs from yesterday that have not been refrigerated.  This is what I found:

Now look closely at the glare spot on the lower right side of the upper photo.  Now look at the same area on the lower egg with no flash.  You will see a white donut shape in the yoke.

See it?  Since it is a donut and not just a spot then we can assume this is a fertilized egg.  This is called the blastoderm and by the time an egg is layed it has already started dividing to form an embryo.  Interesting isn't it? 

Here is my incubator

And I put the 17 eggs collected over the last 3 days that have not been refrigerated.  Ideally the eggs are kept above 50 degrees for no more than a week for the best hatch rate. 

I have a nice combination of colors:  white, green and various brown.  Eggs hatch at 21 days (give or take a day or two).  Ideally the eggs should come from chickens that are over 12 months.  My girls are not a year yet.  But, we are excited to see how things work!  Keeping our fingers crossed!

The chickens that hatch from these eggs will be raised for meat.  We are not sure exactly what mix breed Little Roo is, I was told he should pass on the olive green egg gene but, no way to know for sure.  If we get a new roo this year when I get my little chickens then I will re-think what roos I want to keep. 

Kinda hard to see what is going on from the top "windows".  the yellow trays rock back and forth with the timer "turning" the eggs for proper chicken development.  At this point we need to keep the temperature at 99 - 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and above 45 % humidity.  Our Incubator is in Celsius so what should the setting be?  (jeopardy theme plays in the background) times up!

If you said 37.5ish then you would be correct!

I will keep you all up to date on how things are going.  I do have a candle light so I will be attempting to learn to candle the eggs as time goes by!

Re-evaluate

Ok, so we had our first Bunny Butcher.  Shane said he "dispatched the animals".  There were tears, I am not going to pretend it all went smooth.  We ended up using Brady's 22, I thought that would make things quicker and less chance of error.  It was horrible, the bunnies would sit and kick and kick although I knew they were dead it was still sad.  Sky cried, I cried and Shane was feeling a bit sick to his stomach.  We saved the fur and I am going to try and get what I need to process them.  The boys want gloves...we'll see what I can do.  I cleaned and quartered the 2 rabbits and cooked them up last night for dinner.  Shane had a hard time swallowing.  The meat was tougher then the ones we have bought at the butcher, not sure if that is because it was fresh and not frozen or breed or what.  Sky ate the most singing "bunny bunny butt" didn't take him long to get over the whole process. 

Are we going to continue with rabbit farming?  I am going to leave that up to the triple Zs.  It gets spendy feeding so many during the winter and Shane has to decide if he wants to keep going.  Even though we changed and went to all white rabbits, they are so darn cute!  Even Vic said after taking care of them for us when we were out of town for the holidays that he couldn't eat one of them.

So what I know for sure is we are going to expand our chickens.  Raise some for butcher and I want to add a couple new egg colors to my flock.  I got a really nice incubator for Christmas so I want to give it a try.  We are thinking about ordering some quail eggs and giving that another chance but I don't know for sure yet.

We have plans to hatch turkey eggs and if we get a new Tom then the current Tom will be dinner.  He is such a jerk!  And my turkey girls are so sweet.  Jenny will also be hitting the dinner table, she is pretty but very stand offish and I like to cuddle my girls.  I hope to get some eggs from Jenny come spring though.  I want to try cooking up one of the turkey eggs but after that we will be trying to hatch them to grow for meat.

Little Roo is showing interest in the girls but I want to be sure he is good to go before attempting to hatch any eggs we get since we are still not getting too many eggs each day.

So that is about all that has been going on since we got back from Spokane.  I have been so tired and I have to get the energy to get the house all cleaned up and laundry done and ready for the boys to go back to school.  It will be so nice to have a quiet house during the day again!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Out of the deep freeze

The weather has been crazy here!  We have had trouble with animal water systems freezing up and I have been sick so I have just cuddled up and rested.  Now I am feeling better and I have about a weeks worth of work to catch up on.

Made frog legs for the family tonight.  Shane didn't want to try.  Finally he did and said it wasn't too bad and even ate 2 sets of legs.  Sky liked them, but come on way shorter list to name the foods he won't eat!  Brady ate his, said they tasted more like fish. 

I have to share what happened this morning.  I woke up, saw that my alarm was about to go off so started to get up.  just as my feet hit the floor I heard something...I hurried downstairs to the kitchen and listened...there it is again!  I peek out the window and although pretty much black outside I see a small shadow at the corner of the chicken coop...there it is again!! I can't help but smile and feel happy.  Little Roo has found his voice.  He has a wonderful welcoming of the morning crow that just screams farm life!  Ok, he then crowed about 100 times during the time I was getting the boys breakfast ready but I am still happy.

Luckily our neighbor likes to hear the sound of the crowing in the morning too!

Massacre at Triple Z

I picked up my beautiful Quail yesterday.  7 hour round trip in gas and the cost of the birds.  I was so excited.  I had them in my office until I could get them outside once this cold snap was over.  Everything was going fine until I left to take the boys to school.  After dropping them off I went to get some stuff to make me feel better, I feel like crap!  And after getting a bunch of fresh fruits and veggis I get a call from Shane.  Romeo went into my office and killed all 8 of my new Quail. 

Shane is pissed to say the least.  I can not believe this!  I kept finding Romeo in my office sleeping all night and I would pull him out and close the door but some how he was able to open the door.  Shane found the carnage all over the place when he woke up this morning.  I guess it was a dumb idea.  I won't get anymore and Romeo's future is questionable at this point. 

Now I have to start cleaning up all the feathers all over my office.  I just feel HORRIBLE!

By the way while trying to catch the turkeys one of the hens got away.  so I only came home with 1 tom and 1 hen.  They are doing fine this morning though.