Ladybug, have you tried actually picking them up and putting them in the pool? I don't remember if you posted anything like doing that. But if you haven't, it might be worth a try.
GG
YIPPPPPPEEEE!! Our 1st broody just hatched her 1st chick....
Hi Granny........we have decent sized pond where my DH built a duck/goose house for them. We got all of them at an auction, so got them where they were young adults. After we got them we left them in their house for 3 days, hoping they would learn that this was there house. It is about 12 feet or so from the pond. When we let them out, they acted like the pond wasn't even there........then they all ended up making the trip through the pasture, down a hill, crossing a little ditch, up another hill and up to the house and barn area. We have carried them back down there over and over again in the evening, and they come right back.
ok.....guess this was a really long way of putting off saying......ummmmm no, I don't think we have tried just putting them in the pond.....oh boy, am I having a big duh moment right now. How is it sometimes so easy to overlook the obvious? I think we will have to haul them back down there tonight and then tomorrow, the kids and I will try putting them IN the pond.
Thank you Granny for pointing out what should have been obvious! Wonder how long it would taken me to think of that?
Christy (having a great big DUH moment!)
Christy have you tried tossing their favorite food (something that floats like lettuce leaves) into the pond starting at the edge and then a little deeper? No snapping turtles in there btw? Those can hurt ducks and geese so they would avoid them.
Mine love water, any water! As soon as the pool is cleaned and filled they spend hours playing in it. They're first 'pool' was a 2.5" bowl that I had for their drinking water!! I'd no sooner fill it than they were in it spilling all the water. Next came one of those sweater bins, then a larger bin and now this pool which is getting way too small for them. Hanzel is a show off in the water. He likes to dive and swim like a sub just under the water popping up to splash anyone close to him ^_^ His other favorite trick is to stand on his head in the water with his web feet in the air! Scared me to death the first time I saw him doing that. I thought he was going to break that skinny neck of his. Gretel was frighten too that first time. Now she's gotten use to it and will follow him around in the pool when he dives.
Wish you could have seen the 5 of them the first time I was filling that pool. Their expressions were Oooo we didn't know there was that much water in the world!! I barely had it full when they couldn't stand to wait any longer and jumped in. LOL Like a bunch of 8 years old.
Peyton Place was suppose to be a small New England town with all the usual escapades people get up to but way cleaner than now days. Ryan O'Neal was in it. At that time he was young and very handsome! Not the fat old man he's let himself become now.
MollyD
Be careful you don't get scratched! Those web feet have nails to them.
MollyD
You know, you may only have to get one of them in the pond and the rest might just decide to go in on their own. I don't have ducks or geese, so I am not quite sure how intelligent they are, but it would seem logical that if they see how much fun the first one is having in the pond, the others might get the idea, "hey, let's join him/her!"
GG
GG I can tell you from my bunch that the ducks are not very smart. The geese are the professors of the bunch! You can see the wheels turning when they look at you.
MollyD
Then all I can say is I hope you have good luck for that.
GG
In my case, the ducks were here 1st and then the goslings, and the goslings are younger and just follow the ducks everywhere! All I can think of is they weren't raised on water, or not a lot of water. I asked DH and kids about it and they said that they have put them in the pond, but they won't stay there, they walk right back out. I think with DH being gone all day, he is a bit clueless as to their habits......he said they go down there for a couple of days, then come up to the house. ummmmm, no, they don't but I didn't say anything. I don't know why he would even say that.....they wallow in the little pond (sink) everyday and then they pull the plug and all the water goes out.......so no one has anything to drink. I'm gonna put a big rock in there tomorrow.....bet they can't go for a swim in the drinking water then!
I think I will have to try Molly's idea with the lettuce. Something has to work. We have one female Ruin that has almost never stayed with the rest of them though.....she is ALWAYS on the pond. She the one I that adopted the 1 week old baby duck, and they swam in the pond for a couple of days. You would think at the very least, with all this heat that they would want to be at the pond all the time too! Weird!
Christy
Well, good luck.
GG
And I'm going to bed!!! Nite.
Thanks Granny! I am off to dream land soon myself. I has been a long day. I have more going on with the broody's, and 3 new ones....but will have to post that tomorrow. WHEW!
They are wearing me out!
Christy
Good new and I can't hardly believe it! We have just started our second round of broodies hatching eggs! YIPEEEE! The kids were outside messing around and two little chicks popped out and were walking around the pen! My goodness does the time go fast.....especially when you are not the one turning the eggs! These are from either broody #4 or #5, both PBR's and they have been swapping nests and stealing each others eggs the whole time. One thing I have learned form all of this........each broody needs her very own pen/cage. All the ones that have been sharing nests do the nest swapping and egg stealing. Geesh!
The update on PBR broody # 3, the one sitting on VERY dirty eggs.........the smell got so bad and she was sitting on so many eggs for so long that we finally just took all her eggs. Every single one of them were no good....either not fertile or had died at certain stages....except for 1. My DS tried to run the guilt trip on me for the one, but the chick looked like it had at least another week or so to go and there is no way it would have made it with all those rotten eggs. I am sure that one of the rotten eggs would have exploded or broken open and all the bacteria would have gotten it. If we had made the candler by then, then maybe we could have done it differently, but we didn't so we couldn't. Next time we will do better.
Here is a pic of the the broodies that have the new babies.......wonder who the mama is and who started these eggs and who finished them? Like I said, no more pen sharing! (this was taken pretty soon after they started sitting.
Now that is what I call GOOD work. All them broodies, How could someone be so lucky. Maybe you can rub some of that luck off on us here.
No fooling! The chicken fairy has been VERY good to me!! Maybe I can borrow some magic fairy dust from her and set off around the countryside sprinkling away!! LOL : )
So far there has really been only one draw back on it........we have very few eggs right now. I'm not really complaining.......but some of our egg customers are getting VERY mad at not having the eggs they are used to getting. The 6 that are broody and sitting are not the only ones not laying.....I think the first 3 have not started back up and we have 2 more that are dead set on setting on eggs. We can't let them because we don't have fertilized eggs and because it is really starting to get way too hot. Now I am going to have to break them. I read somewhere to put them in a cage where they can get air underneath them, with no bedding in it, and to give them a clutch of ice to sit on. I don't know how to make them sit on it though, so I think I will try dunking their hot under sides in ice cold water. I hope it works!!
This broody has been busy.......she has hatched out a bunch of chicks but I haven't gotten an exact count on them yet. Both broodies are playing mama and it is so cute!
Christy
Oh gosh I do envy you there. Hope it is a south west wind going on when you spread that dust out. I can see how it can be bad also no eggs. But to think so many in your coop went broody, what is the odds on that. You do have a challenge ahead of ya getting them NON broody now. Will taking all the eggs from them help.
Well, here's hoping the 'fairy broody dust' blows your way when you are ready for it! Not too much though.....gotta save some for myself for next year! LOL
I'm thinking it's pretty amazing too, to have so many go broody! I have tried taking their eggs away....they just wait around until the next day and wait for the other hens to squeeze in next to them to lay an eggs, then sit on those. They seem quite content to just wait it out. I dunked the two that were doing it and got them in their separate pen. I will dunk them again in a little while. They were not very happy with me.
Well, 7 baby chicks so far! yahoo!! They are just the right size to put in the group that just hatched. As much as I want to leave some with at least one mama or two, I just don't think it is going to work out this year. We have so much going on with so many pens that it almost seems like the work will never end. Worth it though. I think I am now an official member of the chicken slaves!! : )
Christy
Chicken Slave yes i would say so. The first few days I had the trauma shipped chicks it was constant work, plus I had forgotten everything I knew to keep them. Now the work is less and more enjoyable. Until thursday and I get another batch of them. But I will be really ready for them this time. Thanks for the dust. And by all means save some for next year (that is really when I will need it).
Don't worry, before you know it you will be an old hand at it!.......and look, you are already for batch #2 and things will go much more smoothly. I think the work will get less once the hot weather passes. For right now its almost a constant battle to keep everyone in water and in shifting around different outside pens and cages out of the sun during the hottest part of the day. Like about anything else though, you start to get used to it.
Christy (hiding a secret pouch of magic broody dust!) : )
you lucky gal! tell them customers that until your hens have finished their primary business of raising layers for this winter and next year, you would appreciate their patience in this matter, and you promise they will be first on the list to get the new eggs once they start pouring out their butts again...
LOL tf.....too funny! I felt like something to that effect to one of the neighbors......I explained to him about 2 weeks ago exactly why we didn't have very many eggs right now and he couldn't have cared less. He got one of those glazed over looks......I don't think he really understood the concept of broodies not laying eggs. DH gave him a short dozen on Sat and had to run out to the hen house to do that. DH said, yep.....told him that a couple might have chicks in them, but here you go! I said, OMG you didn't! He laughed and said no he didn't but the neighbor was still pretty upset. Oh well, let him go to the store (20 miles away) and pay more for funky store eggs! Doubt he'll do that with us right down the road and oh well if he does......there is always someone else wanting them to take his place!
Christy
black mailer lol
lol : )
You got that right, there will be someone else knocking on your door for them eggs. We do not have anyone around us selling eggs that I know of, so I should be able to get a good set of customers going. There is a housing addition not far I am sure they will buy fresh eggs, hopefully I will get some that wants fresh chickens also. How much would one sell a live bird for at say 5-8 months old and how much for a butchered one at say 6-8 lbs.
Tia....the breed you have, do they lay very big eggs? It sounds like you might have a good customer base just waiting for farm fresh eggs. Are you going to post a sign in your yard?
We got a hold of a restaurant in town and she wanted to buy from us right away......30 doz a week. She is sick of getting her eggs from some Amish, she is sick of getting eggs covered in poo and dirt. YUCK! Wish we could fill her order but we are not that big yet......hope to be one day though! : )
I don't know what people would pay for fresh chickens. You will have to check out the laws about it in your state though before you do that. We checked on it because we have so many meat birds about to finish out. Our law states that you can sell the live bird all day long. To charge for a butchered bird though you have to go through all kinds of inspections and have to be up to code if you are doing it yourself. I think you can take them to a butchering plant though and do it that way. We also learned that a way around it is if you sell a live bird to someone, then if they ask you to do them a favor as a friend....'Could you butcher this for me?' then you can do it. We haven't done it yet though.
Also for selling eggs......you might want to check into laws for that too. I know a lot of people just sell them and never have a problem. For us, we want to be able to sell at the farmer's market and eventually to a restaurant or two so we have to have an egg sellers license. All we have to do is fill out a form and pay a yearly $5 fee. This is good for XX amount of eggs a year........in the thousands but I can't remember the exact #.....we'll be good for awhile.
Christy
Not sure on the egg production of the birds I have now, Tam would know, I have the crested special. Some sites say good layers on some and not so good on others I have right now. now the batch coming this week should be good egg layers. Probably these that i have right now will be mostly meat birds, heck its just me and hubby so they should be able to feed us. I dont want to sell at the farmers market, I will just sell out of my yard. I have a restaurant approved refrigerator double door that I can put the eggs in. Wow 30 doz a week. That would have to be at least 360 hens if they laid an egg every day. if you sold them for 3.50 a doz that would be a bit over 100 bucks a week, that doesnt seem very profitable. Not for all the work it would entail.
Wow, good you have such a big fridge......eggs can start taking up a lot of space sometimes. I don't know if you have to worry about a license then if you are going to sell out of the yard, though I really don't know.
360 hens if each laid every day would be 210 doz eggs a week....WOW! We would have to pick up all three restaurants in town and a TON of other customers. 30 doz a week would be 52 hens if they laid every day, not going to happen, so I figure 52 and what I call spares just to be sure of getting that many. Then there's the extra hens for other customers. We are trying to do the math on that now.....on how many we need so we can be sure on having enough. We have high hopes of picking up at least one other restaurant and in a small town it is likely. Our 3 restaurants are the small mom and pop type. We are lucky to have barn space still that can be converted into a bigger hen house and DH has big plans for building the hens their own house one day. We have A LOT of plans and I am glad we are getting a feel for things and moving pretty slowly.
Boy, I wish we could get $3.50 a doz in our area, but that is not going to happen. I think the most people will pay around here is $2 a doz and I think that is not that uncommon.....it just depends on where you live. Hope you can get $3.50 a dozen !!
Christy
Ok I did do the math wrong, Math was not my subject in school many many many moons ago. Ok 52 hens wouldnt be that bad. i have no clue what they sell for around here, maybe I need to check it out. We live 15 miles from town and with the prices of things going higher and higher, i am sure that at least 2.50 would go around here. i do have a restaurant down the road that is fixing to open up and it is on the way to the lake, so lots of summer business. The owner is a good friend of mine I will have to check and see if she can buy farm fresh eggs. I know the local mom and pop stores can buy fresh eggs and produce to sell, so may check them out. Mine will be organic to a point, they will get the feed store feed, but wont be free ranged. I just cant have 100+ birds running around and me trying to get them put up. But they will have a nice big area to be outside.
well, you would have cage free birds. and you can grwo some bugs or worms fo rthem... it helps make the yolk bright orange, which people expect in farm fresh eggs... and some days you could just take them out when you are going out anyhow...
consider how high fuel is getting, and chicken feed. egg prices will go up this winter at the stores. so instead of going up on your prices, why don't you start at 2.50? people will understand they get what they pay for. then when store prices go up, you can announce you won't be going up, or at least not for current customers. just add 25-50 cents for new customers or anyone who deoesn't return cartons...
i get three, and i don't plan to go up, but may add the carton charge if necessary...
it seems people who are wanting chickens now mostly asre those who have had them before, so that makes it easier to sell the bantams. and these same people are coming back next week to get polish, they may want more bantams, one lady said she also wanted large layers...
Tia the best thing to call your eggs will be cage free and free range and FRESH and hand gathered daily.... you may sell enough to fall under rules and regs regarding the use of the term Organic.... you could call them natural...
good point tf.....it is always easier to start a little higher than you think and see what happens than to sell yourself short and then have to up the price. That is what we are facing right now. DH made the mistake of charging WAY too low and is finding it hard to up the price.
and cartons......ugggg. We have some people that are really good at bringing them back....either every time they get eggs again or saving them up for us and then bringing them. Some just toss them, I am sure of it. One time we were so short of cartons we had eggs coming out of our ears and nothing to put them in. It was NUTS! We had little plastic bins packed full of eggs......we were quickly running out of room in the fridge for them all and people were still wanting the eggs. I told my DH that if people wanted eggs then they better start bringing cartons in. They did. It sure was a mess for a while though. I like tf's idea of charging for the carton if they don't bring theirs back. The cost of those cartons can add up fast and cut into your profit in a big way!
Christy
Yes for sure they can. i have all my family and friends saving their cartons now. Since we dont have fresh we have to buy from store for now i usually by 18 pack or better up to 5 doz pack, but will start buying the single doz for the cartons. When I get to producing alot of eggs I will probably buy the cartons, we will see when that time comes.
We ended up caving and buying some....the cheapest we could find. Guess what happened then? I kid you not, the box of cartons came via UPS at 6pm and at 8pm a neighbor brought us about 50 cartons he had been saving up. We still have yet to dig into the box we bought, but figure we have them now when we need them.
Christy
lol that is to funny.
We thought it was pretty amusing at the time too! We just couldn't believe it happened that way. We seem to 'hit' things that way though, in one way or another.....so we kind of thought.....'oh, we should have guessed this was going to happen!' lol
Well, at last check one broody was working on another chick. They should be coming pretty fast now. (fingers crossed!)
Christy
SWEET I cant wait for mine to get all their feathers then find out what they are as in boys or girls then comes the eggs and meat then hopefully your dust will make its way here and i will have some real good mama's
LOL.......your excitement makes me laugh! With your babies still be so little though....I'll warn ya......it's going to feel like FOREVER before those first eggs start coming! It's not quite so bad on the waiting after you already have some laying though.....at least for me anyway.
We were getting 28-32 eggs a day......now with the broodies and hens hiding eggs we are only getting 6-9 a day. grrrrr! I know this too shall pass and they will get on with business. I think I am going to convert the broody pens when the broodies are done with them and cage up a couple of hens in each one.....to test and see which one's are laying and which one's aren't. The stacking pens I have the broodies in can go 4 high and have 2 sections each so I can test 16 at a time. It's going to take some time for sure but will be worth it. I'm going to have to get some colored zip ties so we can keep track of them. The paint stick didn't work so well. Don't know why, on cows the marks will stay on for a long time, but not with the chickens.
The good news on egg production is that we have 18 pullets that are going to start laying any day now. We got a little 'hiccup' egg as Granny calls them, a little Americauna pullet egg last week.....it looked like a robin's egg. No more though.
Tia, have you seen my thread on the broody pics yet by any chance?
Christy
No i haven't seen the thread bump it up and i will look at it.
Yea I know forever, I do have someone local that has laying hens but at 12 bucks a pop and my coop is not finished yet so i cant get em. I can wait. Time is really going by fast, to fast actually, my baby (grandson) will be 5 in 2 months and it was just yesterday he was born. He is comming for a visit this week I cant wait, he can help me with the chickens. He will love that
We had another neighbor that was hot and heavy to buy some of our Barred Rock Hens. He would not take no for an answer, just kept coming back over and over again asking. It didn't seem to sink into his head that we are not selling hens right now, we are selling eggs and don't have hens to spare. DH almost gave in, figuring one or two hens wouldn't make THAT much of a difference. I did the math for him on what we would be losing just by selling one hen, and he came around. We tried EVERY way to work with him, from offering him a chance to buy a started pullet at another date when we had more, to getting him some hens at the auction we go to....at cost. No, he wanted OUR hens. He then told me he had 3 barred rock rooster's who needed a mate......I said you want 1 or 2 hens for 3 roosters? I told him that if we sold him a hen or two he might as well walk away with them and butcher them about as soon as he left.....(this was after the 4th visit and I was getting sick of it) I told him with that many roosters to that few hens, the roo's would end up killing them, so there was no point in it. He still was not getting it. His 5th and final visit he caught me right at the wrong time........our turkey poults were pecking each other pretty bad and doing severe (killing damage) and bigger chicks were flying over the divider to the littler poults and killing them and I had to stop in the middle of trying to get it all straighten out to talk to him. We couldn't care less what was going on and would not let up. I tried telling him 2 times that I could not talk right now and he didn't care.........so I walked away from him when he was in mid sentence. He left. For a while I was worried he would just come up and steal some when we weren't home.......nope, all present and accounted for. WHEW! What is it about people that you try and bend over backwards to help them get what they want and they make it as hard as possible? geez!
One little barred rock chick so far today......from PBR broody in pen #5, the one who stole the Brown Leghorns eggs.
Christy
some people just dont get it. No they are NOT for sale.
you would think that would have been enough, huh? Your grandson is going to have a blast. My kids love all the critters and all that is going on......and they are around it all the time. I bet your grandson will love it even more, especially if it something he is not used to. He sure is going to have A LOT to talk about, huh? : )
Christy
Oh yea, I have not even told him about the new kittens and the chicks, he does know about the puppies. Plans are to keep him for a couple of weeks, we did last year and he did great, just a wait and see thing. He can wear me out more than my kids did, but I was a bit younger then.