The miracle chick

 Today we aren't counting our chickens so much as counting our blessings!

By Friday evening eighteen little chicks had hatched. For us this is a fabulous hatch rate, 90% of the eggs had hatched and we were over the moon. I had already moved eight of the chicks into the brooder box. This is a small secure cage with an electric heat pad on legs that the chicks can walk under to keep warm and feel secure. Effectively it's an electronic mother hen. So at supper time I moved the remainder of the chicks to the brooder, switched off the incubator and watched the eighteen little chicks finding their feet, exploring their cage and eating and drinking. Then I returned to the kitchen where the incubator was and started to clean it out.

There were lots of eggshells and the two remaining unhatched eggs. Sometimes, but not always, I carry out a simple post mortem by opening the unhatched eggs to see whether the chick had died in the shell early on or whether it had just become too exhausted to hatch. It's a useful process as it gives me an idea of whether I have let the incubator dry out or the humidity level was too high etc. It's a bit of a grim process, but it's the best way for me to learn whether I am doing things wrong (or right!).

I picked up the first egg to examine it. It was pipped and the shell was broken in a line about 3/4 of the way round, obviously this little chick had just worn itself out trying to hatch. I started to open the shell when the little bird inside started cheeping and moving! Good grief, I had switched off the incubator about 20 minutes earlier and left the lid off for several minutes while taking the chicks out of it to move them. So, I put the egg back into the incubator and put the lid back on. I grabbed a water sprayer and filled it with warm water and then lifted the incubator lid a little and sprayed warm water on to the shell of the unhatched bird and on to the empty shells in an attempt to quickly increase the humidity levels in the incubator.

Lifting the lid of incubator reduces the humidity levels significantly and leaving it off will mean that the air inside will be as dry as the air in the room. The air surrounding hatching chicks needs to be around 65% humidity (or more) to enable them to hatch properly, if it drops too low then the membrane inside the egg ( you know the one you have to peel off a hard boiled egg) will dry out. Then what you end up with is a shrink wrapped chick that can't get out of the membrane and shell and dies before it's even hatched.

The little chick struggled for some time to get out of shell and eventually the shell was off, but sadly the membrane had got too dry and part of it was stuck to the back of the chick. This little bird was weak, exhausted, had been subjected to cold, dry and being handled and neither Mr J nor I had much hope of it surviving. It was another white Jersey Giant and I would have loved one more to add to our growing flock.

It seems to me that about this point in any hatch I start hoping for miracles, hoping that the weakest little chick will find the strength to live. Up to now we haven't had much luck with the hoping, wishing and fingers crossed method, up until now that is.

Little chick no.19 lay in the incubator, too weak to stand up, its breathing alternated between deep gasping breaths and rapid shallow breathing. Its eyes were closed and looked swollen, its abdomen looked distended. As the evening went on the swelling went down a little and it opened one eye, although it still couldn't stand but looked like it had a little more control of its head and neck muscles.

When we went to bed we anticipated coming down to a dead chick and were prepared to be sad for the one and to celebrate the eighteen healthy hatches. 

But to our delight, no.19 made it through the night and as its tiny feather fluff had started to dry out, it began to look a little healthier. It was also up on its feet, wobbly and weak looking, but upright! 

By mid-morning it was moving tentatively around the incubator and with each passing hour, it looks stronger. It is still sleeping a lot, but then all chicks do that and it has started cheeping which indicates that it's lungs may not have been damaged by the rocky hatching experience. Chicks can stay in the incubator for up to 72 hours as they have enough nourishment from the yolk absorbed into their bodies and I think no.19 is going to need most of that time to become strong enough to join the others.

As I type it is late afternoon on Saturday, about twenty-four hours since the chick hatched, it is now cheeping away in the incubator and walking about, a little wobbly still, but definitely gaining strength hour by hour. It is not out of the woods yet, it still needs to be able to stand steadily, but we are both now hopeful that this little chap or chapess will survive and that if it continues to improve at the same rate, it will be able to join its brothers and sisters in the brooder box in a day or so. 

Every time we hatch some chicks (or ducklings) I am struck by how clever nature is, that little beings can grow inside an egg, go through the struggles of hatching and be well and lively within hours is nothing short of a miracle. The additional struggle that no.19 has gone through surely earns it the title of today's 'Miracle Chick'.

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You can see videos of the chicks on my YouTube channel where I post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Hatch day success

The chicks were due on Tuesday, but there was absolutely no sign of any eggs hatching, in fact, they didn't even pip. I felt quite low, storm Doris was starting to arrive at our smallholding and it was too cold, wet and windy to do much outside. I was getting a heavy cold and a lack of chicks just added to my feeling fed-up. On Wednesday morning I was feeling a little despondent and as though I had done something or not done something that had caused the eggs a problem, as it turns out it was quite the opposite.

By nine in the morning one egg had pipped and by mid-morning that a little chick hatched. 

It was early afternoon before a second chick hatched, a bonny little white Jersey Giant.

Then, in late afternoon, the incubator seemed to come alive, it started looking like a popcorn maker with chicks hatching one after another and by the time we went to bed there were nine chicks jostling about in the confines of the incubator. When I got up briefly at 3am, there were twelve chicks and when I got up for the day at 6am, I found what I think is fourteen chicks. 

It's become quite difficult to count how many chicks there are, partly because of they are all similar colours, but also because they keep moving around. In the moments that they are all resting or asleep I start counting and then suddenly one pops up from under a little heap of baby birds and they all move around again and so, I lose count. This is a good problem to have, I am delighted with the hatch so far.

As I type there are six eggs that haven't hatched, at least two of them have pipped, but a pipping is no guarantee of a chick. They sometimes pip and then become exhausted by the effort required to do that, so die. Sometimes they get much further into the hatching process and then die. Hatching seems an incredible process and I am fascinated by it.

I filmed one little bird emerging from its shell and included it in yesterday's vlog.

It is much too windy to work outside today (unless of course you absolutely have to), so I have the perfect excuse to sit and watch these little bundles of fluff as they dry their first feathers and learn to use their legs. And of course, first of all, I'll make a nice cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Chickens, chickens everywhere

The next batch of chicks is due to hatch on Tuesday and I am starting to get excited about our chicken breeding plans for the year.

In the chicken field, we have now separated the Australorp breeding group from the White Jersey Giants, so in two weeks time the eggs of both will be ready to start hatching as pure breeds. It also means that we will be able to offer hatching eggs for sale. Both the White Jersey Giants and Australorps are in groups from different bloodlines, so the offspring should be strong and healthy.

We have two Australorp boys, one is with the girls and one is going into his own house and pen with a few hybrid girls for company. We want to keep the second male as insurance, in case anything happens to our first choice of breeding male. These two cockerels were selected from the seven we hatched last year, I hope that we've made the correct decision about which ones to keep.

The Jersey Giants (JG) have Little White (who has now become known as Big White) as our breeding male and three unrelated females and there are also two young JG birds in the nursery area of the chicken condo. They are around 14 weeks old and as yet, still a little young to be certain of their gender. It matters little what their gender, they have a different bloodline to the adults of the little flock and will add another set of genes to the group.

One of the young ones has the wrong colour of legs, so sadly will only be joining the flock for a few weeks before being dispatched as I don't want to add poor traits to our flock (or to anyone else's for that matter). A Jersey Giant should have olive colour legs with yellow underfoot and not a blue leg with pink underfoot that this little chicken has. It has occurred to me that it looks more like a Gauloise chickens than a JG, but it's character is the gentle, friendliness of a Jersey Giant rather than the flighty feistiness of a Gauloise (or at least what I've read about them).

In the chicken condo we have more birds than I want. We have decided to reduce our Cream Legbar group to just two girls, so we still have some blue eggs in our egg boxes and we will rehome the boy. I also want to rehome the two white bantam girls, who are great egg layers but small, as a bantam would be and not any use for us to breed from as we are focusing on large birds. I will be advertising them (to be homed for free) on a local poultry group on Facebook. We don't need as many hyline girls as we have now so they can either be rehomed or as they die naturally we won't replace them. They have been great over the winter period, but now that the JG and Australorp girls are laying, I don't want to become overrun with eggs. The young birds that are currently in the nursery pen will become part of our mixed flock as they grow up.

Mr J and I continue to have discussions about how, what and where to build pens in the chicken field. We want the birds to be able to free range, but are also aware that we want to keep some birds in separate groups and to do that, we will need separate living arrangements for them. 

If money was no object, I would have a series of covered pens built with a raised house in each pen, with a covered pathway (for humans only) that ran along the back of them. We could leave them open when the birds are allowed to free range and close the pens during periods of lockdown or when we want specific breeding groups kept together. However, money is a factor and we don't have the cash lying around to invest a considerable sum in pens and housing. So we continue to discuss how best to make suitable pens and housing for the chickens for the long term and will trundle along creating walkways, runs and pens as and when we can.

When I looked at the incubator a little while ago, one of the eggs was wobbling which means that the next batch of chicks are on their way! To follow their progress you can follow me on Twitter (click the link to the right of my blog) as I will give updates throughout the hatching period with the hashtag #hatchwatch2017.

Chicken lockdown news

Hooray, DEFRA have made an announcement about what will happen from 28th February with regard to poultry being kept inside and under cover. For England they have published an interactive map which allows us to look at whether our poultry are being kept in lower risk areas or higher risk areas. Once we know which area we are in, we can then read their guidelines about what we need to do from 1st March onwards. If you are in England, click here for the interactive map

In Wales, where we live, poultry keepers will be required to complete a self-assessment of biosecurity measures on their premises and we will need to keep our birds separated from wild birds until the end of April. The mandatory self-assessment form can be found here

So for us this means that I need to look again at whether the disinfectant that we have in various spots around the smallholding need moving, whether we need additional foot dips, hand disinfectant bottles etc.

At the start of the lockdown I put a bale of straw on the ground outside our front gate and soaked it with Virkon S, a DEFRA approved disinfectant and we have foot dip bowls outside each of the chicken and duck housing. We have the birds in their condo and palace and the ducks in their run, covered and inaccessible by wild birds and some of the birds have covered runs to give them access to grass. All this will continue, but we really need to create some more covered pens on the grass so that the birds can access to more fresh air and to be able to eat some grass, scratch around in the soil and get a better variety in their diet. 

The difference that having access to grass makes has been surprising. I took this photo while cooking breakfast this morning. The egg on the left is from the condo and covered run where the girls have had no access to grass since 6th December and the egg on the right is from the chicken palace where the birds have had access to some grass (although they razed it to the ground fairly quickly and since then they've only had little green shoots as the grass has regrown). The eggs from the birds that haven't had grass are decidedly watery in texture and the yolks are much lighter in colour and less rich.

Luckily I have had areas of grass covered to protect it from wild bird poop for some time, so I will be able to use these areas for the girls (and boys) to forage on. I learnt yesterday from reading the self-assessment form that the N5H8 Avian Flu strain can remain active in wild bird poop for up to 50 days, so only grass that has been covered since the start of January will be okay to use immediately. I wish that this had been more widely advertised earlier during lockdown, I could have covered more grass as early as December if I had known that the grass would need to be covered for so long to ensure it's safety for the birds.

Still, it is what it is and we know for next year and will cover areas of grass from early October onwards so that if a lockdown happens (and I suspect it will) at the end of 2017, we will be prepared for it and the birds won't have such a prolonged period in a restricted space.

Mr J and I have started to create a permanent walkway from the chicken palace towards one of the chicken fields. Working on the basis that protecting the birds overhead all year round may become the way forward for us, we are making another walkway, much like the one we created from the stable (read about it here). Unlike the previous walkway, this one is more or less free-standing, it is fixed to the palace wall at one end but there isn't a nice long supportive side wall to attach it to, so we will have to find an alternative way to ensure it doesn't get knocked down by the wind that whistles across this site. 

We will also need to build several gates into this new walkway as it will pass across our natural pathway from the Food Forest to the chicken's fields. Now gates are not our strong point, so I think I will probably buy either a tall pre-made gate or use pre-made poultry pen panels and strap them together with cable ties to make a gate as I have done on the chicken palace front door.

Poultry health update
Thankfully all of our birds have remained healthy throughout the lockdown period. The young Jersey Giant chicks that hatched in November have never been out on grass, so I am looking forward to moving them into the chicken palace with the other Jersey Giants and seeing them experience grass for the first time.

The seven chicks that hatched at the end of January are growing rapidly and all look very healthy. One of them (an Appenzeller Spitxhauben) had splayed legs, but I took advice from folks in an online poultry support community and treated the problem which now seems to be completely corrected.

The next batch of chicks are currently in the incubator and are due to hatch in a week's time. These eggs are a mixture of white Jersey Giants, Silver Laced Wyandottes and eggs from the girls in the chicken palace. They may be white Jersey Giants, they may be Australorp (although I doubt it as I don't think the males were active until very recently), they may be a cross between White and the Australorp girls or White and Dieselette (who is hybrid cross with some bantam genes). Dieselette is only in the chicken palace as she is the best friend of one of the Australorp girls and when I tried separating them, they both became impressive escape artists and found their way back to each other. Anyway, it means that we will have some chicks that we are sure of their breed and others that will be a surprise.

The ducks are healthy although very obviously highly frustrated at being confined to their covered pen. Mr J and I will be digging a pond and then covering it with a netted pen so that next time they are confined we can at least offer them access to a pond that we are confident has had no wild bird poop land in it. To date it is still only Mrs Warne that is laying eggs, she goes through phases of laying daily and then a week or two of laying every other day. We are still waiting for the young ducks to start laying eggs, I imagine that they will start in the next month. 

Anyway, as I type it sounds as though there may be a break in the rain, so I'm heading out to collect any eggs that have been laid and of course, as I will have to walk past the kettle, I was also make a cuppa.

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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Hindsight Celery Soup

Last year I planted celery seeds, it's the first time that I've attempted to grow celery and was delighted with the results. We had about twenty good sized plants of a variety called 'Red Soup', which as autumn gave way to winter, I cut the heads and froze a few pounds of celery.

I have been using the frozen celery in stews and trays of roasted mixed vegetables, but a couple of days ago I started thinking about cream of celery soup and today I decided to have a go at making it.

Now usually I am a pretty good cook, my children and Mr J can all recall the dishes that were disasters and, as there are very few total failures, I think I'm safe in saying that the rest of the meals must be either in the category of passable or jolly nice (or somewhere between the two).

Here's how I made the cream of celery soup.

I weighed about 12 ounces of frozen celery.

I put it into approximately half a pint of hot water in a saucepan.

 Then I added a small pot of lamb stock (because that was the first pot of stock I pulled from the freezer).

Once the celery was soft I whizzed it up in the liquidiser to make a puree and returned it to a large pan.



Then I made a thick white sauce from ghee, milk and gluten free flour.
I added the white sauce.

And stirred it into the celery puree.

So far it all seemed to be okay. Then I tasted it. Hmmm, it needed seasoning.

But also it needed more time in the blender to make it less stringy in texture, so I put it back into the liquidiser and blitzed it for longer. Well that didn't work either, the texture was still bitty and off-putting, there was certainly nothing creamy about it.

Next I thought sieving the soup might remove the bittiness and yes, it did, or at least it did with the small amount that managed to pass through the sieve. 

It didn't really matter though because when I tasted it again I realised that I really didn't like the taste. It looked like stagnant pond water, it smelt like stagnant pond water and although I've never tasted stagnant pond water (SPW), the soup was pretty much how I imagine SPW would be.

So the experimental cream of celery soup was relegated to the food recycling bin and we'll be having baked fillet of fish for supper instead.

This just goes to show that you can't win them all and in hindsight I should have strained the puree before I added the white sauce or perhaps, I should just stick to making cream of leek soup!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Keeping chickens in UK v USA

I've been inspired by so many people over the years and most recently by a bunch of homesteaders and smallholders via the wonderful magic of the internet. Early in 2016 I started searching online for advice, information and inspiration and found that there are several (quite a lot actually) folks who share their daily working practices, knowledge and hard-learnt lessons online via blogs, websites and vlogs.

We had already decided on the direction and way that we wanted our smallholding to work, to use no artificial chemicals, fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides etc., to raise as much of our own food as possible and to keep chickens and ducks for their eggs. Raising meat birds came as a slightly later decision and as a natural progression of the way we were living.

I made so many mistakes in those early months, I followed completely correct advice and ideas that I had seen online from American vloggers, only to discover little by little that many of those practices are not allowed in the UK.

So I thought it may be interesting and perhaps, useful to look at some of the differences in the practices of keeping chickens between the UK and USA as I understand them. Please feel free to comment below if I am mistaken about any of these differences, it would be interesting to learn more.

Registering your birds.
In the UK we have to register our premises and also our flocks as soon as we have 50 birds, that's not just chickens but all the poultry we keep. When we started keeping chickens I couldn't imagine how we would ever have that many birds, but it doesn't take long to build up to 49 birds, particularly if you are keeping meat birds and hatching chicks and ducklings. I don't know whether you have to register your premises and flocks in USA, perhaps someone could comment and let me know.

Feeding the birds.
In UK we cannot feed kitchen scraps to poultry. It is fine to feed fruit and vegetables from the garden to our birds, but not if they have passed through a domestic or commercial kitchen before being given to the birds. Here's the APHA (Animal and Plant Health Agency) information about kitchen scraps. This also means that we shouldn't feed crushed eggshells back to our birds.

So in our house, cooked food goes into a biodegradable bag (and then plastic bin) and is taken away weekly by the local authority services. As I understand it, the cooked food is sent to processing plants for Anaerobic Digestion producing Biogas which is used as a power source or In Vessel Composting which produces a soil conditioner. Thus reducing land-fill and reducing the amount of fossil fuels required for power. This great little animation explains the processes.

Because we have a good composting system in our garden, we put all of our raw fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps onto a compost heap. 

Likewise, we can't let our birds scratch through and eat any compost heaps that have kitchen scraps put into them. So I keep one or two heaps that have kitchen scraps in them which the birds are not allowed to access.

The other compost heaps have nothing that has been in the kitchen and the birds have access to these (usually). We make these heaps inside a ring of straw bales - on our smallholding we call these heaps the Circles of Love.

Washing & storing eggs.
In UK (and the rest of Europe) eggs are not washed and are not refrigerated. There is a protective layer on eggs that prevents bacteria from entering the shell, keeping them safe to eat for some time (weeks!). Washing eggs removes that protective layer and means that those eggs would need to be kept cool to stop the bacteria from forming. So our eggs are collected and put into boxes and kept at room temperature. If for any reason eggs do get refrigerated, they need to be kept that way because if they then warm up again there is a risk that bacterial growth may start.

Processing meat birds.
In UK on smallholdings (homesteads), backyards and small farms we have to dislocate the neck of a bird rather than using only a sharp knife, so the killing cones that make dispatch relatively simple in USA (and other countries) are only useful here to put a bird into after dislocation, to allow them to bleed out. Here are the UK government guidelines for slaughter at home. We can only dispatch a limited number of birds per day (70 birds) and larger, commercial farms have different regulations, which I am not familiar with at all.

The lockdown issue.
Since 6th December 2016 all poultry keepers (commercial keepers, smallholders or homesteaders and backyard keepers) in the UK have had to keep their birds under cover, preferably housed, but at the very least completely away from all contact with wild birds. This is because of the threat (and now reality) of Avian Flu H5N8 which has been found in birds as far away as China, India and more recently mainland Europe. Here's DEFRA's latest situation information.

In Europe (and the UK is still part of Europe) steps have been taken to try to reduce the spread of H5N8 which has included the mass culling of birds across regions. Here in UK there haven't been many cases of this strain of Avian Flu, but there have been some and the proceedures that follow an outbreak are heartbreaking for the owners of the birds (all birds on the premises are culled immediately upon confirmation of the disease).

We are heading towards ten weeks of the birds being in lockdown and the current regulations may or may not be changed on 28th February (the date that DEFRA have given for reassessment of the situation). After that date eggs which have previously been sold as 'Free Range' (which is what I think may be called Pasture Fed or Pasture Raised in USA) will not longer be allowed to carry that label. I understand that the majority of eggs in Europe are now Free Range eggs and so the industry could be devastated if the lockdown continues after a 12 week period as this is the maximum time that birds are allowed to be kept inside in a 12 month period and still be called Free Range. We can only wait and see what happens nearer the 28th February.

So there are a few differences between UK and USA in terms of how we can keep our poultry, but when all is said and done, in my opinion the most important thing that we all have to do (on both sides of the Atlantic) is to keep and treat our birds safely and humanely.

Edit - this post is receiving a high volume of views - hooray! Please could you leave a quick comment and let me know where you found the link to my blog and what country you live in, it would be really interesting to see how far and wide it's being read. Thanks!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Vegetable cage Chicken run

I am delighted! This morning I spent an hour or so making the first of the chicken runs that I've been planning (read about our planning thoughts here). It was easy to make and relatively cheap too. This one will have a dual purpose. At the start of the year I will put chickens into it so that they can till the soil in a raised bed and fertilise the area, while they are scratching around in the soil and eating the weeds and last of the crops in the bed.

Then, when the chickens have done their thing I can plant the bed with brassicas and put butterfly netting over the chicken run to create a vegetable cage. This should keep our cabbages and other brassicas safe from the voracious appetites of hundred of little green caterpillars.

To make the frame I used 8 x roofing battens 3.9m long and lots of 5cm (2 inch) screws. The total cost of frame was £25.

The uprights are 90cms long and the cross pieces are 105cms long, this was the most economical way of cutting the wood. So, there are 4 full length (390cm) pieces, 8 uprights, 6 cross pieces, 1 long diagonal and two small diagonal pieces. I will probably add two or four more small diagonal braces to add to the strength and stability of the frame, but it started raining and using electrical tools in the rain is a silly idea.

Here's how I put it together (if the video below doesn't work, you can find it on YouTube here)

The next step is to staple chicken wire around three sides (leaving the end without the cross brace uncovered) and to fix windbreak fabric or debris netting to the top. I will then create an end panel that can be held on with either a couple of bungee cords or small hook and eye catches. The end needs to be able to open so that the chickens can be let in to the run in the morning and out again at night. Once I am using it as a vegetable cage I can use cable ties to keep the end panel on it for the season.

I am really rather pleased with my handiwork and even though it has meant that I have been able to do little else today and I hurt all over, it was worth it. I had fun making something that is useful, that allows us to put the chickens to work without them having a free-for-all at their favourite 'all you can eat buffet bar' (our annual vegetable garden).

Projects like this are good for the confidence and spirit. There is something highly satisfying in being creative and when I can make something that is multi-functional, it is even more pleasing. This evening the plan is to have a hot soaky bath to soothe aching limbs, but first of all, it's time for a cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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