Chicks everywhere, goat drop-off

When it comes to chicks – whether chicken or duck – I believe we are maxed out. I have built four cages for Mama to use to house the little ones and a fifth cage that I did not alter sits in the little coop. All are occupied. Two sit in the coop areas housing the first batch of hatchlings only a couple weeks old. The cage in the little coop holds three Banty chicks that are more than a month old. With the two cages in the coop, Mama plans on letting the chicks out of the cages into the West side of the coop to finish growing out. To make that possible, we took the chickens from that side of the coop and placed all of them on the East side of the coop. It was a tight fit. Mama will clean the now unoccupied West side this morning and let out all eighteen of the chicks in the two cages in the coop run free on that side of the coop. They will be isolated inside the coop for a couple more weeks as they continue to grow. We cannot integrate them into the general population until they are considerably larger.

In the little coop, Mama opened the door to the cage housing the three Banty chicks to allow them out of the cage. We will see how that integration goes, but they are now large enough to hold their own with the Banty chickens they have been cooped up with for the last month. Meanwhile, we have two more cages in the garage that have young birds in them. One has four recently hatched ducklings in it while the other has more than a dozen recently purchased chicks. I quizzed Mama as to how we are going to integrate those newest chicks into the flock since they are a month behind all our other younger birds but did not get a clear answer. As for the ducks, the four we last hatched out are now large enough to place with the mature ducks we have which will free up the grow out pen for the most recently hatched ducklings. There are still four duck eggs in our small incubator along with three chicken eggs in various stages of development, so there may be more hatchlings to come.

I combined the remaining unhatched duck eggs with the chicken eggs in our small incubator because I wanted to free up the larger incubator for quail eggs. I have accumulated a lot of quail eggs over the past two weeks and kept them in the refrigerator to halt development. So, Monday, I got those eggs out of the fridge and allowed them to initially warm before putting thirty-eight of them into the incubator. The egg turner would only hold thirty-eight, so I was forced to throw out the remaining accumulated eggs. There must have been about twenty eggs left over after I filled the egg turner. I did not want to boil those eggs right now. We have about three dozen eggs laid by our quail per week, so I did not want to overwhelm us with eggs that were already as much as two weeks old. It still seemed a waste to just put them in the trash. Oh, well. We will see how many of the quail eggs actually hatch, but I plan on raising those hatchlings strictly for processing or replacing our current twelve quail hens.

I took a day of vacation, Monday primarily so that Mama and I could drop off Sugar and Honey, two of our goats, to a farm about two hours away. Leoni, a friend in the goat raining enterprise agreed to let us borrow a buck for the breeding. It was simpler to take our girls to her farm to allow the breeding to take place. While Mama and I were there, I saw one buck I was very interested in borrowing to breed our four younger goats. Those little girls are only about eight months old, so it will be October before we seriously consider putting a male with them, but this male is a great candidate. Also, Mama and I saw one black and white buck we will probably buy from Leoni to further our breeding program. There were two very young “blue” bucks that caught our eye, but they are already spoken for. Blue is more a pale gray, but the coloring is striking. I can only afford to buy one buck, so we will get the black and white buck to keep the traditional coloring of the Tennessee myotonic breed in our herd.

We had a wonderful visit with Leoni along with a tour of her farm. It was not that much different from ours other than the shelters she uses for her more than one hundred goats. She lets her chickens run loose and has to conduct an egg hunt every evening to locate the eggs laid that day. Something that would not work where we live. We spent more than an hour with Leoni then headed down the road for lunch. I told Mama we needed to eat someplace special, not a fast-food meal. We settled on Saltgrass Steakhouse since it was nearby. We had a great meal there and walked to a Popshelf store in the same shopping complex. We needed to walk around a bit after a pretty big meal but eventually headed back home stopping at WinCo, Sam’s and Texas Tea as we traveled through Denton. We finally made it home about 5 pm.

Since we had abandoned Grandma and Grandpa all day, we took time to cook Grandpa a good meal. Boneless pork chops, mashed potatoes, peas and rolls. Grandma ate a little bit of the mashed potatoes, a few peas, and a couple rolls. Neither she nor Grandpa have been feeling well for the past several days. Both have a cough and bad sinus drainage.

So, please keep them in your prayers.