Of the five chicks we brought home on Good Friday, there is one we suspect being a rooster. Three of the five chicks were Buff Orpingtons. In this picture below we see the suspected rooster, affectionately named Roo, next to another Buff Orpington. Obviously Roo has a much bigger comb and waddle. Additionally we will get a series of weak cock-a-doodle-doos in the morning from Roo. I’m so glad it isn’t a robust crow because our motto is … If it crows, it goes.
One of my friends who has a life long experience with chickens is giving us hope that Roo may yet be a hen. She noted the tail posture of Roo. It isn’t up like rooster like to do. Also, Roo doesn’t seem to be developing spurs. We probably have a couple of months or so before we will know for sure … but what do you think? Is Roo a rooster or a hen?
The aquaponic tomato plant is getting huge. Not only that, but it also has three unripe tomatoes developing nicely already. Both the potted tomato (remember that one used to be the “big one”) needed additional support, so I rigged up some bamboo as a horizontal support and used this nice covered wire material to act as the vertical support.
I also needed to transplant the potted tomato as it had obviously outgrown its former container. There is some curling of the leaves near the top of both big plants, but it is more prominent on the potted plant. We added a nice layer of home made worm castings on top of the potting soil to give it some extra nutrition and natural fertilizer.
The girls helped me harvest enough dandelion flowers to put together our first ever batch of dandelion wine. It should be ready in a few weeks. Expect a video from us at that time. Here is the recipe we used:
Ingredients
1 quart yellow dandelion blossoms, well rinsed
1 gallon boiling water
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
8 cups white sugar
1 orange, sliced
1 lemon slice
Directions
1.Place dandelion blossoms in the boiling water, and allow to stand for 4 minutes. Remove and discard the blossoms, and let the water cool to 90 degrees F (32 degrees C).
2.Stir in the yeast, sugar, orange slices, and a lemon slice; pour into a plastic fermentor, and attach a fermentation lock. Let the wine ferment in a cool area until the bubbles stop, 10 to 14 days. Siphon the wine off of the lees, and strain through cheesecloth before bottling in quart-sized, sterilized canning jars with lids and rings. Age the wine at least a week for best flavor.
1 Timothy 5:23 New International Version
Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.
I have been doing some water exchanges and this has lowered the Nitrates. More will need to be conducted. The pH rose some probably due to adding the new water. I have been using city water, but have it oxygenated for several days with an air pump pumping air into it through a diffuser stone. We have just lost our second feeder fish in the system; RIP “Mohawk”. A couple weeks ago we found our first floater, “Charlotte”. So far the girls have not noticed Charlotte missing.
So we’ve had chicks in our house for nearly a month, and we are amazed at how quickly these chicks grew from little chicken babies into teenagers! The girls of HumblevilleUSA are having a blast playing with and bonding with our five potential egg layers. See the three buff orpingtons, a rhode island red and a silver wyandotte entertain our three girls.
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The chicks are now pullets. The weather is warming up in SE Michigan. And the time to have the coop ready for the hens to start living outdoors is at hand. Join me and the girls as we play with our free range pullets and assemble a pre-fabricated chicken coop and pen.
Ideally I would have wanted to design and build a coop from scratch to get it just the way I think I’d like. In speaking with my friends who have done this, they spent nearly what I did. Sure, they got a coop more suited to what they wanted and how they wanted to use it, but I decided that we have many other projects that we would like to get to this spring, and this was much easier than designing the coop, creating the materials list, shopping for the components, hauling them home (and who really gets a project done with a single trip to the store?) and building it from scratch. And in my humble opinion, a project done is much more desirable than a better project planned but unimplemented.
In theory, I like the artificial wood-type product used in the construction of the coop. It is lighter in weight. It is supposed to be odor resistant. And once you open up access to the coop through the roof slats, we are supposedly able to hose out the coop for better cleaning and we don’t have to worry about the rotting issue that comes with natural wood and moisture. We shall see.
Also, I haven’t played around enough with the pen to see if I can get the door on the other side. Ideally I would like it switched. The panels for the coop are all pre-drilled, so switching the door to the other side did not seem possible, at least initially. The floor to the pen is open. Now we need to determine how to protect our hens from critters digging under. Maybe I will use some hardware cloth and secure it to the bottom of the sides. Maybe I will use some footers and stones to place around the pen, digging into the ground for additional security.
The girls were going to help out more in the assembly of this chicken coop build, but it was such a nice day and we had the pullets out running around in the backyard. It was just too much fun for the girls to play with the hens. No worries. This project was easy enough for one motivated, but skill challenged father.
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Watching the aquaponic bed grow and develop has been fascinating. The “mystery plant” can be seen in the lower left in the pot. It is huge now. For those who didn’t catch the previous posts on our desktop aquaponic experiment, we have a mystery on our hands. In the pot we used to plant our thyme seeds, several mystery plants emerged instead of our sought after thyme. It looked enough like a tomato that I wanted to save the largest one to see what develops. I also kept in the medium sized specimen in the aquaponic bed in the corner near the window. This plant has now caught up to, if not surpassed, the largest mystery plant that we transplanted back into the pot. Not only has it caught up in size, but it is now sporting numerous, small, yellow, bell shaped flowers which, if I’m not mistaken, could still indicate that these mystery plants are tomatoes. I sure hope so. We will then have a nice jump on at least a couple of tomato plants this year.
1 Corinthians 15:35-38
Some skeptic is sure to ask, “Show me how resurrection works. Give me a diagram; draw me a picture. What does this ‘resurrection body’ look like?” If you look at this question closely, you realize how absurd it is. There are no diagrams for this kind of thing. We do have a parallel experience in gardening. You plant a “dead” seed; soon there is a flourishing plant. There is no visual likeness between seed and plant. You could never guess what a tomato would look like by looking at a tomato seed. What we plant in the soil and what grows out of it don’t look anything alike. The dead body that we bury in the ground and the resurrection body that comes from it will be dramatically different.
Wow, the nitrates are much higher over this last month, I was anticipating they would have spiked and decreased by now. fish seem fine. cilantro showing some browning/purple. Spinach, the possible tomato, the spinach and the remaining house plants all look healthy … not sure if this high nitrate reading is acceptable or not, and if not, unsure what to do about it? more plants in the bed with bigger root systems?
The pre-fab chicken coop is now constructed along with its companion detachable pen. The kit was fairly easy for one adult to assemble, though a helping hand every now and again would be nice. The girls helped, but we also had the chicks out running free in the yard and therefore the girls were easily distracted and wanted to play more than work. I can’t blame them.
This coop is constructed from the artificial wood planks used these days for decks. The advantage to this material is that it does not absorb odors and is easy to wash out. I wish this coop design had a slide out tray system at the bottom to help in the coop clean out process. As it is, the roof slats can be removed with minor effort and the coop can be accessed from the top.
The materials were all individually numbered which made the assembly much easier. 1 connects to 2 connects to 3 and so on until you run out of numbers. The instructions encourage you to sort the parts out by number, and I concur. That helps speed things along. The directions to the pen assembly, however, did not have the part numbers listed in the assembly instructional drawings, which I thought was odd. The biggest tool I needed to use in this project was the snippers I used to cut the plastic straps off the boxes. The coop and pen are actually assembled using hand tightened jumbo plastic screws.
Another modification I might wish to make is for the door. As it is now, I think I’d have to open the pen door, reach in, then rotate the clip that holds the coop door shut. I wouldn’t mind rigging up some sort of system where I can raise and lower an additional door via a twine line. We shall see if that develops or not. Also, I will need to line the boarder of the pen with some paving stones, or perhaps lay down some hardware cloth on the ground and secure it to the sides so other critters cannot gain access to the chickens from below.
The chicks are growing daily now, and watching them mature is amazing. They should be ready for their outdoor home soon.
Total cost for the coop and pen, including sales tax, was ever so slightly under $500. In talking to other people who have custom built coops, this is about what they paid in materials, so I decided to remove all the hassle of designing the coop I’d want and having to develop a materials list and take, I’m sure, several trips to the store to obtain such materials. So far I’m pleased with that decision.
Thanks for coming by to Humbleville, USA … and GOD BLESS !!!
