Our little adventure into farming practice this past year has been fantastic. So much so that this spring we find ourselves with too many beautiful roosters! Loving our farming community here I am happy to let these boys go for free. (I am sure our neighbors appreciate this as well!)

The top right Rooster is a splash Ameraucana. He should sire blue egg laying hens. The other two are EE roosters, they come from an Olive Egger Mother and a Blue Copper Marans Rooster. While they lack the blue slate legs of most EEs, they do have the muff and the right combs. They would be perfect over an Olive Egger hen creating chickens that should lay a fabulous green egg! There was a lot of interest in these boys and they found quick homes!

 Free Ranging Chickens and Ducks Danger!

While many farms are getting new animals in, we are thinning down trying to work on the breeding projects we intended to before. For that reason I have a silkie rooster left with two frizzle hens and a smooth sizzle hen. They are in a small coop fully enclosed and I can tell they are missing their free range days. However a falcon took out our Polish hen a bit ago and while our very large Blue Copper Marans Rooster did damage the Falcon, it clearly knows where it can get a meal. For now the smaller bantam chickens will be staying locked up!

We also lost our 4 ducks this winter, we don’t know what took them but something sure did. The piles of feathers told the story much to our heartbreak. The ducks being so large I didn’t think anything would go after them, oh how wrong I was. There is a price for free ranging chickens and ducks, and we have paid it. We love nature and understand there is a balance but goodness it is hard on the heart!

  Another area we are down sizing in is bunnies!

Mr. Handsome, our 9 year old son purchased a rabbit with his allowance last December. She happened to already be pregnant! She had these adorable bunnies a few days after Yule! Goodness they have grown!

   On one of the first nice days we have had in a long while we brought the bunnies outside to enjoy the sun and the grass and they loved it! They escaped our little pen a few times but were easy for the kids to catch! The kids are keeping on female baby bunny to keep with her Mom as house bunnies. I want to see if Husband though can build an outside pen for the bunnies to spend some time in when the weather is really nice!

  We will hatch chicks!

When we get back from a trip we are planning we are going to set some project eggs! There is a lot of demand for black/blue copper marans chicks and we want to work on our sizzle project. Those eggs take 21 days to hatch so by May we should have chicks ready for homes and know what hens we are keeping. With three roosters in the yard, we have more than enough of those! We get fabulous eggs and can hardly eat them all so it might be time to put my candling license to use and sell some of them!

  Why chickens and rabbits?

Great Compost for the garden! Both types of animals provide different nutrients to the soil that different kinds of plants need! It is great to have both! Cucumbers want bunny poop and tomatoes want chicken poop!

    We are moving the raised square foot garden beds!

The chickens free ranging can really destroy a garden now that they have gotten the hang of it. For this reason we are moving the garden beds and putting a fence around them as well. Hopefully the fence and clipping the chickens wings will give the garden a better chance! We are going to make the garden three times as large as last year and hopefully put the experience we had last year to good use! I hope to get photos up of the new garden area in the next few weeks!