Grannieannie’s Chookblog

Well, the fat little chicks are now 3 weeks old, well 23 days to be exact!  And they look HUGE!  I was a bit late in weighing them.  Should have done it Friday on their 3 week birthday!! lol .  They were over their ideal weights for the past 2 weeks, but today they are spot on! 

 The record sheet says they should be between 190 and 210 gms, and all the ones I weighed are exactly that.  The majority being dead on 200gms!  They have lovely white wing feathers and tail feathers now (unless someone pecks the tails off, which they are still doing a bit, but not as bad as before!!!)  and today I noticed that most of them have white downy bits on their heads too.  I hang their lettuces onto garden canes jammed from one side of the shed to the other, and although the canes are over 2ft from the ground, they are using them as perches, but once you get 10 200gm chicks on a cane, it bends so much they all fall off!!!!!  Everytime I open the shed door, the canes are on the floor!  I don’t want to hang too much from the ceiling in case it collapses!

In about 2 weeks time, they will outgrow their brooder sheds, so we will have to move them and now there are 297 instead of the 125 I was going to have, they will have to go into the big shed where I have my ex battery hens.  Therefore sadly, I am re-homing the ex batts.  I advertised on freecycle, hoping that I wouldn’t get someone who was going to try to eat them, as they haven’t any meat on them.  Luckily I have been contacted by some lovely ladies.  One came on Friday and collected 8 of them.  She also keeps ex battery hens plus 4 pure breeds, and the girls are settling down nicely, apart from one who was quite thin when we caught her, but Jax said she will be okay with a bit more TLC!

Then another lady is coming tomorrow for 20 or so.  She has a farmhouse where they do holidays for people with disabilities etc and keeps other ducks and rabbits.  So they will have loads of room to wander with her too!

 Then hubby has to extend the big house to accomodate all the chicks.  That’ll be interesting!  Well, I’d better go and tuck them up for the night.  Will add more news on Wednesday!

On Monday, I went out to the bigger of the brooder sheds, and when I opened the door, there was what looked like bits of red paper lying on the floor.  I was puzzled for a second,
then realised, it wasn’t paper, it was the bits of the infra red lightbulb I had in there!

What had happened, was when hubby re-built the shed for the chicks, to hold the lamp up safely, he put a bolt up through the roof and bolted down each side of the wood and new roof felt.  “Will that be okay?” I asked, “you’ve just made a hole in the new felt!”  “Oh that’ll be okay” he said,
I’ve made it nice and tight.  Well, it had been raining that morning, and you know what water’s like, gets anywhere.  It was only drips, but it had gone under the washer, through the roof, down the chain onto the lamp shade, and trickled onto the infra red which exploded!

Well, I was just going to put my leg over the 2ft hardboard circle that the chicks live inside, and there were 3 dead chicks right by my foot.  There must have been such a panic when the light exploded, that they got crushed!
I was soooo upset on Monday.  I couldn’t concentrate for 2 days!  I cleaned it all up, and unhooked the lamp from under the bolt and put it on a hook further away from the water, then I put a dull emitter bulb in the holder.  The dull
emitters are better, because they are more energy efficient and supposedly don’t explode if water is flicked onto them, but they don’t provide the infra red light, just heat, so that’s why we had the infra reds in there.

Hubby’s re-done the bolt and put mastic all over it now, but I’m still using the hook I put in.  It is only screwed into the wood, and doesn’t go out the other side!

I’m surprised I didn’t lose all of the chicks to heart attacks!

Washed all the chicks water bells this morning (why do they insist on pooing on top of them??)  but as our only outside tap is near the back door to the house, I do them in a bucket of vanodine solution.  Boy, was the water cold out there!!!!  Suppose I could boil a kettle of water first!!! lol

I haven’t got any lettuces in the garden at the moment, so I’d been buying them and hanging them up to try to stop the chicks getting bored, but it was costing a bit, so today I hung up a couple of CD’s.  Hubby said his friend Don used to do that with his turkey poults (mind you, Don did have about 25,000 turkeys!!!) to stop them getting bored and fighting. 

Must say, the chicks weren’t impressed, but hubby said I hung them too high, they need to be low enough that they can peck the CD’s which makes them flap around.  Perhaps it hypnotizes them (watching this CD will make you very friendly towards your fellow chicks!!!!!!) lol.

So tomorrow, I will re-hang the CD’s a bit lower down and see if that helps keep them occupied!

 Well, it doesn’t seem possible that the chicks are now 2 weeks old.  I weighed some of them yesterday.  According to my record sheets, they should weigh between 125 and 135 gms.  A few are a bit smaller, 120gms, but the majority weigh up to 150gms!  Greedy little things! But according to the hatchery, I still have to feed them ad lib.  They have eaten an amazing 80 kgs of chick crumbs in the past 2 weeks!

I’m still giving them their lettuces or sweetcorn each day.  It helps keep them occupied.  I have a garden cane stretched across the brooder shed at a height of 2ft with the lettuce hanging down from it. Well, they love jumping up and catching bits of lettuce, but several of them also fly up and perch on the cane!  Can you believe, so small still, but they can fly to a height of 2ft and more! 

They look funny trying to dust bathe in the shavings and straw!  I was watching one of them tonight, and she was nearly covered in shavings, so much so, that the other chicks were just walking over the top of her as if they couldn’t see her!

The brooder sheds look like something out of Great Expectations!  The chicks produce an amazing amount of white dust, and it sticks to the cobwebs on the walls and ceilings of the sheds!

At least, I can turn the heat down a touch now, goodness knows what the next electricity bill will be!!!!

Still, its 10.30pm now, so I’d better go and check on them all to make sure they are warm enough and still have plenty of food and water in their sheds.

Well, after all the panic of the past week, it has gone almost unnoticed that one of the new point of lay hens produced her first egg!

We thought they would never lay any!  If the information I was given was correct, they are now 23 weeks old and should have started before now!  Anyway, its now Saturday 22nd September, and we have had 4 eggs off of one of the new girls, and another came into lay today!  Just another 10 to go, and that’s another dozen eggs a day!

Also, I think the old ex battery girls were in a moult for the past few months, because at the moment I am getting between 6 and 11 eggs a day, as opposed to 4-6 for the past few months.

When we first got the ex batts, they were laying quite well, in fact 3 were laid in the car bringing them home!  And as it was more than we needed for ourselves, I decided to put a notice up out the front selling my eggs.  I waited for several weeks, giving eggs to friends and family, then I started to get customers!  I was only sellng them for £1.20p a dozen, because as they are from ex battery hens, the eggs don’t look as uniform as the supermarket eggs.  you get different colours, different sizes and shapes.  Wrinkled shells etc.  But my customers didn’t mind.  They felt they were helping to do their bit too, to help these poor old ex battery hens lead a normal life again!  I don’t make a profit on my eggs at the moment, as all monies that I get for the eggs, goes towards the hens feed and shavings etc, but its been nice that they had been self sufficient, all this time until they started to moult!

I had to cover my sign up a couple of months ago, because I just wasn’t getting enough eggs to sell to anyone!  One or two people still came to the door to ask if there were any eggs spare, and if there were, then I’d let them have them.  Hopefully I can soon uncover my sign again once the new girls start to lay in earnest!!

 Mind you, I’ll have to put the price up to £1.40 or something.  But most people around here charge £2.00 a dozen!  Feed prices have gone through the roof.  I am paying £1 more per bag than I was in April!  I had a customer today, who said everyone else around is putting up their prices because of the price of feed.  His son works for a pet food company as an accountant, and stuff like wheat has gone up from just over £40 a tonne, to about £120!!!  That’s bad, and I can only see it getting worse with all the rain and other bad weather we’ve had this year!

On Tuesday, I thought I had to do something quick, perhaps if I had another small 6 x 4 shed, I could separate the stressed chicks into 2 lots, but the only other shed was hubbys workshop, which is much larger, and full of his tools and workbenches etc.

So I thought perhaps if we got some more hardboard, we could make a big circle like I’d seen in the magazines and keep half of them in there, but hardboard isn’t very heavy so it would need weghing down or something.

You can tell I’m not very technically minded can’t you?? lol

So I was upstairs looking around, and I kept looking at the wardrobe in the spare bedroom!  I measured it, and it was 6ft tall, 4ft wide, and about 20 inches deep. Mmmmmm, interesting!  No, don’t be silly I kept telling myself, you can’t put chickens in a wardrobe!  But hubby had put them in the greenhouse, so was my idea any sillier?  And something HAD to be done!  Luckily hubby was out for a few hours, so I took the doors off, and the hardboard back. (Hardboard, another bonus!!!)  But I couldn’t get the centre panel off.  Its an old wardrobe and I couldn’t get the screws out!.  then I thought if I could only get it down the stairs before hubby gets home.  Well, although not really heavy, I couldn’t get it down the stairs on my own.  I managed to get it to the top, but didn’t want to risk it falling down the stairs with me possibly underneath it!  So I had to leave it there until hubby got home.  When he arrived, we took it out to his workshop, and laid it on its back.  He said to keep the centre panel in place, as it would help keep a bit of the emergency brooder dark for the chicks.  He cut 4 pieces of the hardboard and fitted them into the corners of the wardrobe so there would be no corners for the chicks to get crushed into, as when they go to sleep, they huddle together and we did lose a few to being crushed, even though there weren’t any corners in any of the brooders!

I then put one of the doors over the brooder at the back to act as a roof, and hubby fitted up another pygmy bulb and a dull emitter bulb for heat as we didn’t have any more infra red lamps.

In case the concrete floor was chilly, I put some ground cover membrane under the wardrobe and piled wood shavings in it, then left it to warm up a bit before putting the chicks in it.

At least with a larger area, and only 75 chicks, they’ve now got more room to run around and practise their flying!  I turned away to get them some chick crumbs, and when I looked round there was a chick sitting on the top of the wardrobe!  So I got some of my garden netting and covered the whole area to keep them in.  Its a very stiff netting, so they shouldn’t get caught up in it if they do fly upwards.  I weighed it down around the sides with some double ended hooks and pieces of wood going across the hooks as weights.

Wow, am I a genius or what?  I know, probably the ‘or what’!!!  But its working, they are happy, they love their corn on the cobs and lettuces strung up.  We still get the odd injury, but I can’t think of what else it can be!

Well, the second week in the brooders started well.  The chicks in the converted greenhouse seemed happy, temperatures were okay, so I thought all would be well.

Then on Sunday, hubby called me to say that there was blood on some of the chicks in the greenhouse!  When we looked, there were quite a few with blood at the base of their tails, and as we looked, other chicks were chasing them around, pecking at their tails, and in some cases their wings!

Oh my god, hubby panicked! I panicked, then I went and got a large cardboard box, one of the ones the removal companies give you, put some wood shavings in it and went into the greenhouse and picked up all the ones that were injured.

I’d got some purple spray that had been recommended to me for one of the old girls who had her vent pecked.  So I sprayed all the injured bits of the chicks.  We took the box in to the dining room.  Funnily enough, it didn’t seem to bother the chicks.  We didn’t know why it had happened.  I checked the temperature in the greenhouse, it was a little high, so we opened the vent a bit more, they had plenty to eat and drink.  So I went in and read through my old Smallholder magazines, and looked feather pecking up on the internet.  There seems to be a myriad of reasons why it happens, but over heating and stress seem the most common.  We kept the greenhouse cooler through Sunday, but we were still getting more injured chicks, until we had about 40 in these big boxes in the dining room!  I put a post on my favourite forum (see sites I like!!) as I knew there are quite a few good chook keepers on there.  One of the members answered and said that trying to convert the greenhouse wasn’t a good idea, as with all the glass (even though hubby had covered some of it in black plastic!) it was nigh on impossible to regulate the temperature properly and we should get them out quick!  they are over heating and getting very stressed.  He also suggested we hang  a lettuce and/or corn on the cobs in the brooders to help keep the chicks occupied.

The only other place we had was my small garden shed, but it is only 6 x 4, so not really big enough for 150 chicks!  Anyway, I cleared it all out, washed it and disinfected it and we waited for awhile to let it dry, luckily it was a nice warm day so didn’t take long.  Hubby went and bought some more hardboard to cut the corners off the area and we put the infra red lamp in there.  I also got one of the boxes the chicks came home in, cut the side down a bit and filled it with sieved dry soil from my polytunnel.  I put that in the new shed, with the food and water, and they loved it!  How chicks that young instinctively know how to dust bathe is amazing!  They also loved the lettuces! Jumping up to reach bits.  It certainly kept them busy!

Monday arrived, and we had more casualties!!!  I think the small shed was just too small, so I spent all day trying to think of where else they could go!  We had taken my cold frame that hubby had made me into the garage for the injured chicks.  It was very warm in there with a pygmy lightbulb painted red, so they were out of the dining room, but during the course of monday, I still had loads of injuries.  I had to get them into somewhere bigger quick!

Strangely enough, the chicks in the original shed were fine, no cannibal tendencies at all, so I thought perhaps it was the stress of moving that caused the problem.

Well, the chicks are 1 week old today! And we transferred half of them to their new home in the converted greenhouse! I tried weighing them, as at one week old, they are supposed to be between 60 and 68 gms, but the ones I managed to weigh (fidgety little things what they are!) were between 65 and 86 gms!!!

This past week they have eaten between them nearly 40kgs of chick crumb! I called the hatchery to check that we are supposed to be feeding them ad lib, yes they said, give them as much as they want!!!!

When my friend John works out how I can put some pics on here, as I’m a bit thick where this sort of stuff is concerned! I’ll show you the photos I took. Their little wings are so much bigger now, and when we got back from the feed supplier with their latest bag of chick crumbs, (half a ton arriving next Tuesday!) one chick was sitting on top of the water bell which is over a foot high!!!!

We also bought 12 Bovans Goldline POL’s 3 weeks ago. They are a cross between a Rhode Island Red Cockerel and a Light Sussex Hen, so when I called the hatchery, I also mentioned the Amberlinks. What are they a cross of I asked? Oh they are the same, just the other way round. So the white Amberlinks are a cross of a Light Sussex Cockerel and a Rhode Island Red Hen.

They are all sex linked, so you can tell as soon as they hatch whether they are hens or cockerels, which is very clever, but must put the old chickens sexer out of business!!!!

Still, I’m just going out to the garden to make sure they are all okay, especially the ones in the greenhouse, as its their first night in there.

Well, this is my first ever blog, so you will have to bear with me until I know what I’m doing! I should have started this blog last week, so I’d better begin by bringing you all up to date!

How It All Started

Last year hubby and I decided we wanted to keep chickens again, after a couple of years of buying supermarket eggs. Believe me, once you have eaten fresh eggs produced by your own chooks, you will never want to eat supermarket eggs again, even the free range and so called organic ones!

So we heard about the Battery Hen Welfare Trust and contacted their local area co-ordinator.
We started with 50 chickens last September. We lost some over the next 6 months, so bought another 20 at Easter. We’d had ex free range chickens before, but never ex battery. The poor things, some of them were nearly bald, some could hardly walk, and it wasn’t until we got them home and put them into their new house that we realised they had never seen grass or the sky before. It was 2 days before they would come out of the house, and when they did, they were either walking around looking up at the sky, or lifting their feet up and looking down as they had never seen grass before either!!

As I said, some of them didn’t last very long, as they are so stressed when they are in the battery cages, 4 or 5 to one cage, fighting for space, pecking each other. It was wonderful to see them all acting like real chickens again.

It was good at first as we were getting 4 dozen eggs a day from them, and what we couldn’t eat were given to friends and family, and then workmates started to buy them. So the money from the egg sales bought their food, and we got free eggs, so they at least were self supporting!

Then word got aound and people in the village started to pop round and buy some. By this time, they had started to moult and some are now nearly 3 years old. Battery chickens aren’t bred to have long lives, so now we are only getting 4-8 eggs a day.

The New Girls!

We decided to add some younger chickens to our flock, so we bought 12 point of lay chooks from a local lady rearer, 6 are brown Bovans Goldlines and 6 are white, they are a fairly new hybrid breed called Amberlinks.

They are white chickens, but lay brown eggs, which is a bit unusual. They were supposed to be 19 weeks old, but we think they are younger as over 3 weeks later, still no eggs! And still the customers wait!!

We loved the Amberlinks, they are a pretty chicken, as well as being good egg layers (at least they will when they start laying!) We are not used to seeing white hybrids, they are more usually brown.

With growing your own veg becoming more and more popular again, and a lot more people taking on allotments, especially younger people, quite a few people locally to us have been asking us where they can get chickens that look good as well as laying lots of eggs.

The ideal bird for this purpose we have found is the hybrid. They are bred specially for egg laying, its what you find in the commercial flocks, but just the brown chicken gets a bit boring, people want something a bit different, which is what we found in the Amberlinks, and this kindled an interest for us again. Also, buying pure breed chickens can be a very expensive business, so hybrids are the ideal ’starter’ chicken for people who may never have kept chickens before.

The Arrival of the 300!

I contacted the hatchery on Friday 7th September 2007 to order our first 125 day old chicks.

Hubby had converted my garden shed into a brooder house. We used our last little bit of savings to buy 2 brooder lamps, 4 bulbs, 4 chick trough feeders and 4 chick drinkers. The lady at the hatchery said that they would put us on the ’surplus list’ as they usually deal in thousands of chicks, not 125! So we would have to wait until one day the following week until all the orders had gone out to see what was left and if there was enough, we could have our 125 baby chicks. I thought we could have 50 white, 50 brown and 25 black chicks to give people a choice, but this hatchery don’t any any of the black chickens, so it would be half of each colour. These we would rear until point of lay at 18 weeks then sold to likeminded people.

We would keep some ourselves, to make up our new laying flock.

There seems to be a shortage of people willing to supply small number of chickens for backyard flocks in the Lincolnshire area, at least they are hard to find!

You know what they say about the best laid plans……… Lunchtime, had a call from the hatchery to say that they had been let down by a buyer from Scotland who had ordered 500, and we could have our chicks today, and what wasn’t sold would be gassed as they can’t keep them over the weekend.

First of all they tried to get us to take all 500, but as the shed isn’t big enough, we went down and collected 300 all white ones!! Of course, they are yellow at the moment, and so tiny, it’s unbelievable. They come 100 at a time packed into a box about 24 inches square. The noise in the car on the way home was quite deafening!

It was a bit of a rush to get the finishing touches done to the shed, but it was nice and warm with a spare quilt cover over the shavings as I’d read that at first the chicks eat everything they see, so put a clean sheet or something down for a few days until they get used to what their feed looks like! That didn’t take them long, they were soon running around eating everything! We bought some anti-perch chick feeders, but within hours they were ‘perching’ on top of the little feeders, and boy, do they eat!! They are very nervous at first, but hopefully they will soon get used to us.

The dog was fascinated with all the noise and movement, probably hoping the chicks are lunch!!!

I’ve never kept chicks from day old before, so was worried about them being too hot or too cold, so I kept going out to see to them every hour, but last looked at them at 10.30pm, and the temperature was up to 32C so left them in peace.

Up Bright and Early

It’s now Saturday and the chicks are a whole day old! Most look pretty good, one or 2 look a bit mopey, but I don’t know if its because there is something wrong, or they are just tired from the exertions of their first day out of the shell. Shall keep my eyes on them just in case!

Boy, can they eat! we started off with the 4 small feed troughs, but took 2 out and replaced them with 2 shallow trays I had. They are eating like there’s no tomorrow, and also using the trays as dust baths and for scratching around in. They are remarkable little things. Just one day out of the egg, and already doing what the big chickens do!

The shed temperature is fine, but they seem to like huddling together round the edge, which usually means they are too hot, so I spent most of today raising and lowering the heat lamp trying to get it just right. It gets very hot when the sun shines in, so I may have to shade the window a bit. And the shed really isn’t big enough for 300. we thought we were only going to have 125 in there! So hubby decided to convert one of my greenhouses into another brooder house so we can have half in each. He bought some hardboard and made a big circle 2ft high like he did in the shed. Then covered the south facing glass with black plastic to shield it from the sun (not sure if black is ideal, as it draws the heat). We washed and disinfected it all, but haven’t put the chicks in there yet, waiting for it all to dry out.

Sad Sunday

When we went out to the chicks on Sunday morning, hubby said there are 2 dead ones in there. so I picked one up, that had been trampled on, but when I picked the other one up, she was still alive, but very poorly looking. So I took her in the house, and made her a little brooder box of her own.

I cut the lid of a photocopy paper box in half, and fitted the lampholder from hubby’s bedside light into one half of it, and glass painted a small pygmy bulb red with glass paint. folded up a spare pillowcase and put the chick which I’d called mighty mouse for some stupid reason, in the box, I kept the temperature constant with the light on and putting the other half of the box lid on and off, and I’d read on the internet that you can feed small chicks with some warm water with a little molasses dissolved in it. I didn’t have any molasses, so I dissolved a little dark brown sugar in some warm water and fed it to the chick with a clean dropper that I had. I kept this up all day, in between looking after the other chicks and chickens we have.

Sadly, all my efforts were wasted as she died about 7.30 that night. I know its silly, but I was really upset as I really wanted her to live. Hubby said the reason the hatchery give you 2% extra is because they expect some to die, but it doesn’t make you feel any better does it?

Wings and Tails!

By Monday, they had started to grow their first little white wing feathers and tiny white tails started to appear! It may sound corny, but it was amazing to see my big burly hubby standing in the doorway of the shed enthralled with 300 tiny white and yellow chicks racing around. If they want to get to the other end of the shed, it doesn’t matter that there are another 299 chicks in the way, they just wave their wings and race over the top of them!

Last Friday, each chick weighed in at 40gms, by Monday, the ones that I weighed were between 48 and 55 gms, then I weighed a few again on Wedneday and most were over 70gms! They are supposed to weigh between 60 and 68 gms by the time they are a week old.