Not much has gone on, really, up until now. This winter was a bucket full of "fail" what with the worst blizzard & highest total snowfall level since the 1960's. I was snowed in 3 times (would have been 4, but I escaped the last major storm when I visited family in Florida at the end of Feb). I got pretty down in the dumps around the end of January, too.
I've only lived here for 3 winters, but experiencing this kind of winter so soon after moving here is like someone moving to New Orleans the year before hurricane Katrina struck. Most middle-aged people haven't ever seen a bad storm, then all of a sudden....WHAM!! Maybe that's a bad comparison- seeing as how in our snow hell, nobody died, houses are still standing, and we didn't even have to loot local stores while wallowing around in fetid water....BUT you get the point. I may have entered SD in the middle of some 30-year cycle which will dump record setting snows on us for a few years. Then it'll taper off, and in 30 years I'll be one of those old, wrinkly people telling stories of 15-foot snowdrifts (no joke!) that we had back in the good old days, before South Dakotans were sissified by mild winters.
Here's Chloe atop one of the smaller drifts that piled up in the front yard by the shelterbelt. This drift was about a foot taller than me (I'm about 5'5)
Here's the back door; the entire backyard was covered in about 2-3 feet of snow from Christmas until mid-March, except for a little corridor that ran alongside the garage, which is generally where the dogs pottied since they didn't like sinking up to their genitals in the snow. I had a lot of poop scooping to do when it all finally melted.
So....ANYWAY....the topic of the day is my very first attempt at raising CHICKENS!!! And ducks, and later this spring, quail. There is a huge 2 acre pen behind my house, complete with brooding houses & growout pens, that used to be a pheasant breeding facility. There's sufficient room to raise poultry at a commercial level....so I've got more than I need for my hobby chickens, ducks & quail (next year may bring geese & turkeys!)
Brooding house. The whole thing isn't that much smaller than my OWN house, lol...
Right now I have a total of 23 chicks and 6 ducklings....I lost 2 chicks the other day. 15 are random pullets from Tractor Supply; all I was told is they are "assorted sex-links". I have mostly red ones, and 3 or 4 white ones. Sex link chickens are dual-purpose hybrids; gender can be determined at birth based on the color of the chick. The remaining 8 chickens are "Easter Eggers"....the ones that lay blue-greenish eggs! The store only had "straight run" EE's, which means I likely have some roosters; time will tell. As soon as the feed store gets the next shipment, I plan to buy 2 more EE's to replace the ones that died, and since they had Australorps and Orpingtons last time, I may buy a couple of each and bring the grand total to 30.
My ducks are harder to guess....I am thinking (hoping) 4 of them are Mallards or Rouens (a heavy domestic breed with Mallard colors). Two of them are adorable all-black ducks, even with black feet & bills, and I've been told they may be Cayugas, which grow up to have a lovely iridescent blackish-green plumage in the sunlight.
They will all be free-range, with nightly quarters in the secure grow out pen by the brooding house; if most of them survive I should have plenty of chicken & duck eggs to eat & share with neighbors. Plus extra roosters to, well....provide a nice dinner :) Pics!
I must say, even in the short time I've had these guys, I've learned more about chickens than I ever thought there was to know. More updates as time goes on!
Quail come in June; I'm ordering about 60 day-old chicks; those that make it will aid in dog training and provide us with a little more "egg variety"...I am eager to find out what quail eggs taste like. Maybe if I'm lucky I can incubate/hatch some too. The dogs I'll be training will be here next week sometime (two young Pointers). Also next week, we're tilling up a garden patch- I've already got some tomato plants sprouted which makes me feel quite accomplished, as I've never managed to grow much of anything except strawberries, in a pot, which miraculously haven't died yet. We'll see if I can grow anything in the garden or not!
No comments:
Post a Comment