Marmalade, our lone Silkie girl, laid her very first egg at about 25 weeks of age. A perfectly formed tiny 30 g pearly-cream coloured egg. She had been squatting over the last week but honestly though I wasn't sure at first if she was even squatting given her fluffiness and the fact that her breed is already low to the ground! I might have underestimated Marmalade's intelligence as she laid her egg in the Little Coop's nest box without any 'training'- I didn't show her the nest box or even place the plastic egg as I usually do.
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After staring at the slightly angled central yellow post from my kitchen window, I had a moment of higher brain function! I realised that I really did not need a central post to hold up the chicken wire. Chicken wire really isn't very heavy. So I cut away the cable ties and re-homed the site post. By repositioning the post, I actually made the end post and stake more secure and now it no longer looks like a leaning tower. And now I have an unobstructed view of the chickens and coop.
Our gorgeous black silkie Midnight has died. She had been losing weight over the last few weeks but had no other symptoms. She had been eating really well and only more recently seemed to have gone off her food. I had separated her from the flock and kept her nice and warm near the heater in her own cage with feed and water. Had been hand feeding her as much as possible but realized in the last 2 weeks that it was not making any difference. I had given her probiotics, lots of honey and scrambled eggs. Even wormed her as well. But she just kept losing weight. She died overnight and we said our good byes to her today. It is always sad time when we lose a chicken and this is the second Silkie we have lost for mysterious reasons. :-( Yay! At about 20 weeks of age, Biscuit is the first of our two Pekins to lay her egg. I found it in the dirt patch under their coop! I knew she had been doing the SQUAT but had been too sick (or looking after sick kids) to train her to use the nest box in the Cottage coop (she sleeps in the Little Coop). Two days after finding the egg in the dirt I found Biscuit squawking and appearing to be searching for something/somewhere so I picked her up and put in into the nest box. She stayed put and layed in there so hopefully she will start catching on.
Her eggs (from the three I have collected thus far) have been about 33 g in size, a light cream tinged with brown coloured egg. I think not a bad size for a tiny chicken. This also means that I can move my Pekins into the Cottage Coop as they can all eat Layer feed. Tilly, the other pekin is also the same age so its okay to move her to the Layer feed as well. Well Nina and Ella have decided that they are bored of their much smaller patch of grass since the fence went up. They have now started to dig out the soil in my raised veg beds and potted plants. This afternoon I found my poor potted apple tree's roots under attack by Nina. Ella was busy unearthing something in the vege bed. Looks like I created a problem for myself by sectioning them off. I now think I will have to redo the fence line to exclude the beds and pots or somehow build a greenhouse type structure over them to keep the chickens out. Yikes! more work! :)
I finally decided on a very simple fence 'system'- something that I could uproot, roll up and tuck away if I should ever need to. I found the perfect 1500mm Site Posts in a yellow colour that matched my coop door at Bunnings. In addition to these posts, all I needed was a hammer, a small wood block, black cable ties, tin snips (to cut wire) and chicken wire. I had thought about using the plastic 'fencing' roll but decided against it because of its inorganic look. Although if you want something that is easy and won't require wire cutters or do not want to spend some times twisting wire ends then the plastic stuff is worth a go.
Anyway, I decided to space my posts depending on the 'view' from the deck. I did not want the coop front to be obstructed so just used that to demarcate where the posts would go. Then it was relatively simple albeit a little labor intensive to hammer the posts into the soil. I used a small off cut wood block to cushion the blows otherwise the lovely yellow paint on the posts could be chipped off. I also made sure that the posts were level periodically and took a few steps back to make sure it was in the right spot. Once the posts were all in, I unrolled and cable tied the chicken wire making sure the wire was level etc. It would have been easier with two people but I managed on my own but it took longer as the chicken wire kept curling back! I cabled tied one post at a time in as many places as possible. Where I intend to place a gate, I also hammered in some wooden tomato stakes so that I could attach metal hinges to later. I am not sure if they will stay in place with the weight of the gate but will sort it out later. With the chicken wire; once I cut and end, I twisted the loose ends and then folded them back on itself so that there were no sharp points on which children, chickens or myself could get hurt on. Then I cable tied these loose ends between the stake and post to make it all neat. One mistake- I should have painted the stakes but in my haste I decided not to...now I wish I had. So I think I will get a can of spray paint to do the job- messy but at least it might look better! So I have decided that I need to contain my chickens to one side of the grass! They are doing their business all over the deck and its become impossible to go out barefoot or let the almost 2 year out unsupervised. Lest she should pick up offending item and say "Look mamma" as if its some prized object !!
So a fence needs to be erected. Got the hubby to help me move the slide/climbing wall thing aka the pirate ship forward and now pondering on the materials I will use for said fence....sigh, sigh and more sighs... I'll be back in a few days to report on how I went with the fence. Hopefully chickens won't decide that they would rather fly over it! Or it'll be time to trim their flight feathers for the the first time ever. My friends, daughter and I put these together. Vanilla cupcakes with various combinations of Persian fairy floss, silver cachous and shaved white chocolate atop swirls of piped pink frosting.
I made this cake last year for my daughter's 4th birthday. She was very much in love with Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom. It took me about two and a half weeks to mould the characters (all that drying time!) and set up the decorations for the day too. Felt cutout flowers atop green card stems and grass. A string of colourful lanterns and a whole lot of BlueTac to stick it all to the wall and my indoor 'garden' was done.
(I had entered my cake into a Canberra cake decorating supply shop's competition...hence the Latorta token in the picture...) |
AuthorBased in Canberra, Australia, I am a mother of two gorgeous little girls. I would describe myself as a 'retired' molecular and cell biologist, now a full time mum, part-time student, lover of cute cakes, builder of one chicken coop and possibly also a crazy chicken lady in the making. Categories
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April 2016
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