We carted them off and then came back home to clean out the big coop. We shoveled out the old litter, swept, and then put in the new litter. We tried to corral the new chickens into the big coop from their smaller coop, but they wouldn't go. So Stephen and Nathan had to catch all those chickens as well and put them in their new home. They seemed to like it after a while, but they wouldn't go outside yet.
Here's the nice coop with fresh litter. The white birds are Delawares, the brown birds are the Araucanas, the black birds are the Black Astrolorps, and the speckled ones are the Silver Tipped Wyandottes.
Then we cleaned out the small coop where the newer birds used to live. We were a tired bunch of chicken farmers at the end of the day.
6 comments:
It's just like you told us, if you name them you'll have to keep them! :-)
I'm glad you found someone to butcher them. I know I wouldn't like that part. Or the catching them. Or the cleaning out the coop. :-)
I don't like the catching either. Stephen thought that was the best part of the day. Aaron liked the coop once it was swept clean.
Cleaning out the coop wasn't so bad since the weather was nice and it didn't smell too bad. Nothing like those big fat white birds last year. That was truly disgusting.
What do you do with all those eggs? And what color are the eggs? I'm loving brown eggs these days. They are just so pretty.
We eat a lot of them and I bake a lot so that takes up a good deal of the eggs. The boys sell the rest to friends in town.
Most of these new birds will lay brown eggs. The Araucanas will lay light green eggs. We won't start getting the new eggs until the end of the month and then it will start slow. So much to the boys' horror, we are buying store eggs until these new layers kick in.
That's funny. When you said you had 29 chickens that were only laying 2-5 eggs, for some reason I read that as "each." And I thought, that technoprairie, she has high standards, I tell you.
Just because you are uber-productive doesn't mean the chickens will be.
So then did you keep the butchered chickens, or did you sell them?
If each chicken were laying 2-5 eggs each day, they might actually pay for their own keep!
We kept some of the butchered chickens and have given some away to friends. They will make good chicken soup but we can't eat 27 birds worth of soup this winter.
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