New Homesteading Projects
It's been a while since I've hatched out any chicks here. I was breeding some of my own chickens last fall, and decided to bring in some chicks from an external source to raise with them. This was a bad idea, as some of my own chicks started to get sick after I brought the new chicks home.
I believe what I may have brought home from this retailer is called Acute Marek's disease. This is a very virulent disease which causes paralysis and a loss of up to 80% of your flock.
Vaccination is the only way to prevent this disease. Since I only raise my birds organically and don't use vaccinations or medications, this is out of the question.
Later I also found out that some of the young "female" chicks I purchased turned out to be roosters. That is the last time I will be purchasing chicks from any retailer. It is very hard to get rid of some illnesses and some you just can't beat. It takes up to 5 months for the disease to die off, and you must clean and wipe every surface that the chicken dander may have touched.
So I'm starting another batch of my own chicken eggs again. We have lost a few to coyotes recently, which is really frustrating. Everything around here likes to eat chicken. Raccoon, possum, hawks, coyotes, and even the neighbors dog have been a nuisance here. I've been sitting on my back porch in the mornings and evening hoping to get a shot at it.
Our spring garden beds have been overgrown by weeds and not really producing much anymore. We cut down the grass, harvested the hay, and tilled the beds to prepare them for some fall crops. I cast out some peas, oats, sunflower, and field corn seed onto the beds which should provide some excellent food for my chickens going into winter.
After you've cast the seed onto the freshly tilled ground, I like to go over it one more time with the tiller to get it mixed into the soil. If you leave it laying on the surface, germination will be poor and critters will come along and eat your seed.
Once tilled, you can water the seed in to start the germination process. May sure that you water thoroughly to get the soil moist down to a few inches. If you have a sprinkler this is a great way to water seed in. If you're planting a much larger area, wait until just before a forecasted rain.
That's it for this little homesteading update. I'll be candling the eggs in 7 days, and in 21 days they should be hatching out. Hang around for some cute baby chicks here in a few weeks!
It is always a worry bringing in stock from unknown sources. But you need to do it every so often to introduce new blood into the flock.
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Your garden fields are looking good in this picture!
I sure wish I had a little more property to have ones like this.
Just in case you haven't hatched chicks from eggs:
Be sure to carefully monitoring the humidity in the incubator or else the shell of the egg will get too hard for the chick to hatch through.
This means a big spike in humidity when it is time to take them off of the automatic turner.
I did something stupid with my very first batch and left them on the turner at the final stage instead of taking out the turner and setting them on the steel grate. (This makes it so that the hatching chick can rock the egg around to fight out.)
The absolute best way I found to hatch eggs was with a broody hen: much higher percentage of successful hatching, for me at least.
I found that if I had a broody hen I would just let her keep some eggs if she wanted to sit.
If I didn't want her to have actual eggs because i didnt want a batch of chicks, then I would have a supply of ceramic eggs on standby that she could sit on.
Just make sure that you mark your fertilized eggs that have been candled and selected for hatching with crayons, because that hen will probably try to gather other hen's eggs and roll them underneath her which would be a waste of those eggs because she stops sitting on the eggs as soon as the initial round of chicks hatches, which means an egg introduced a week later would be abandoned a week before it was ready to hatch.
I've successfully hatched several batches with this incubator including one 100% hatch rate.
That's awesome you clearly have it dialed in a lot better than I ever did: think 70% was the best I ever did.
You can see some of my previous hatches if you go back a ways on my blog.