The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: Connor on January 15, 2014, 06:59:47 pm
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I am currently very busy atm selling last years stock and the odd bits and pieces. I now got myself a new quad of buff Orpington bantams so last week i got them tagged and wormed and mite sprayed. I am also busy getting fertile eggs ready for the next hatch and i have been using a new system of cleaning the chickens out! Its called the one weeker!!! lol I used to clean the house out everyday but now i am just cleaning once a week then cleaning the out at the weekend and re bedding with a layer of sawdust them i put straw in the main parts of the house for them to play about in!!
What is everyone else doing with their chickens and is there anything exciting happening???
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I need to clean out the chicken shed and duck house but to be honest can't face wading through the mud to do it, need to wait till drier as otherwise the garden will have big tractor tyre marks going across it! Apart from that it's pretty quiet.
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Just layered the surrounding area of the coops with wood chips last weekend as the hens were getting clogged up badly with mud. the longest residents are sensible and stay undercover in the rain so their area wasn't bad at all but the rescues are a bit dozy when it comes to staying clean, digging about the mud during heavy downpours, saving poops until night and trampling thick mud into the nest ::) made a good few metres of their run floor thick wood chips. Seems to have helped, big improvement this week despite the rain :relief:
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the quagmire that is my chook pen is beyond salvation, waiting as long as possible to move them onto the other pen as its not much better currently...
i have the baldest chicken i have ever had at a moult, feel kind of sorry for her...
still waiting for my 4 new babies (born july) to start laying...
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I am resting the big grass pen (we still have grass growing but probably not for much longer) as this will be a pen either for breeders or layers, so everyone is out in the paddock atm (which is too wet for the horses!). everyone is looking well, most are now laying and am excited about the new hens I have for breeding this year-plus my first attempt with the rumpless ;D
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Lovely surprise today, one of my very young game bantams that I thought had been taken by fox, appeared with 10 little 'uns in tow :excited: didnt even know she had started laying yet!!
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Wow! I wonder where she'd been sitting - poor thing has got through some awful weather in the last three weeks!
I used to clean the house out everyday but now i am just cleaning once a week then cleaning the out at the weekend and re bedding with a layer of sawdust them i put straw in the main parts of the house for them to play about in!!
Why did you used to clean them out daily? That's crazy! It must take so much time! I reckon most of my chickens get cleaned out every two to three weeks. They are understocked in their houses so that helps - the biggest house has eight in at the moment and is designed for up to twenty - but even the ducks don't often get done every week (although I do turn their bedding over for them so it freshens up).
As for everything else, I've got two new goose sheds arriving on Friday and then I'll be sorting them all into their breeding pens as well as clearing some males. No plans on breeding yet but there are enough little interchanges for me to think I need to start splitting up the males. I'll see how the weather goes in Feb but no plans on hatching anything until mid-March.
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We clean ours out daily -just poo picking from the bedding. Keeps them less smelly, no flies, but the important thing is problems can be spotted early if you know who perched where overnight. Not that easy mind as you need to recognise the individuals in low light. But it has helped us frequently -with sour crop particularly.
We're buying posts now to subdivide the new enclosure properly. The tripod posts we have holding the mesh at the moment take up a lot of space.
We have a sick Blue Laced Wyandotte cock at the moment. Some internal problem which Baytril has not resolved. Think he has a tumour in his lower neck obstructing his airway and throat, but that's just a guess. Fortunately it is a breed that we can get here.
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I clean out twice weekly in the winter when they are inside more-weekly in the summer although I do skip out during the week as well.
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ALL IN CONDITION keeping them there have 25 out on a test hatch all fine .The wood burner has giving them a good start . We are half way through the winter so touch wood all will be fine .
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I Poo pick twice daily with the messy rescues but only in a morning for the others. Only do a full clean when the litter starts looking grubby or starts to get a smell to it . Sometimes it can be 2-3 weeks , sometimes longer.
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I never clean out more than once a week and mostly longer that that except when they are in breeding pens then it is done more often to help keep the eggs as clean as possible. I have my first couple of breeding pens up and running with the first weeks eggs in the incubator. Today I penned up some of my cockerals just to give my hens a rest from the constant attention. Mud is bad going to spend time putting brick paths in this year. Setting out a penning shed as I plan to start showing this year at a few smaller show to gain a bit of experience. Big year ahead poultry wise for me.