chicken scratch

I collected 18 eggs today, 2 from the 3 year old hens and 16 from the 8 month old chickens. This is the most eggs the pullets have offered us in one day. I just purchased a bag of layer ration and it cost just over $14.50. That 50lb bag will last me 6 days. Now for a word problem (a flash back to grade school).

Vince has 25 hens that lay 18 eggs a day. If Vince buys a 50 pound sack of feed for $14.50 and his chickens consume it in 6 days, how much money in feed does it cost to get 1 egg.

18 eggs x 6 days = 108 eggs in 6 days

$14.50 every 6 days / 108 eggs every 6 days = $0.13 each egg

It costs Vince $0.13 (I can't find the symbol for cents) in feed to get one egg.

(I had to write the answer in a complete sentence to get full credit.)

Every evening after work I visit the chickens to put away feeders that attract mice if left out and collect the eggs. I usually walk into the run in order to swish the water around and dump out any contamination. The waterer is empty at least one evening each week and I take it up to the faucet to refill the 5 gallons and lug it back down to the run. If I neglect this task in the evening I have to wake up a little earlier the next morning. Around 7:00 A.M. I feed the chickens that I have separated into two flocks, 2 scoops of feed to the smaller flock of older hens and 4 scoops to the younger hens. Each flock has a rooster, more about that later.

By the time these chickens have reached 22 weeks they are starting to lay and it cost about $15.00 each in feed to get them to that age.

I have kept the older flock through their 2nd full year to see how they do throughout the 3rd summer; hopefully they will lay enough to earn their keep. Two eggs a day is what the 9 hens averaged all winter and through the molt. It hardly seems worth all of the feed but I kept a Rhode Island Red rooster to fertilize the hen's eggs. I am going to try to raise some chicks this spring. Mail ordered chicks are only $3 a piece and I will get mostly hens when I purchase chicks, but breeding my own has an appeal that might be worth the extra expense. Then again, this can be how a farm doesn't pencil out and an enterprise fails.

I need to raise my own feed to reduce my costs. I am going to plant a little field corn and wheat or oats. I need to find out more about harvesting cereal grains. The hens eat less feed when they are free to roam, but I can only do that on weekends when I am at home; we lost 7 hens to the coyotes before I built the runs.

When something does not cost a whole lot of money its small cost is referred to as chicken scratch. Boy is that an old saying.

Sun!

There's something about the sunshine in the Pacific Northwest that makes people go crazy, especially in the winter. The sidewalks and parks of downtown Seattle were packed with walkers, sightseers, joggers, strollers, dogs, and window shoppers; all squinting through scratched sunglasses that have been in storage for a year, like moles yanked up into daylight. We even had a visit from my aunt from Wisconsin and we were willing to walk all the way down to the bottom of the property through the mucky, snow-and- flood-flattened grass. Out here on the hillside, even the mountains peeked out from behind clouds and showed their snowy peaks and flood waters seemed to sparkle a bit. The sun prompted cleaning up of the hoop houses and moving the compost, mainly, I think, just for the thrill of being outside and on a dry tractor. Although it is still cold, it seems easier to don the jacket and boots for a walk outside, even if it is to meander through the field to survey flood damage and just "check on things" or even to collect the mail. The chickens were just as excited to get out of the run and scratch in real dirt and grass. Added to our sun-induced euphoria was a great Steelers win to send them to the Superbowl. Football seems to have been invented for slow winters to give us something to cheer about and a reason to be excited. Especially when your team is winning.

Planning for Spring

This scene is one that filled the living room this weekend: Vince, spread out surrounded by catalogs, seed packets, the calendar from last year, in which all planting times and results were painstakingly recorded, and a new calendar for this year. As a thick, claustrophobic fog blankets the valley, mud clings to our boots and the cold seeps into the house, we look forward to spring with every sun break. As soon as those long anticipated seed catalogs started arriving in the mail, they became the chosen reading material for the bathroom, morning coffee break and bedtime reading. Now the planning and ordering has begun. Knowing spring is still a long way off, next month we will start some seeds in our friend's greenhouse so we can plant the starts when the ground is ready. This will be our second spring on this land and we now have the benefit of knowing what worked and what didn't, as well as what we might want to try this year. Celery is the new challenge; boasted to be one of the most difficult crops to raise. Undaunted by the warnings, Vince added it to the list of things to order. I'm sure we'll stay posted with the results.

more flood photos

The floods rose higher on January 9th. The road just beyond our house was closed for a number of days as the river took it over in a rushing torrent. The shipping container in the picture is in the field where our raspberries are just down the road from our house. It gives a good idea of how high the water was in the valley.
This picture is of the bottom of our property, looking out from the back deck. Along with all of the water came a huge population of ducks dotting the huge "lake" and the shots of hunters filled the air. The water has receded from our land, but still fills the valley.

Pineapple Express

Some warm weather and an abundance of rain has flooded all of the lowlands in Western Washington. For most of the day no one in the greater Seattle area could leave the state by vehicle without going through Canada. The East to West highways were closed by avalanches and the North to South roads were closed do to flooding. All of that high-mileage food was at a halt in the back of many tractor trailers.
Our property seems to be right at the edge of this potentially record setting flood. The picture above is from the back of the house looking Northeast at our neighbors fields. This graph is from the National Weather Service. It is a reading from around 7:00PM on Thursday. The green line is the forecast. The river (usually 1.5 miles away) in Snohomish is suppose to crest around 11:00PM.

Shed Repair

We replaced the gutters on the house when we painted this summer and I mounted the old gutters on the shed. Besides keeping the shed from becoming a muddy mess, it allows me to catch rainwater to use for irrigation. The shed roof handled the snow load just fine but the metal roof and steep pitch allowed the snow to slide off of the roof and catch the gutters on its way down. I need to repair the gutters and add more hangers for the next snow event. The last time this area had snow like this was 40 or 50 years ago. I doubt the shed will be standing for 40 years but maybe we are in a part of a climate cycle that will bring weather like this more often to Western Washington for the next few years.

Where have we been?

The blog fell by the wayside in December, but we're back now! In the middle of the snow storms, we got out of here and flew to Pittsburgh to spend Christmas with Vince's family. We had a wonderful time catching up with family and friends and rooting on the Steelers.
We enjoyed only a dusting of snow, a couple 4 degree days and then some upper 60's after Christmas. We missed the deep freeze and subsequent dumping of snow in Washington. Luckily, we have great neighbors who took care of the chickens, kittens, and the house. They had to battle frozen water when the power went out and stinky chicken coops because the hens wouldn't venture farther than the doorway. We had heating pads from the drug store under the waterers and they were working to keep water from freezing, but when the power went out and was restored hours later, the pads didn't turn back on. With the frigid weather, the pipes broke under the house, luckily our neighbors caught the leak and turned off the water supply to the house (I don't suppose it was easy finding the shutoff at the below ground meter under 2 feet of snow). So, we returned home to broken pipes but no damage to the house, the shed gutters torn off, and a soupy mess from potatoes that froze and then thawed and rotted, leaving a black gunk all over the shed floor. The second hoop house's plastic also finally caved, but the peppers were long frozen anyway.

After cleaning up around here, we could finally celebrate Christmas with Anna's family while Laura was still here from Montana. Now we settle back into a routine with school starting again and most of the snow only remaining in the piles left from plows. Seed catalogs are the exciting evening reading material and thoughts of spring dance in our heads. We leave with one last Christmas image: our live tree plucked from the ground in Anna's parent's woods. Now comes the challenge of replanting it. Maybe next year it will have a little more substance to it!