Many new and experienced chicken owners will at some point find themselves asking the question… Do I have a hen or a rooster? Unfortunately it can be hard to tell for a long time with most chicks. Remember back when I expressed my own concerns about Joy possibly being a boy? Sadly, it turns out that I was correct – she was, in fact, a he. Our backyard chick had grown up to be an urban rooster! Our Experience It…
If you’re an urban homesteader like me, you don’t have acres of land for raising animals and planting gardens. You need a way to grow a lot of food in just a small amount of space! I have personally had great success using a method called Square Foot Gardening. What It Is Square Foot Gardening was started back in the ’80s by a man named Mel Bartholomew. You can find out more about the history and method here, but basically it is just…
Confession: I am not a gardener. Oh I want to be! I want to be the person who knows all the names of the flowers at the nursery… not the person that a kind older lady takes pity on, telling my kids what each one is called because clearly I’m clueless. I want to sink my fingers into a pot of rich black soil and not think about how badly I want to wash my hands. I want to not be afraid of…
Chickens are generally very resilient when it comes to weather. They can handle low temperatures well and don’t seem to mind the rain, wind, or even snow. However, heat is a different story. Chickens do not have sweat glands, which means they are not able to self-cool very well. So we need to be extra careful with our feathered friends when temperatures rise! Here are some tips for helping your chickens beat the heat. It’s June here in Nebraska, which means temperatures up…
Your chicks are no longer chicks anymore. They are eating a ton, pooping a ton, staying out past curfew, and getting themselves into riskier situations. If you have a rooster, he will be strutting his stuff soon. And your girls are getting hormonal, preparing to lay their first eggs. It’s time to for them to move out from under your wing, but to where you can still keep a careful eye on them. That’s right… they’re big chick teenagers!! The truth is, chicken adolescence is…
Today I feel like giving up on gardening. My hose is leaking at both the beginning and end of the line, one of my raspberry bushes grew a strawberry instead, and there was a bee on my neck. But that’s not the worst of it! When I went out to water my two small square foot gardens today (more about that method here), I found that my broccoli and cabbage plants had basically been decimated by cabbage worms. Their leaves were more “hole” than “leaf”,…
Are you in a busy season of life? Summer, the holidays, homeschooling, life with little ones; though they are full of joy, these can all be busy, hard seasons. Perhaps you’re waiting on God… waiting for healing, answers to prayer, or for an easier season. Maybe, like me, you’re looking for peace in the pauses. Human BEings Our lives have been so busy lately. In April and May we kept very busy finishing up our homeschooling before the summer break,…
(Or should I say, chicken-richment? Get it?! Chick enrichment! … No, I’m not sitting here giggling at my own cleverness, why do you ask?) It has bothered me for a few days that maybe the chicks aren’t being entertained enough. As they get bigger their brooder gets smaller, and there just isn’t much to do during the many hours that I’m not down there with them. Chickens are very intelligent animals, and they need some activities and challenges. Enter: Operation Chick Enrichment!…
The chicks are now 4 1/2 weeks old, and have been home with us for 3 1/2 of those weeks. I can’t believe how much they’ve grown just in the past ten days! They are so much bigger and are doing so many more things now. I even made them a trampoline chicken tractor because they want to spend so much time outside! Getting Bigger To give you an idea of how much they’ve grown, this photo was taken 9 days ago, when the chicks were…
We have had our chicks for 11 days now, and they have been growing so quickly, it’s impossible to keep up on here! They were about a week old when we brought them home, so we started out on their second week. I’ve kept a daily notebook on their changes in appearance and behavior in the first two weeks, and I think the best thing is to just share that with you here! Sweet baby Pepper sleeping in my hand Day…