Incubating: take two

First hatched chick

A chick unzipped from it's shell

Well, incubating: take one was quite the disappointment, so we tried again. This time we did things a little differently, with dry incubation. Instead of adding water every few days to keep the humidity around 50% we added none, left the vents open (in very humid NJ) and allowed the room to control it. The incubator is kept in the bathroom, at a steady temp inside and outside. Because of this, humidity stayed between 25-30%. 

This second batch from the incubator:

Charlie helping me take pictures

I had 30 eggs inside and 20 made it to lockdown. Pretty good statistics for the obvious infertile eggs and a sizable gap of no electric. Half hatched, 5 others pipped but didn't make it, and the rest didn't make it all the way. I'm pretty happy with these results, we've got another Cream legbar, 2 araucanas, and a few more polish on our chick porch. YUP I've re-named the porch seeing as we've got twenty little chickies running around out there!

To the left is my frizzle polish from the first batch.

To the right is my legbar pullet (90% sure it's a pullet at least!)

Mama and her chicks

So the humans had a 50% hatch rate... My broody hen outside on the other hand had a 100% hatch rate. I gave a first time mom, 8 eggs the same time we started up the incubator. She's a few years old, but hasn't been given the opportunity to hatch eggs, and she did a fantastic job. When I had checked her eggs before I thought only 6/8 were progressing properly, so imagine my surprise when I found seven chicks this morning! Clearly mama hens are better at hatching then we are, even with 3 thermometers and two hygrometers.

 More lessons learned, more chicks on the farm. Pretty soon we'll be selling a few of these polish chicks, if interested, stay tuned!

On another note, my beautiful lilies are blooming:

Egg-scellent News!

This past week Donnie & I found an awesome, new (crazy) chicken lady. Don't get me wrong, I accept the fact I am also a crazy chicken lady, just try owning a few chickens and not becoming one!. This one though, she had a whole assortment of fun new chicken breeds. Some rare, some that lay beautiful eggs, and some are just plain fun.

So we traveled up to civilization (Mt. Laurel, NJ) and met her. She showed me her fabulous breeding program and her unbelievable cabinet incubator.. which I've since added to my dream list. 

While there I got a nice little collection of fertile eggs to hatch. We also had to purchase a new incubator seeing as the old one was ancient and faulty. The new one circulates air for a nice even temp and has an egg turner. It also holds over 30 eggs Quite the chicken upgrade on the farm.

We're adding the following breeds to our chicken coop. Crested cream legbar (blue eggs), Araucana (blue eggs), Tolbunt Polish (fabulous bird), and some silkies, since we lost our last one over the winter. 

So egg clients, prepare yourselves for BEAUTIFUL light blue and green eggs this fall! We are ecstatic to see how well we hatch these babies in 21 days. Three weeks until new baby chick pictures!

Until then, check out Tolbunt Polish on the google. 

Eggs

Our chickens have slowly been starting back up with their laying. We've got a few mix girls that were born here this past spring. They are both black with hints of blue or green. The one, I swear shines a little purple! She's beautiful. Well they are Ameraucana x brown layers so they have olive eggs. Our first olive eggs! I got a picture of one compared to one of our regular tinted eggs. You can really tell the difference against this one.

Hopefully by spring we will be back in full egg laying mode, right now it takes a few days to lay a dozen, but soon we'll get a dozen or more a day! It's about time, I've been threatening to turn them into stew for months, unfortunately they know I'm all talk..
I got a few pictures of our lovely olive egg layers.. figured I'd make them bigger so you could see the color a little more.

 This little girl is our AmeraucanaX Cuckoo Maran mix. She has some purple, blue, and green in her feathers. It's easier to see in the sun, but she just refused to pose properly for me in the sun..
To the left was her giving me angry looks for chasing her around while great snacks were on the ground. I brought out pancake, banana bread, veggie sticks, and mushrooms. She was not happy I kept disturbing her.

Obviously, since i was trying to take pictures, T-rex had to check me out and make sure I wasn't bothering his hens too much. He cracks me up, but is an excellent rooster. 

Since I had previously written some about our wry neck silkie hen, Maisy, I figured I would show a picture of exactly what i meant by "star gazing" Here she is checking me out when I surprised them. She doesn't do too well with surprises, I should have warned them I was coming. She's really silly and completely independent. Just every once in a while when she gets nervous her neck goes back like this.

Sheep and Chickens

We figured it was about time to give you an update about our lambs. Our handsome ram went in with his girls in November, which means we are expecting some new lambs around March 28th!

Yes that's right, in just a few more weeks we will have more of this :

This year Olivia, Mellie, Nina, and Rain have been with Arthur. So we are expecting at least four little ones. If you are interested in buying a sheep or two to start your own flock, feel free to contact us here or email with any questions. 

Another fun update is our lovely chickens have just started to lay again! After a few weeks of slowing down the laying, then absolutely NO eggs from molting, we have seen the light! They started laying one or two a day last week. Here is hoping it starts to increase. Honestly, thirty some chickens and we get one or two a day? I've informed them they will be stew soon if they don't step up their game... This weekend I brought one in to check his leg, he had a bit of a limp, but is overall perfectly healthy. We took a second to snap a picture before I let him back outside with some snacks. He is one of our newest chicks this fall. Out of our five new chicks, FOUR of them were roosters. How about those odds? It works out well though because T-rex loves the two older ones, he even taught them to crow. So hopefully we will be one happy flock with a few more roosters. 

And, last but not least, we've restarted the fodder for a healthy winter snack. The chickens and sheep absolutely love it! And, it's really nice to have something green and growing on these cold, short days.

Barley, Eggs, and Chick News

 A few very exciting things to tell. First, we are growing fodder! Last week we got the barley and trays, built the stand for the trays, and put holes in the bottom one of the buckets for draining. Monday morning, we started the growing process. It's simple and very exciting, well exciting for us..
We have two trays going now and a third one started.
This morning, when we went in to water the top layer, we saw some small sprouts starting!! Very good news for our first time doing this : )
Now I know it is hard to see, but I took a picture anyway and hope that you can see too. If not, we'll have more pictures coming this week as the growing continues. This picture is 60 hours into the start of the process.

We are growing this barley to have fresh, clean feed for our sheep and chickens year round.

Second fun news, our littlest Silkie has finally started laying! She was one of the adopted ones we got in the spring to make sure my little silkie, Nugget, wasn't lonely. Now they have moved in with the other teenage girls and everyone is very happy together. Here is her first egg! I put it next to the brown egg so you could see the difference in size, isn't it cute?

Last piece of news for today, our new little munchkins turned a week old on Monday! Just nineteen more weeks until they could possibly be laying. At least they are cute now. 
Here's a shot of one of the chicks taking a small sleep with me last night.
And, yes, she is still alive. They just sleep funny.

New Munchkins !

This morning I sent out this message, "a box full of happiness" with this picture:

We got 8 Welsummers and 8 Cuckoo Marans. We got this different breed for our flock to add some new colors to our eggs. These ladies will lay chocolate brown colored eggs! 

We love the new baby noises, and so did our silly pyr mix, Christian.. he was hoping to get a look at these little noise makers.

We've got them all set up in a crate with a heat lamp and lots of food and water. Over the next few weeks we'll handle them as much as we can so they learn to love and trust us. We'll have more new pictures to post soon! But, look at all those little ones!

Tips on Tuesday: Natural Egg Dying

Check out this fun info on naturally dying eggs: Natural Egg Dying

This week

These week at the farm stand, we have...

- our own fresh chicken eggs for $2/dozen
- white sweet corn for $4/dozen OR $0.35/ear
- tomatoes for $3/6 OR $0.50 each
- cantaloupes for $1.75
- a qt of peaches or nectarines for $2.75
- seedless watermelon for $4
- blueberries for $1.75 each
- large sweet onions for $0.50 each
- fresh basil right from our garden for $2 a bunch
- fresh mint from our garden for $2 a bunch
- yellow squash or green zucchini for $0.50 - $0.25 each (lg or sm)
- qt of red potatoes for $2.25
- cucumber for $0.50 - $0.25 each (lg or sm)
- eggplant for $0.75
- local honey of various flavors for $2 - $5 per jar

Our Farm Is Stand Open!

With everything in bloom now, "Wesh Farm's Farm Stand" is officially open for business!!

Right now we have our own fresh, brown eggs from our chickens, some flowers, herbs, asparagus and local honey in various forms, flavors & sizes. Since we're either working on stuff around the farm or at our actual jobs, we're going with the honor system for now ... though expect some actual "open days" soon where someone's down to greet you. We'll also be getting more fruits and veggies out there as they come into season as well.

Hope you can stop by soon to support local farmers & local food! :)

Coming Soon!

I'm very excited to say that the farm stand my mom has been considering doing for some time now is going to officially be opening this spring!

We'll be selling eggs from our chickens, possibly some of my photos, the produce we grow in our own yard, local veggies and local honey too, which I'm quite excited about. The honey is made locally and with anything from pollen from wildflowers to the pine barrens to clover. Sounds yummy!

Just today we received these in the mail:



I'm stopping there though. I don't want to give away all our secrets! Just know that I'm excited and you should be spreading the word! Look, even this Blue Heron checked out our shed and flew off to spread the news :)

Bang, bang, bang.

Bang, bang, bang.

That's what is going on right outside on our front porch. Guys are here and they're putting up the framework to then install big windows to enclose our front porch for my dad. I think he'll love it! He stares out the front windows all the time now and now he'll be able to do that in a room with views in three different directions.

Oh and by "guys", I don't mean construction guys ... no just a bunch of family/friends.

And on another note, we only have 12 hens and yet we're getting like 20 some eggs every 24 hrs. Are these ladies unaware that it's barely been above freezing lately and that in the last month we've had like 3 feet of snow fall??? I'm thinking we might have to turn their heat lamp off for periods during the day. These egg numbers are ridiculous!

Chickens

We have 3 types of chickens: Buff Orpington chickens (the gorgeous gold ones), Barred Rock chickens (the black & white striped ones) and, fairly common chickens around here from what I can tell, Rhode Island Red chickens (the red ones). We have them in a shed that was already here on the property when we bought it. We seperated the shed so that there's still a space for storage and added a door to that side of the shed. We also cut a small hole in the back of the shed. We also set up green house pieces with netting extending off the back of the shed so that the chickens have a nice area to roam, kick up dust and scratch around while still being protected from any predators.

Last May we purchased around a dozen little chicks which we raised inside, then moved into an old rabbit hutch until they were finally big enough (and fairly friendly with us) to go into the shed we set up. A few chickens mysteriously died with in the first couple months - they seemed well and they weren't attacked by any animals (the shed set up is very safe for them), so I'm not sure what happened. However, the remaining 9 seem to all be very well and are now producing eggs every day. We actually just ordered a few more little chicks, the Buffs and Rhode Island Reds, because we've been selling the eggs. Friends and family seem very impressed with the eggs, so we figured a few more hens would be a good idea.

The eggs our chickens produce come in all shapes, sizes and different shades of brown (all three types of chickens lay just brown eggs). I think the photo here is a great example of what I'm talking about ... and excuse the wine cork, it's all I had around to compare the size with at the time. Aside from being protected from predators, we also have no rooster meaning that none of the eggs we're producing are fertilized in anyway. Sure, there's the "feral rooster" roaming around, but he can't get to the hens - thank goodness! The eggs are normally pretty big, very fresh and are from some fairly spoiled chickens, so we feel good selling them and sharing them with others. Right now, we're selling a dozen of the eggs for $3 to friends right now, though the price may change when we start up our farm stand soon.

Here's some more photos that just had to be added in: