Recent content by RubyLady

Excellent summary. We have two 4x4 coops where our chickens sleep and lay. I am able to lay a bit of chopped straw or pine shavings down to keep the manure from sticking to the wooden floor but not enough lip to make a real deep bedding situation. So I am VERY glad that design point was covered...

Absolutely love this and will doing the same from now on. We cold-brooded 10 chicks last September in the fall - no heat lamp - inside the mudroom with an ambient temp of about 75F using litre soda bottles filled with hot water and wrapped with fleece fabric. We had two feather dusters taped to...

You might want to simply make an area around their coop more predator-proof until such time as they move on and find another flock to terrorize. Electric fence, deer fence with a string of barbed wire along the top or avian netting over the whole thing. Then set animal traps around the outside...

Those hens ended up being fine at that time. I don't actually use it as regularly as I should, but I've never seen worms in their poo and none that we've butchered (roosters). I just use it as a weekly or even monthly dietary supplement as that's about all I can remember to use it. They don't...

I have dehydrated over the wood stove in cookie sheets lined with parchment paper (not my favorite only because the top of the wood stove is somewhat curved and that gets tricky. LOL But otherwise I use silicone trays with edges so the liquid stays in in Nesco round dehydrators (I found two...

I used to water glass my eggs in hydrated lime but then discovered that the bloom on eggs isn't 100% coverage and lime or mineral oil or anything else that coats the eggs can seep slowly through where there's no bloom. And I kind of suspected because, to be honest, I could always smell a little...

Honestly, I'd be thrilled with a small shed I can walk into with roosts on one side, nesting boxes on the other and a little space up front for feed bins and brooms. Of course, it would be open to a large enclosed pen with feeders and water outside, although it would still have a gate to the...

Grass can be up to 20% of a chicken's nutrition but I suspect that slag includes grass seed and not just the green portion although my hens eat a LOT of green grass and weeds and the more they do, the more golden the yolks. And if it's not cut often, other beneficial weeds will grow that they...

My 20 week old pullets do this all the time, the friendly ones that sit on my lap or hang out with me when I come sit. It's their way of getting my attention and being friendly. It's fine as long as they aren't actually attacking you. I've had a couple of love pecks break the skin under my...

I think you'd have to have a thermometer inside the coop to know if it's below 35F. I would have guessed it's been lower than that in ours at times in the last three years but then I'm not taking into account their own body heat, the heat of their poop and breath. I haven't lost a hen yet to the...

Well, I'm not that good with math, but if you had 10 birds and expected 80% to be infected, that would be 8 birds. So you'd have to test at least 3 to see if ANY were infected as 2 of the three could be the 20% not infected. That's how I came to that conclusion.

Okay. So if you had 10 young ones, you'd have to test three of them as 20% could be free of infection and you could be sure that if you had tested those two in your sample, you had also tested one more. Statistically anyway. Four would probably be better. Of course, the problem is that 80%...

Oh, I see now. If you can find anything on the statistics of marek's in flock populations, that might give you a number to test and see if you can afford that. I mean, I don't know what percentage of any flock where there is or night be Marek's becomes infected (though not necessarily...

Are you taking whether or not you should test them? I'm not clear what the question is. But I can relate in that I have 10 12 week old pullets and now I'm down to five out of 11 hens that saw a wave of (most probably but not tested) Marek's. We did consider all other possible...

Thank you. I've seen how a feeding tube is inserted on the right (the bird's right) and how the esophagus is to the right so that helps confirm that I can do it without drowning the chicken. :)