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I’m less concerned with making coop litter into compost and more wondering if 12-18mo is long enough that it won’t be too hot and have too much nitrogen. And about potential pathogens in the poop. Our soil is on the sandy side and shavings can help retain moisture. Maybe? Going to see if I can...

I’m a failure at composting. The shavings basically have sat there and I have done absolutely nothing with them. I mulched my tomatoes with aged coop litter one year and got an obscene amount of fruit, but that was also a pretty perfect summer for growing conditions.

Looking for some garden advice! I have a problem every year with grass in my garden. And purple thistle, but I just keep pulling that out. ANYHOW, I'm looking for some suggestions for a better mulch to put into my veggie garden so I don't spend the entire summer nagging my kids to go pull...

We usually only have lice problems when I have starlings in the coop, and I figure that if I’m not gonna eat eggs (because of sevin in the nest boxes) for a week or 2, I may as well worm them too. If the wild birds brought in lice, they may have brought in other stuff. That kind of stuff really...

I use the “shake n bake” method. Put sevin in an empty feed bag, chicken goes in up to it’s neck, and shake. Repeat in 7-10 days. Clean the whole coop. Replace with minimal shavings, dust the nest boxes. Re-clean after the 2nd treatment. I usually take this opportunity to also worm all of my...

We got probably 2-2.5in yesterday. It BETTER all melt today because we are supposed to have outdoor baseball practice today. I keep checking tsc for dark brahmas but they haven’t had any since mid March. I think one of my “sapphire olive eggers” might be a cockerel since most of the consensus...

The chicks got evicted last night. Helped the other coaches cement in the posts for the bases at the fields, reconfigured our back yard fence a bit because the dogs keep digging up next to the deck and the last thing we need is for them to compromise one of the footings.

Bought a bunch of gladiolus bulbs today. Anyone have some insight as to when is a good time to start planting those???? I’m planning on planting 20 of them every 2 weeks. But I’ve never grown them before so I don’t know what I’m doing. Also had a friend of ours message me that the ffh they...

Well I have 8 chicks in my basement brooder now. Hopefully I can recruit the kids to help me clean out the chick coop this weekend when it warms up and get them out under the hover brooder. I stopped at TSC to get a bag of feed for the lavender orps, and the manager sold me 4 EE pullets for...

Got home Saturday from a week at Disney. This weather can take a hike. 14 degrees this morning? No thanks. But. Some local friends of ours (friends in that we are on a few FB swaps together and I have picked up chicks for them when we have been traveling and were stopping anyway) messaged...

I had cut way back on numbers in late summer (gave away a bunch of 3 and 4 year olds that would only lay regularly (5-6eggs/week each) from April-June and then maaaaaybe 2-3 a week until September and then nothing until March. I "only" lost 8, but it was pretty irritating since I was FINALLY...

Stopped into TSC today to look for salt to melt the 6+in shelf of ice in front of our mailbox, and somehow ended up looking at chicks. They had "assorted brahmas" and at least half of them were dark brahmas. Of course. I've wanted those for 5 years. The manager of the other TSC near us said...

Ugh. The black flies were sooo bad the first week it warmed up here. I’m glad they seem to have dissipated a bit. I’m going to throw caution to the wind and plant the rest of my veggie garden this weekend. I like to use the NMC barbecue as my “cutoff” date since the weather always seems to be...

Thank goodness! I really didn’t want to be dealing with tapeworms. Super busy weekend (as they all seem to be lately.) batting practice with summer league players, heart worm test at a low cost clinic for the dogs, I started priming the north wall of the coop, we got the fence and netting...

Soooo grossed out. I had to force myself to finish cleaning it out. I’m ok with a lot of “gross” stuff but parasitic worms are too much. Uuuugh. That’s what I was leaning toward to. Now I have to figure out how in the heck to treat it without a vet because I’m not paying that much for a bunch...

Let’s play a fun game called “larvae or worms”. I was cleaning the poop board off in my layer coop (it’s been 3 weeks because we are so busy right now and I found this in one section of the droppings. Not in all of it, just in about a 1ftx1ft spot. And I’m completely grossed out.

We are living and breathing baseball in our house, I’m gone for 11 hours a day when I sub and then we have practice, more like 13 on game days. 3 more weeks and we will be down to “just” summer leagues. It looking like ALL of my lavender ams are cockerels. Disappointing, but I can at least...

It just goes to show that you can't believe everything you read.....my 11 3-4yr old hens are giving me 8-10 eggs per day right now. And here we were getting ready to butcher or give them away a month ago. 2 of my chicks somehow managed to squeeze out of the basement brooder and fall on the...

Got home from teaching/running errands today to find 2 dead chicks in the brooder: one BLRW and one dominique. Everyone else still seems fine, so I'm just assuming shipping stress got the best of those 2. Crossing my fingers that everyone else stays healthy at this point. I have found a...

PO called at 9 this morning, and I have 17 chicks banded and in the brooder! :love No losses in transit. I'm digging through the meyer chick ID tool now to try to figure out what i got for my assortment. The BLRWs were easy to pick out, and it looks like only 1 splash! As far as the...