Our First Egg

We got our first egg! We think it was an Easter egger because it has a greenish/blueish tint.  You can see that it is much smaller than a "large" egg from the grocery store from the second picture. We don't know if they will get bigger as the chickens get older or not. They chickens are just under five months old.

Our first egg!

Our egg on the left, a "large" egg from the grocery store

Loving 4H

The girls need to have Western wear for some of the 4H horse events so we bought them some new hats. We will be going to our first horse event, a gymkhana that our club is putting on. The girls aren't going to be riding yet, but it will be fun to see all the events and watch their friends compete.

Aaron had his first event, Area Presentation Day. He will go to the County Presentation Day in April. Depending on how well he does there, he could move on to state which competes during the 4H Field Day, which sounds like it would be fun to go to regardless of whether he is competing.

Our Chicken Coop

I realized that I never put pictures of our coop up. The indoor picture is from November, so the chickens are MUCH bigger now.

Ron designed it all by himself, no plans were used. He did a lot of reading about coops, and we looked at a whole lot of plans together to get a feel of what we liked, and then he went designed it on his own. 

We have a few more things to do. It still needs steps to the door so the kids and I can more easily get inside. And we need to add access doors to get to the nesting boxes from outside. But it is fully functional! 

Wild Life on the Farm

A few of the animals we have found on the land.

California Toad

Gopher Snake

Tarantula

Island Fence Lizard (I think)

We also have rabbits, squirrels and gophers, but I really like the non-cute and fuzzy ones the best!

Fruits and Veggies

It's not all chickens on the Potter Farm, we've also been working on the garden. And when I say "we" I really mean "Ron."

Last weekend he put in some fruit trees and table grapes.

The girls planted a row of strawberries and Ron put in a soaker hose

We also have some beans growing that we planted a few weeks ago,

Hopefully we will have some nice fruits and veggies this summer. As long as the gophers don't eat them first.  

We'll see what we get up to this weekend. I still have to add pictures of some of the creatures we've found as we've been working in the garden.

We did it!

We said good-bye to two of our chickens today, one hen and one rooster. We didn't do it over the weekend because I had a horrible cold. Today I felt well enough to go to work, and when I got home we decided not to put it off any longer. So, we have two chickens in our fridge.

One of our hens, we called her Crooked Beak because, well, she had a crooked beak, was having a hard time eating.We knew that the humane thing to do was to end her life. We also knew that since she was an Easter-egger, we weren't going to get much meat off of her. We decided to butcher her first knowing that if we ended up doing something wrong there was less meat to waste. We used the video from another blog, Weed 'em and Reap as a guide. Ron was more comfortable with the slaughtering part and I was more comfortable with the cleaning part, so we worked well as a team.

I still think that slaughtering is the hardest part. Making sure that you cut deep enough in one cut to make it humane feels like a lot of pressure, but Ron did it.

The kids did most of the defeathering with a little help from me to get them started. I was afraid that it would be hard to pluck out the feathers, but the hot water bath really did make it easy. The kids were just fine with the whole process. We have been talking about it for so long, I think they were well prepared. We hadn't named any of the brahmas which probably helped. There are a couple Easter-eggers that the girls have named and they did say that they don't want to kill those chickens, which we will respect and will let those chickens live a long full life with us.

As for cleaning out the guts, I was very worried about cutting the intestines or gall bladder by mistake, which would contaminate the chicken, so it took a lot longer than it should have, but I wasn't grossed out at all. It was actually pretty cool, like dissecting the cats in high school anatomy. The brahma was definitely easier since it was bigger. Everything took a while being my first time, but I think I did OK.

We still have two more roosters to butcher, but we need to wait until the weekend because it takes way too long to do after work and I am not doing that again. By the end, it was getting pretty dark and we had to clean up in the dark - not fun!

While I was sick over the weekend, Ron and the kids were very busy planting and finding snakes. I will write all about their adventures next time!

Too Many Roosters!

We thought we were only getting two roosters, but turns out we have four. That is at least two too many for us. At this point, they aren't fighting or hurting the chickens, but the crowing does get  a little annoying sometimes. It can be fun to watch as each rooster tries to out-crow the other, but less fun when it's 5:00 am. They are a little over four months old now, they just started crowing and trying to mate with the chickens. The chickens are not laying yet however and they usually get away easily. I don't know how much this will change as they get older.

We have one cuckoo maran rooster and three brahmas, we thought we had ordered one cuckoo maran and one Easter-egger. Right now the plan is to butcher two or all of the brahmas. While, I love the brahmas, they are the biggest and they have really cool feathers on their feet, we weren't planning to raise more of them. They are supposed to be a good dual purpose chicken, good for eggs and meat, but they are not supposed to be the best egg layers, and that really is our primary purpose to having chickens. The Easter-eggers are our favorites because they come in so many variety of colours, and we are looking forward to the blue and green eggs. I wasn't that big of a fan of the cuckoo marans at first, but now that they are getting their patterned feathers I like them a lot more, and the cuckoo maran rooster is just beautiful.

The plan is to butcher the roosters this weekend. As neither Ron nor I have ever butchered a chicken, we are a bit nervous about doing it. We keep watching videos and are learning about the most humane way to kill them. I am also a bit nervous about removing the guts because you have to be careful not to cut the intestines or gall bladder or you are basically poisoning the meat and then you've just wasted a chicken.  Wish us luck and check back next week to see if we follow through!

Free Range Chickens

We have decided to let our chickens "free-range" on our property. We have about four unused acres that they are allowed to wander on as they please.  There are dangers, we lost two to a hawk and one to a friend's dog, but there are benefits. I just love watching them (you can see a video of them below), but being free-range also means that they get to forage for whatever bugs and seeds they can find and we don't need to worry about feeding them grit. Plus, they just look happy.

We knew that hawks were the biggest predator risk during the day, but the chickens seemed to know to stay under the bushes when they were out. Initially, we would stay outside with them to keep an eye on them when we let them out, but we couldn't stay out with them forever, so one day my husband went inside for a while and left them out alone. When he went back out, he found one of our Brahmas in a bush, dead. He picked it up to examine it and the only damage that he found was a single puncture wound on its back. Our guess is that the hawk tried to get it, but couldn't lift it (the Brahmas are the biggest of our chickens) and either dropped it in the bush or the chicken got away and ran to the bush before it died. Ron looked around for all the other chickens, trying to get a count and see if there were any other dead or injured chickens, when something made him look up. He actually saw the hawk flying away with one of our Cuckoo Marans! He said that the hawk actually landed on one of the power poles not too far away from where he was standing. He went to get a closer look to see if he could tell what kind of hawk it was, but it flew away and as it flew away, it actually dropped the chicken.  Ron went to examine that chicken and could see that the hawk had already took some bites off, glad that I didn't see that site! He left it there for a while and when he went back out it was gone. I like to think that our little chicken helped feed some baby hawks.

We still let them out daily, and we haven't lost any others to hawks. I think that now that they are full grown, they are too big for any of the hawks we have around to take them, but we have also accepted the possibility of loosing more. It's just one of the things that goes with having free-range chickens.


As for the dog who got one of the chickens, that was just us being careless and leaving a gate open when our friend came over. After the guilt that we all felt when we found that chicken, that won't happen again! Our own dog, Maya, is out with the chickens all the time. We taught Maya not to attack/play with the chicks when they were young and we have never had an issue with her going after the chickens. Maya is calm and very eager to please us; training her is extremely easy. These are the steps that we took with her to teach her not to "attack" the chickens, I do NOT suggest that this would work with all dogs. Every dog is different, and owners need to figure out whether they can be taught to stay away from the chickens or not.

We first introduced Maya to the chicks when they were little by taking her to their brooder and holding on to her collar. We took one of the chicks out and let her sniff it, but held on to Maya too so she stayed calm. Later, when the chicks got bigger and we would let them out in the yard, we let Maya out with them. The first time she got excited and ran at them, we told her "no!" and took her away from the area. I think we only had to do that two or three times and that's all it took for her to stop running at them. Now she is out with them all the time and never bothers them.