Still Brooding

This has become our daily ritual: Lottie refuses to leave the box. I extract her from the box. I then ply her with treats and hope she is motivated to stay outside the box, which doesn't work, so I repeat the same process the next day. How long can this go on?

Lottie Extraction:

Lottie & the other girls eating their sunflower seed treat:

By the time I posted this and looked outside, Lottie was back in the box.

Brooding

Brooding is the new black for Lottie. Starting last Monday, she decided to become a hermit chicken, sitting in the nesting box and refusing to move. If you take her out from the box and put her on the grass, it takes her a few seconds to even respond. She just sits there, sad and sloth-like. She'll then get up, run around, have a snack and return to the nesting box. We have been removing the eggs she sits on daily, but it doesn't seem to matter. Egg or no egg, she wants to sit in there.

We thought she snapped out of it this morning as she voluntarily left the nesting box, but she has now returned. I've heard you can trick hens by placing a chick in the nesting box with them so they think they hatched it and then they will stop their broodiness, so we may need to resort to this soon if she doesn't cheer up!

Courtesy of my Dad

How to Pick up a Chick:

Farmyard Chic

Is the title of this post an oxymoron? Why, no! Not when you can find such cute farmyard accessories as the ones below! Made by Simrin (more about them on my GGG blog here) and available online here, they are cute but not too "country" looking. I think the round red hen tray (pictured below) would look especially good in my house!

Chicken Scratch

Lottie and Wanda scratching around. We'd just moved their coop so there was a large rectangle of extra long grass where the coop was sitting and they just HAD to investigate it.

Spring Chickens

Posting to this blog has taken a back seat to "real life" stuff like traveling for work and getting a wisdom tooth extracted, but I'm back! The ladies are doing well. Some days we get three eggs, some days only one, but we haven't had to purchase eggs in months!

The photo at right is of Lottie and Wanda enjoying my husband's juice "sludge" - the leftover stuff that spews from the juicer. We've also started feeding the ladies sunflower seeds and flax seeds on a daily basis. I put them back on organic feed again, which they protested against for a day or two, but seem to be eating it with gusto now. I was ordering from McGeary Organics, but the shipping was killing me and I couldn't justify paying that kind of expense, so they had to go with the non-organic food I found at the local pet food store. Luckily I found that East Valley Tack & Feed, where I purchase equine grain and supplies, will special order Purina organic feed and they don't charge me ANY shipping as it comes in with the rest of their Purina order.

Easter Poop

While most people were attending church or hunting for eggs, we conducted our own Spring service - gathering horse manure for the garden. (see containers at left) I should clarify that my husband did the gathering, but it does have to ride in my car, so I can claim SOME credit for it, right?

We're getting ready to do some planting! While last year we had a frighteningly large pumpkin patch, this year we're going to devote that space to tomatoes. We haven't decided what else we're going to plant, but we need to start the seed trays soon.

This year we have the added challenge of keeping our feathered friends OUT of our planted areas. They love "nesting" in our herb boxes, leaving chicken "dirt angels" between our basil and parsley. They will take up so much dirt that they expose the plant roots. BAD CHICKENS.

Below are the chickens enjoying some sun on Easter. They are difficult to photograph because as soon as they see me they come running!