Author Archives: frankie

About frankie

Maiden name is Farmer so I guess I am getting back to my roots. I love raising chickens and especially when the baby chicks are hatched out. I am a senior citizen and live with my husband in Florida. We live a quiet, peaceful life on our two acres with our one dog ( two dogs died past year and we miss them) and various amounts of chickens. I have had up to 120 chickens but now at about 45. That seems to be a good number for us. Feed and medicines can be expensive and you certainly don't get enough money for the eggs to pay for the feed. Selling the chickens and chicks helps, too. It is not a business for me though....they are my pets. I have three terrific grown children that I am very proud of and two wonderful granddaughters. With my children living in DC, Texas and North Carolina, we will be doing a lot of traveling now that my husband has retired from 40 years with civil service. If you are new to raising chickens, I hope I can tell you amusing stories as well as give you information that will make your experience with chickens fun. I sometimes feel like raising chickens is like raising kids. Some days it is so rewarding and other days, it is a darn lot of work. I am very much interested in making life simple and trying to be self-sufficient as much as I can. I enjoy grocery shopping and getting the best prices as well as stocking up on food and household items. I also love to go to the thrift stores. I have bought numerous pairs of name brand jeans for $3. It just makes sense to be thrifty and since we have the time to look around and find bargains, that is what we chose to do. It also gives us something to do. We planted our first garden this year. Though it is small (squash, watermelons, sweet potatoes and tomatoes), it is a start. My daughter bought me a dehydrator for Mother's Day and we are looking into buying an upright freezer. Those things were needed before we plant a bigger garden. Hope you enjoy my blog....God bless.

Keeping track of births, deaths and sales

I learned recently that my memory will not serve me to remember all the ages of my chickens.  When you sell chickens, you want to be able to tell the person the age of the chickens or at least I do.

I have a calender with the big squares for each day that you can write in (a little smaller than a desk calender and it has spiral wire on it and it hangs up).    I write down births, deaths, sale of chickens, when I buy some chickens, when I put eggs in the incubator, when to stop turning the eggs, hatch dates, money I make from selling eggs, money I make from selling chickens, money  for feed and supplies and reminders of chicken related stuff.

The back of each page is great for writing down additional info that is lengthy.  I write down…incubator hatch, first egg (green), second (Barred Rock), third (Silkie, white), etc.  If I hatch out chickens the next month, it is easy to get them confused about birth dates but I always feel like if I can give the buyer an approximate date (say June or July of 2011), that is close enough.   After all, it isn’t like they are going to throw the chicken a birthday party each year.

When I let the momma keep her babies, it is so much easier to identify the chicks because they get to the juvenile age and I can usually tell them apart….unless I have 10 white Silkies.  lol  If a hen hatches out chicks and my incubator chicks hatch at about the same time…within days….I have given the momma one or two of the chicks from the incubator.  Especially if she only hatches one egg and is still sitting on her eggs days after the hatch date.  I feel sorry for her.

I also write down which chickens I sell.  I look back at my calender and find where the chickens were hatched and write down the sell date and price and who I sold them to.

I have only been doing the calender for about three years now…once I started getting so many chickens that I couldn’t keep track of their ages.  I have two Silkies right now sitting on Guinea eggs (8) and a standard breed chicken sitting on 4 .  I have a standard chicken sitting on 7 Silkie eggs, too.  Then I have two Silkies who are sitting on 4 and 8 Silkie eggs.  Oh yeah, and I have probably a dozen Silkie eggs in the incubator.  Don’t ask me why.  I already have 108 chickens right now but I am addicted to those baby chicks.  Especially when I see them running around with their mommas.

I keep thinking I am going to treat this as a business instead of a hobby so I guess each thing I do to keep my accounting organized will help me to make a decision about hobby or business.   Right now, I am sure I spend more than I make on my chickens.  I guess that would be the appropriate time to claim it as a business…who doesn’t need another tax deduction?

I also need to start going to the chicken swap/flea market sales they have at the feed stores around here.  I sell on Craigslist sometimes but perhaps I should try selling at these places, too.  I am afraid I will come home with more than I sell.  That is a possibility.

I think I will go visit a couple of the businesses that are on Chicken Swap to determine what I need to do to make my chicken hobby a professional business.  Right now, it looks more like Grandma’s back yard.  Why that’s a cute name, isn’t it?  Grandma’s Back Yard.  Maybe I am on to something.  lol

Have a great day, guys and remember “don’t take life too seriously.”  Nobody likes to be around grumpy people.  Life is a journey, not a destination.

Chicken Swap Friends and Their Chicken Set-Up

I am enjoying the Chicken Swap site.  The information goes directly to my email address when something new is posted.  Some people might find that annoying with so many posts but I quickly delete anything that doesn’t appeal to me so no big deal.   I like to see what is for sale and what the prices are because I know I will be wanting some Maran chickens before too much longer.

Jimmy on Chicken Swap offered to show his set up to a Newbie in the chicken raising world and I asked if I could come, too.  I LOVE going to see what ideas I might pick up from others.

Jimmy’s family certainly showed “southern hospitality” by having tea and brownies for our visit.  So nice.  He has a very friendly family and I was especially impressed with his son’s knowledge and love of the chickens.

Jimmy’s set up was very impressive and I left with a bunch of ideas of future projects for our chicken yards and houses.  I hope we can duplicate his water system for his chickens because he doesn’t have to clean containers and boy would that save me some time.  Calvin and I will be doing some plumbing projects down the road.

He also have a storage building converted into a chicken house with some great ideas for the nests and perches that close up and lift up for easy cleaning underneath.   He has a run attached to it so his chickens get outside and have that much needed sunlight.  Plus, he had room for his chicken supplies in the storage building so everything was handy and so neat and clean.

Boy, my poor husband is going to have some heavy duty “honey-do lists” when he retires.  I just want to incorporate all Jimmy’s ideas into our future projects.

I was thinking about building more chicken houses with the 4×8 sheets of wood but I really like the way Jimmy and James, his son, made the back wall (of one chicken house) with vertical boards leaving a gap between each one of probably 1/2 inch for ventilation.  My chicken houses always seem hot during the summer and in my one yard, it is the only shade they have until my trees grow bigger.

And to top it all, James gave me a dozen guinea eggs.  I had guineas when I had a dairy farm in Missouri and I enjoyed seeing them running around and hearing the “buckwheat” sound the males (?) made.

I have said it before and I will say it again, chicken people are just nice and helpful people.

Snake in the chicken yard

Calvin always tells me to watch out for snakes when collecting the eggs.  He once found 2 four foot snakes in the chicken nests at his mom’s house.  So, today was my day to find a snake.

I was going into the Silkie yard to collect eggs.  Some of them like to lay on the ground even though I provide crates with hay.  There are two hens sitting on eggs in the house that is 8 feet long.   On each end, there is a hen sitting in her crate on four eggs preparing to be mammas.  Right beside the one crate is a sunk-in area where a hen has been laying eggs on previous days.  Fortunately, the whole front of the chicken house is wide open with lots of sun light so I immediately saw the snake curled up in that rounded, sunken hole.  I didn’t get too close to it but instead I ran to get a flat end shovel.

Calvin was due home within ten minutes but I couldn’t wait.  I lost a baby chick and an egg about ready to hatch and I wasn’t going to lose anymore future babies.

I stood about four feet away from the snake and shoved the shovel at it about in the center of the body just trying to hold it down.  Of course the dirt under it was soft and it made me have to push really hard just to hold it still.  I stood there for probably 10 minutes and I threw a brick on the back end of it.  There wasn’t really much I could do because I needed to just hold the shovel to prevent it from  slithering away.

I heard my neighbor, Gail, outside and I called to her. Her husband, Ray was home.  So he was over in a matter of minutes with another shovel with a sharper point.  He said it was a Corn Snake which is what I suspected and they aren’t poisonous.  He said he hated to kill it but I said it has to die.

When my husband came home, the snake was dead but it was still wiggling around.  Calvin hates snakes which is funny because when he was a kid, he played with them.   When we watch shows with snakes on them, he actually jumps when the snake strikes at someone.   This is the corn snake.  Had he been in my chicken nest in one of my closed-in chicken yards, I doubt if I would have noticed him until he bit me.  He looks like the straw that is in the nests.

I will definitely be taking a flash light from now on when I go into the darker chicken houses to collect eggs.

Moving chickens to new yards

Okay….I am being a bad wife.  My husband has the day off today and I jump out of bed at 6:45 telling my husband I need to give my white Silkies some more water.

After being outside for 10 minutes, my faithful husband joins me to help take care of the chickens.  So without even a cup of coffee, my sweetie stayed outside for an hour with me cleaning water containers and feeding the chickens and catching chickens to move them into another yard.

Yesterday,  I decided to move my Americauna hens into the Barred Rock yard since I only have 11 Americaunas hens and 10 Barred Rock hens.  The yard is really large so there is plenty of room for the 21 hens.   No roosters so they are my egg layers for right now.  I may get a rooster of each kind later but right now….way too many chickens.

My Americaunas were free ranging in the front part of my yard with their rooster and the Barred Rock were in the back part with their rooster.  My problem was my dogs keep eating the chicken poo when I let them out to run every evening.  Since they are in the front part of my yard, there was poo around for them to eat.  Well, I know that nasty strong fertilizer poo is good for plants but I can’t see how it could be good for dog’s digestive systems.  Hence, the reason to put the hens together and leave my dog’s “free range” (lol) yard free of chicken poo.

So, now I have 10 Barred Rock and 11 Americauna hens in  one large chicken yard.  This will be great because I can let them roam together and free range together.   No more chickens in my yard where I walk around and my dogs roam, too.

Now, my Americuana yard has become my Silkie rooster yard.  I am going to make some individual yards for each color of Silkie with their own chicken house but that will be have to wait until the time and money come together.

Moving my chickens around is probably like women who move their furniture around in their home.  My mom use to do that.  “Let’s try the couch over there and the chair over here.”  Not me, I have my furniture where I want it and it is not moving.  Furniture is heavy, chickens are not.

Just another day in paradise

Nothing too exciting going on here right now.  I do have some Silkie eggs in the incubator…mainly because the lady I thought was going to purchase the fertilized eggs didn’t come get them in time so to avoid them being thrown away, I incubated them.

I also have three hens sitting on eggs.  One black Silkie has four eggs and one Partridge Silkie has four.  Then I had a grey mixed colored hen who is broody and I felt sorry for her so I gave her seven Silkie eggs.  It is sad when a hen is broody and I keep taking the eggs from under her.  The grey hen is in a yard with a couple roosters and they would produce mixed breed chicks so I don’t want any of those eggs to be hatched.  They are my eating eggs or selling eggs.  I am going to take the roosters out of there today so the eggs I am selling are not fertilized.   Some people get grossed out by the idea that the egg could have made a baby chick under the right circumstances.  Oh well.

I read on Craigslist that someone wants some chickens … free… of course so I offered some baby chicks that were given to me.  I really don’t have a place for the mixed Rhode Island Red and Buff Orphington chicks once they grow up.  I guess I could put them in the yard with Gail’s chickens since there are a bunch of mixed chickens in there.

You know…I hate to give chickens away because people often do not value something unless they have paid for it.  If you cannot afford to pay 8 bucks for a hen, can you afford feed for the chickens?  Just a thought.

I decided to separate my Silkie roosters from my hens except one white rooster and one Splash rooster.   Too many roosters and the poor girls just can’t catch a break.  I want to see if they will start laying more eggs if they don’t have the roosters in there chasing them and upsetting them.

I was looking at some of my baby chicks yesterday and I believe the chick that I thought was white is actually going to be a Splash.  My first Splash chick.  Yoo hoo  I sure hope it is a hen.  I have two female Splash and one male Splash.  I recently lost a hen and I never could figure out why.  I was outside and I noticed her sitting and I thought she was going to lay an egg and I came back later and she was dead.  It was a really hot day and I wonder if that had something to do with it.  None of them were showing signs of any sickness and still don’t.  I think I will read up on “egg bound” chickens or something  like that.  Maybe that was her problem.

And gosh, how I hate those darn ants.  You just can’t get rid of them in the chicken yards because they are attracted to the feed.  I have been trying to remember to keep ant killer around the outside of the yards where the chickens can’t get to it.  I am so sick of ant bites and I wonder if they bite the chickens, too.

Well, I have rattled on long enough and the sun is finally up so I can go out and check on my chickens and feed and water them.  I really look forward to seeing what they are up to each day.  Occasionally,  I have to put a chicken back into the right yard because they manage to fly over into another yard.  I have a couple of problem chickens.   But, it is a joy to see them all running to the fence line when they see me coming.  They know “momma” has the food.

Good morning to you all.  Hope you have a great day in your “paradise.”