Sunrise, sunshine, horses and chickens

There is no better way to start the day than watching the sunrise at 5.51 in the morning! But it was certainly warmer later in the day!  We’ve got a lot more cape weed growing this year, as well as more clover, rye and barley grass.  In the second paddock …

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Hatch Day – Rhode Island Reds

Well today is hatch day here at Eagleburra…well technically 21 days was up at 7.30pm last night, but after a  power outage one night at the end of week one, plus the colder temperature only one chick (a Rhode Island Red) hatched yesterday at 4.30pm. After a very nerve wracking …

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Incubating Eggs and three new girls

Its  a little frustrating having  a pen full of chickens and still having to buy shop eggs!  Although Corn Chip the gold laved wyandotte started laying again a couple of weeks ago and it looks like Coal the Ancona hen has also started laying, yesterday we picked up three 17 …

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Chickens

Chickens

After a lot of research, I have settled on Indian Game bantams for breeding our table chickens, they lay quite well (or at least a lot more than their large IG or Cornish do) and improve the meat of any other breed they are crossed with. The cockerels mature early …

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Baby Chickens and the importance of healthy breeding stock

We ended up with 25 hatched chicks, the remaining seven chicks died in the shell without pipping (2 of which I believed died around day 16). Of the 25, one had *sort of* splayed legs – I’m not convinced they were splayed at least not like the photos I have …

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Hatching Chicks

The first chicks hatched in our new incubator (a hexagonal Janoel) over the weekend. We rather unexpectedly started with 36 eggs, pulled four duds out during the week, all of the rest looked great bar two that did not take up all the room in the shell (but we saw …

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