Breaking up the garden

Today, I started breaking up one of the garden to start getting it ready for planting. Our oldest hen, Poppy, is very familiar with the whole garden digging procedure and was quick to join me and eat all the worms that I dug up. The dogs hung out in their dog pen and supervised (and humped each other of course LOL)

Daily Eggs

The ladies are all doing well and they all slept in the same coop last night. I think they are finally all friends :) It's interesting how different in size and colour the eggs are.

Herbal Remedy for Kidney Stones

I have a friend who suffers from kidney stones every few years. I have never had them, but from what I understand they are horribly painful. The last time my friend had them I did some online research about herbal remedies and found one that got rave reviews. He tried it and amazingly it worked fantastic. He still had to pass the stones, which of course wasn't fun, but at least he didn't end up in the hospital.

As I often do when I need to learn something, I wrote an article about it:

Read Herbal Remedy for Kidney Stones

Seedlings

My kitchen window seedlings are doing wonderfully well! The green peppers have finally poked their heads out of the soil and I have tons of tomatoes, beans, peas and corn. :)

Chickens

So the new hens have been here for about 50 hours now and the worst of the "fowl" language has stopped. The ladies are starting to get along. Today we let all the hens meet face to face. There was no fighting or even feather fluffing, just a bit of squawking and pecking. Red (the hen that is outside the cage in the photo), decided that she could go into the new ladies' cage, but they couldn't come out. We'll let them mingled supervised again tonight. Hopefully by the end of the weekend they will all be friends :)

Chicken Eggs

One of the new hens laid an egg this afternoon and boy, it was darn small in comparison to our normal eggs. I knew that egg size varied per breed, but had to Google to see if it was also affected by age. So, Google tells me that egg size varies per breed, age, diet and the overall health of the hen. Hopefully, when the new hens get settled in and a bit older they will produce bigger eggs. Our older ladies always produce large to extra large eggs. 

New Chickens

We added some new hens to our flock today. They are Golden Cross hens, about 6-7 months old, just started laying. New hens must be kept separated from the flock for a few days/week, to stop serious fighting.

We set up the dog pen for the new hens to stay in for a few days. Once everyone is comfortable, they will join the other ladies in the coop.

I wrote an article about adding new hens to a flock, if you are interested, you can read it here.

With adding two more hens to the flock, it should raise our egg production from 2-3 eggs daily to about 4 daily. (We had three hens, so now we have five)