Category: Livestock

It’s Spring and things have been really, really busy.
In between planting and transplanting and putting even more plants under the grow lights, we decided to get an incubator and hatch out baby chicks from our own chickens.  Here’s the incubator with the eggs on “lockdown” — three days before they are expected to hatch when the temperature is to remain constant, but the humidity levels rise up to 80% so that the chicks can break through the membrane around each egg.

While the incubator was holding the hatching eggs, we set up the brooder in the Workshop.  That eerie red glow is from the heat lamp which ensures that the baby chicks are warm enough in their new home.  Although the heat lamp is on 24/7, the glow is only visible at night.  It looks spooky, but to chicken-keepers, it’s reassurance that the chicks will be warm, dry and not pecking at each other.

Hatching is supposed to happen over 24 hours, but in our case, it was a “draggy hatch” that took more like 48 hours.  Here are our first four hatchings, resting under the heat lamp in the brooder.

Almost 12 hours later, we had 16 chicks in the brooder under the heat lamp.  It turns out that Londo, our rooster, is a Blue Ameraucana, rather than a Black which means he has one black feather color gene and one white feather color gene.  We expected mostly black chicks (since we didn’t realize Londo had any white genes), but we’ve been pleasantly surprised to have black chicks, yellow chicks, one grey chick and two striped chicks.

Here is a close-up of one of the White Leghorn/Blue Ameraucana crosses.  We’re waiting until the wing tip feathers grow out to determine each chick’s gender.  The pullets (girls) will stay here and lay eggs, while the boys will go to a friend’s farm to be raised for meat.
The quality of the photos varies as I was learning how to take chick photos AND how to deal with the red of the heat lamp.  Lots of learning curves!

The chicks don’t need to eat or drink for the first 24 hours as they still have the yolk sac in their abodmens to give them nourishment  However, it’s best to give them food and drink as soon as possible so that they know how to eat and drink when the yolk sac is used up and they need those nutrients.  The transition from embryo that already has plenty of food to chick who eats and drinks is a big one and I was very relieved to see the little chicks drinking on their own.

Here is yesterday’s photo of all 23 chicks (from 31 eggs).  To keep the chicks from filling up on items that aren’t food, for the first 2 days, one covers the bedding with cloth and paper towels so that they have something with traction to walk on, but don’t eat the bedding.  This morning, they were all eating from the trough and drinking from the waterer, so I took up the toweling and they are now walking on pine shavings.

Spring is here!  We do have asparagus, although the season is starting slowly with this wet and cold weather.   But it’s warm and dry in the Workshop if you’d like to stop by and hold a baby chick!

With the longer days and a drier barnyard, the chickens are laying plenty of eggs!

As we have a mixed flock, we have three different egg colors.  The Leghorns​ lay white eggs, the Rhode Island Reds​ lay brown eggs and Pilgrim, our Barred Rock, lays beige eggs.​

Email us if you’d like to purchase eggs for Easter or other times during the year.  Our flock lives in a converted horse stall in the barn, has a large barnyard to roam and scratch in and eats a varied diet.  The chickens love visitors, especially, those bearing mealworms, so if you’d like to see how the chickens that produce your eggs are living, just email to set up a time to see them.

​No one has “gone broody” (that is, decided to sit on their eggs and hatch out some baby chicks), but Londo has been doing his job, so if I can borrow a friend’s incubator, baby chicks are possible.  Here’s Londo:

Unlike the laying hens, Londo is an Ameraucana chicken.  Hopefully, he will pass along a blue egg laying gene to his daughers.

Pilgrim, our Lead Hen, was not too fond of Londo when he first came here in November.  However, they seem to have ironed out their differences and are spending quality time together.  Once I have my friend’s incubuator, there won’t be very many beige eggs for sale until I have some Londo daughters!  Here is a photo of Pilgrim:

We’re looking forward to having several egg-based dishes for Easter this year.  If you’d like Pilgrim and her friends to supply you with eggs, let us know soon — there will be a lull when I put eggs in the incubator, but having little baby chicks will be fun for everyone!​

As we have slowly fixed up the barn, our goals have been for it to be a useful storage place and a shelter for livestock.
Since Hill Creek Farm is primarily a produce farm, the livestock needs to be fenced so that they don’t eat the produce (and plants!) we’re growing to sell.
Over the fall, Chris of Sandy Hill Construction, LLC, who has done most of our outbuilding work had some time, so we had him finish the third bay for goats.
Readers of this blog will remember that we have 8 chickens — which can be destructive enough to produce if they free-range, but nothing is as hungry of fresh, green growth as a few goats (never have just one goat — they are herd animals that need at least one buddy).  So, if we are going to get goats and have them share the barnyard with poultry, we needed a good fence.
Chris did some research and came up with a fence that should keep in chickens, turkeys and goats (the livestock we’d like to house in the barn).  There’s no point in doing a fence multiple times, so in November, Chris and his father, Tom, came out and put together this fence:

Note that there is no latch on the gate.  It’s held together by chains that wrap around the gate so that escape artist goats (and all goats are escape artists!) can’t undo the latch and help themselves to the herb garden beside the house!
Here’s how the fence looks from the front:

Experienced goat keepers will note that we’re not completely ready for goats yet.  The oak posts have to dry and get cut even, then a single wire electric fence line will be strung along the top of the fence and stone wall to keep the goats from climbing out and heading for the herb garden, front field, neighbor’s bushes, etc.  Chris will come back and do all that in the Spring, plus we’ll be taking out the random stones in the barnyard and grading it so that heavy rains don’t turn the area into a mud pit.

If you’d like Sandy Hill Construction to fix up your farm outbuildings or build a multi-purpose fence for livestock, you can contact them at  sandyhill_llc AT comcast.net​

However, the fence is sufficient to take down the green fencing outside the second bay where we keep the chickens.  Since we have more space, we could get a rooster so that the most productive of our 8 hens can experience motherhood.

After Pilgrim, our lead chicken, put up a personal ad on various Facebook groups, we found another small farmer here in East Coventry Township ​who had 5 roosters to choose from.  My cousin Ed and I decided we wanted one of the white-spattered ​Ameraucana roosters, so all four of us ran after those two roosters until we caught one.  This is what he looks like:

Continuing the tradition of naming livestock after characters from the Babylon-5 TV series​, I named him Londo, since the Centauri have multiple wives.

Londo was purchased in August as a chick from the Pughtown Agway​, so at only 4 months, technically, he’s a cockerel, rather than a rooster.  He’s thinking about crowing, but hasn’t done it yet.  He and Original Leghorn​ are becoming friends, but, Pilgrim, a Barred Rock, after a week and a half, is still suspicious of him.​  This is Pilgrim:

Hopefully, these crazy kids will one day (soon!) fall in love, or at least lust and we’ll have some cute little baby chicks in the Spring.
Meanwhile, Londo has decided to spend his nights on the tallest roost in the coop.  Here he is, keeping an eye on the flock in the morning:

Chicken politics keeps us all amused, but hopefully, we’ll have our own chicks in 2016 that will lay a variety of colored eggs.  Stay tuned for more chicken photos!

Our next fall task after the garlic was planted was to finish converting one of the horse stalls in the barn into a chicken coop for some laying hens.

We had just finished layering sand, shredded leaves and tiny wood chips in the bottom of the stall (the “deep litter” method of chicken keeping), when a friend who runs a farm animal rescue received an emergency call from Philadelphia.

Chickens are illegal in Philadelphia and these four 8-month old pullets had been “dimed out” to the authorities.  The owners were heartbroken — they had cared for the chickens since they were chicks and wanted them to have a good home.  So, they drove from Philadelphia to Barto and reluctantly gave them up.

At one time, anyone could keep chickens.  People like my PA Dutch grandfather kept chickens on the Iowa farm where he grew up and in the town of Mount Pleasant, PA that he moved to after he married my grandmother.

Unfortunately, he told me, “a wave of so-called ‘civic pride’ swept the towns and they took pride in that they ‘weren’t rural.’  And the biggest way they could prove they ‘weren’t rural’ was to ban chickens in the town.”

Supposedly, the Mt. Pleasant Town Fathers made a personal visit to my grandfather to let him know (supposedly with great glee) that his chickens would soon be banned and he would have to get rid of them.  “It was the stupidest law ever,” my grandfather said.

The Town Fathers may have gotten rid of my grandfather’s chickens, but to their great consternation, he refused to take down his chicken coop.  As a child, when we were working in his garden, he’d point to the chicken coop and say “One of these days, people are going to realize how good it is to have chickens around.  And they will let chickens in town again.  And on that very day, I will fill my coop with chickens.”

Unfortunately, that day never came for him — when he died the mid-1970s, his chicken coop was still standing, waiting for the chickens the Town Fathers wouldn’t let him have.  I’ve always loved the urban chicken movement on his behalf.

But I did take his words to heart. Whenever we looked at properties for our future farm, we never made an offer until I looked up the zoning codes for the municipality on PA Ecode and made sure I would be allowed to have chickens.  (We let several properties go, one as large as 4 acres, because chickens were not allowed.)

After a week in quarantine, our friend brought the chickens here. The best of the four is this Barred Rock who is friendly and easy to handle:

We also have a white Leghorn, who will probably always be flighty.

We also have two Rhode Island Reds, which are in the back left (smaller one) and front right (larger one)

Here’s the best I could get with all four of them together.  They had only been here an hour or so — it will be easier to take photos once they are used to their new coop.

Luke, our English Shepherd, seems very excited about the chickens.  He likes going to their stall and watching them peck and coo.  Once they are used to their coop, he’ll start learning to herd them so that we can use them around the farm to eat insects and weed seeds in season.

I’m excited too — and hopefully, my grandfather is happy that I finally have chickens, like any gardener or farmer should

The polar air has us finding excuses to work indoors.  Vir (top) and Galen (bottom) decided that snoozing in a warm spot until the weather changes is the best course of action!

Vir’s full name is Vir Catto, after Vir Cotto, a character in the Babylon-5 fictional universe.   His mother was a Philadelphia stray taken in by a friend. When the kittens came, we had an opening for another cat, so added Vir to the family.  His mother was a tiny thing, but due to the wonders of pre-natal nutrition, both Vir and his brother are very large cats!

Galen is named after the Greek physician and after a Technomage in the Babylon-5 universe.  He helped heal our hearts after our elder kitty, Lindsey Valen, died at 17 years old.   He was found in Bechtelsville, PA at about 4 weeks old with an upper respiratory infection and nursed back to health by the rescue society, Cat NAPS of Pottstown.  If you live in the area and are looking for a kitty companion or two, we highly recommend Cat NAPS.

Meanwhile, stay warm and be sure to snuggle with someone you love!