They are not only brothers, but they are the best of friends. You will never see one without the other a few feet away. We hatched them last Spring in a homemade incubator made from a cheap styrofoam cooler, a glass lid from a small aquarium and a lightbulb. We couldn’t believe it worked! We turned the eggs 3-5 times a day. It was tedious. But so cool!
Our homemade incubator and egg turning schedule was a success.
We hatched 3 boys and 1 girl.
Jerry and Beavis are the 2 remaining roosters from the 4. Rillo, the 3rd boy, got picked off by a hawk last summer. Beavis’ mom was a Cinnamon Queen hen and his dad is an Old English bantam rooster. Jerry’s mom is a Silver Laced Wyandotte with the same father. (We only had one rooster at the time) His name is Nacho. He’s the boss.
Nacho is the head rooster on this farm.
When Jerry was born, he had a severe vitamin deficiency from the 11 hours it took him to break from his egg. It generally only takes a couple of hours for a chick to hatch. So we had to give him vitamin water (Flintstone chewable vitamins crushed into a water paste) manually a few times a day.
Vitamin deficient baby Jerry.
He had badly curled toes on one foot and he would stare up at the heat light so tall that he’d fall on his back and be stuck there until one of us flipped him over. We were very worried about him. But our treatment helped and now he’s a regular dude with curled toes on one foot.
Beavis giving me sass as a youngster.
Jerry and Beavis spend every minute of the day together. They stay out later than most of the chickens, clucking and beeping as they scamper around looking for seeds that might have fallen from the bird feeders. They frequent our wrap around porch every day between 10am and noon, where they shout together.
We have really been getting into chicken “husbandry” this year. What exactly does that mean? Well, we have seen the egg shell color possibilities on Instagram and our working to expand ours. The chicken ladies on Instagram get real nerdy scientific with it and we’re both kind of obsessed with the possibilities.
Our current egg color selection. It’s a mini-rainbow!
Don’t get me wrong, we’re not taking our current ladies for granted! They do great work. We love the different shades of tan, white, pink and brown they give us. We just want to add a little more pizzazz to what we can offer our farmers market patrons. Because it’s fun. And we love pretty things.
Eggshell color is all about genetics.
So because of that we have researched chicken breeds and how to cross them to make different egg shell colors. We recently purchased Black Copper Marans, Cuckoo Marans and Welsummer chicks from Hoover’s Hatchery in Iowa to provide us with a dark chocolate egg…
Marans have a beautiful chocolate brown egg.
Aren’t they gorgeous?
For the blue eggs needed for our rainbow, we ordered 4 Easter Egger chicks. 3 females and 1 male. And we also purchased 8 Whiting True Blue eggs from a farm in Florida and 6 Cream Crested Legbar eggs from a farmer in Pennsylvania. We are currently incubating all 14 and they should be hatching within the next week
How many chickens is too many?
I know what you’re thinking, “that’s a lot of chickens!” But really it’s not going to be. Our coop is set up to more than accommodate the chicks we bought from the hatchery. Plus the hatching rate for successfully incubating eggs is only about 40%. So we’ll be lucking to 5 out of the 14 we incubated. We’re good on space, but I admit that I’m a certified chicken lady. That being said we have well over 30 chickens right now.
Egg husbandry chart for colors:
This shows how to cross chicken breeds to create fun egg colors.
As you can see; the process is fluid and there’s no guaranteed result, but that’s the fun of it! We will have special chicken runs built to facilitate this process. And we specifically bought a Black Copper Maran male, Cuckoo Maran male and an Easter Egger male. The breed that comes from crossing a dark brown layer with a blue layer is generally referred to as an Olive Egger, and the olive/green tint varies vastly.
Green eggs chart.
So there’s your crash course in the wild world of chicken breeding for egg colors. We will have dark brown and blue eggs added to our current colorful arrangement by late summer. And olive, green and mint colored eggs by next Spring. We will also be selling fertilized eggs for people who would like to incubate and raise their own special Oliver Eggers. Keep a lookout for us!
As Midwesterners, after struggling through blizzards and freezing temps all Winter, springtime is always welcomed with open arms. However, this Spring is extra special, because we now have a yard (5 acres of it) with copious amounts of garden space. And we are over the moon about it!!! At our apartment in Chicago, I only had a 4′ by 5′ area on our deck to use as my personal garden. I had just enough space to grow a couple pepper and tomato plants. But now our current setup is a lower vegetable/fruit garden of 150′ by 30′ and an upper herb/flower garden about 18′ by 18!’ I’ve always hoped to be able to put my green thumb to work!
150′ by 30′ garden?! Only in my wildest dreams!
Having this much gardening space is amazing. And because of the endless space opportunities, I went a little crazy on seed buying. We have some very pretty and unique plant seedlings growing in our indoor greenhouse right now. Tomatoes and peppers are taking up the vast majority of pods at the moment. Mainly because they are best started indoors before transferring outside, unlike our radishes, kale, mesculin greens, melons, arugula, corn, peas etc which are best grown from direct sowing.
100+ starter pods are sprouting!
Greenhouse sprouting success! 22 varieties of happy little tomatoes.
22 varieties of tomatoes
We have blue, tie-dye, green, chocolate brown, yellow, orange, pink, orange /red striped, purple of all sizes…the list is a lot longer. We’re so excited for you to see them! And we’re even more excited to sell them at farmer’s markets this summer! Here is just one of the 22 varieties that I’m super pumped about…
Tigerella tomatoes. These are going to be beauties.
We also have 7 bright and colorful varieties of belle peppers. Purple and chocolate varieties included, of course. Here’s one of my favorites…
Purple belle peppers; not only yummy but super pretty too!
We have 7 varieties of hot peppers. The shishito peppers are a personal highlight, I’ve been obsessed with them for over a year now! Shishito peppers are small Japanese peppers that have the sweetest/most pungent flavor, they taste like a belle pepper x 100, but they’re considered a hot pepper because 1 out of 10 is spicy. They’re so delicious, even if you get a hot one, which isn’t really that hot. I first tried them at Bangers & Lace in Evanston, IL. The head chef at the time, Justin Schaub, sautéed them and tossed them in with the fried cheese curds. The app was a real showstopper.
the color Purple looks great on food!
Not only do we have purple tomatoes and peppers but we have purple broccoli, kale, potatoes, cauliflower, green beans, Brussels sprouts, corn and tomatillos! We are not only growing delicious, organic food but we want it to be pretty food!
Life is not all about treats, cute faces and beautiful eggs when you’re a chicken mom. Oh and let’s not forget about chicks, and broody hens who surprise you with a new chick every now and then, and watching a sweet incubator hatching, and feathered mobs rushing your porch every morning…
Chickens can have health drama.
2 days ago, Floppy wasn’t up in the roosts at bedtime with her friends. She was kind of dazed, a little lethargic and very, overly people friendly. We knew something was off but we weren’t sure what. We have a checklist we go through when trying to figure out what’s wrong with a chicken. Is s/he pooping. What color is their comb. Can they walk. Can they stand. How’s their breathing. How do their eyes look. Those few questions narrow our course of action down significantly…there are 4 main concerns that we have when dealing with an oddly acting chicken.
Floppy, named after her awesomely floppy comb.
Is she egg bound?
Every once in a while, due to a calcium deficiency, stress, a rare double-yoked egg and sometimes illness, a hen will be unable to lay an egg. Which will kill them. Think about it, the egg is in there until you help her get it out. If you don’t, and she can’t, she will die. Our first hen loss was in this way. Penelope, she was one of the 9 original chickens that came with our property, courtesy of the previous owners. We worked for 3 days to help her, and she was working too. We gave her warm epsom salt baths to relax her, making sure her backend was submerged. We made a little bed for her, a little bigger than a nesting box with a towel over top to give her a relaxing dark place to sleep. We even applied Preparation H to her since she had been working so hard for so long, to help ease some of her local pain from pushing. We worked really hard, and so did she. But to no avail. The loss was particularly tough.
Could it be Marek’s Disease?
This is a viral disease of poultry, primarily chickens. It can cause partial or total paralysis of the legs, wings, and even neck, it creates tumors in the body (often near nerves which causes the paralysis), blindness and death. It’s spread through dander so it’s a serious concern for us. If one chicken has it, they all will have it. But just having the disease doesn’t mean they’ll show symptoms, therefore all new members of our flock are required to be vaccinated and we will no longer be taking in rescues due to learning about it. So on that note, the first thing we’d look for is leg, wing or neck paralysis. And go from there.
Chickens get colds and flus just like humans do.
Wheezing. If there’s any wheezing or one eye is cloudy, they’re going into our homemade chicken hospital to begin intravenous antibiotics. We have had amazing success with 1cc of Duramycin 72-200, twice a day. We’ve had Claire, Newman and Ruby all make a full recovery after 5 days of treatment. Which makes a chicken mom feel really good!
Could it be chicken crop issue?
A sour or impacted crop is always a concern. The crop is basically the holding area for food before it travels to the stomach. We’ll often comment on a chickens’ “food boob” being especially large after a big meal, it’s because the thing is packed with food waiting to be digested and they’ve clearly had an amazing meal. A sour crop happens when the crop is never fully emptied, which means there’s old food in there fermenting, which results in a bacterial / yeast infection within the crop. Sounds pretty gross, because it is. Long grasses, excessive amounts of bread and pasta, moldy food and inadequate amounts of grit can cause this.
Chicken Digestive Tract
Since our chickens free-frange, a lack of grit is not an issue, but undigestible pieces of manmade material is, little pieces of plastic or a rubber band, which is how an impacted crop can happen. A strange object is blocking the crop from being emptied. Chickens are nosy, they’ll peck at anything. This is why I give the chickens a large bowl of yogurt a couple times a month. To keep things moving, keep a steady flow of good bacteria going. And I don’t often give them bread or pasta, which doesn’t offer much nutrition anyway. An impacted crop will feel hard and the sour crop will feel soft, and the best time to check is first thing in the morning, if the chicken is lethargic, since the crop is emptied almost completely overnight.
And none of these applied to Floppy…
Her lethargy and death happened abnormally fast. We found her standing on the coop floor, not even facing a corner (which chickens do when they’re sick) just staring at us. She had no symptoms of anything, aside from just wanting to curl up into a ball. She seemed dazed. Her crop was a little mushy, but not overly so. We gave her a epsom salt bath anyway. She would not open her beak for anything. We placed her in a dark warm corner with a towel. And she died peacefully the next morning. We think she must’ve eaten something poisonous. She was only a year old. It was really sad, and strange. We buried her next to Penelope at the south end of our property.
We buried Floppy next to Penelope, our 1st major hen loss.
The keepers of Archie’s Acres went on a quick trip to Union Pier, Michigan on Wednesday. We stayed at a wonderful little B&B and slept in until 9:30am 2 days in a row!! What?!! We also visited Greenbush Brewery, Round Barn Winery, St Julian Winery and the Journeyman Distillery, with a quick stop at Three Floyds Brewery along the way. And of course we did a little antiquing! However, if you’re looking for a bargain, this is the not the area to shop. The prices reflect the large amounts of money that have been moving into the area for decades.
Michigan: The Third Coast
It’s obvious, and accurate, why they call this area the Third Coast, behind the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines of course, because it really is. The beaches have soft, white sand and are home to the largest freshwater dunes in the world. The sunsets are on par with anything you’d see on the West coast of the United States. That’s my personal opinion anyway, even after living in California. One of the definite highlights of our little trip was walking down to Lake Michigan to catch the sunset. Absolutely stunning!
Union Pier, Michigan Sunset. March 16, 2017
A 2 day trip was the perfect amount of time to relax and recharge, especially since we have so many adorable little faces waiting for us on the farm. On Friday afternoon we got home just in time to see the kittens start to open their eyes for the first time!
5 Day Old Kittens Sure Are Cute!
This is Lima’s #1 baby. We know this because this was the first little face that popped up on Monday, and the rest are black!
I’m an Egyptian Faiyumi hen. After it was pointed out that I look like a seagull, I got the name Steven Seagal, but I go by Steve. My sister, Chipmunk, and I were adopted from a family in LaGrange, IL and we love living at Archie’s Acres!
As I should have known; yesterday didn’t go at all as planned. No fence and no chicken coop blueprints were made. And no new seeds were planted. Because….Lima had her kittens!!!
When life hands you kittens…
5 adorable mewing little bundles of adorableness. My wife had been working out in our “cave” all day to keep Lima company. (The cave is what we call the typical “man cave.” It’s a pretty sweet setup with a wood-burning stove, kegerator, kitchen and living room. It’s a work in progress, as most things are around here but it’s coming along) Lima was moving from my wife’s lap to the cold floor to her lap to the floor, clearly antsy and uncomfortable. Then Lima curled up on the towel and bubble wrap that had been piled up to give her a comfy and waterproof (for the protection of the couch) area to nest. Lima doesn’t make a peep for a little bit, then all of a sudden there’s a tiny meow.
Ninja kittens!?
And there s/he is! Kitten #1! Less than 2 hours later, we have 5 adorable new lives on the farm! 2 of them have her tabby coloring. But the other 3 appear to be black. Which was a surprise since Lima had tried to bring a large, orange friend into our house a month or so ago. But he was clearly late to that party!
Rescue cats are awesome…
I gotta say, Lima is a tough girl. Never complains. Toughs everything out. She’s appreciative. She was purring while giving birth! It made our hearts melt a little. I was able to capture a pic of the first kitten but things got a bit intense and not picture-worthy. If you know what I mean. So for the next few days we’re giving Lima space to be a mom. But by this weekend! It’s on! I’ll have pics for you.
Kitten #1 right after her mom cleaned off her face.
…and welcome to this, the first blog post of many to come. It’s the Monday after Daylight Savings time and the morning after a surprise (but not really all that surprising) overnight 4+ inch snow here in the Midwest. The chickens hate it but our dog, Archie, LOVES all the fresh powder everywhere! He’s been visibly smiling all morning, no exaggeration, as he runs laps around our small 5 acre farm in the fresh snow.
I’m guessing you’ve figured out where the name Archie’s Acres came from…
Archie is our 1 year old (turned 1 on March 4th) Australian Cattle Dog/Border Collie mix. We found him on a farm in Miles, Iowa near the hatchery that we visited last Spring, my only regret was that the farmer wanted us to take him immediately, but he was only 5 weeks, so we made up an excuse to allow him to stay with his mom for an extra week but still, taking him away from his mom at 6 weeks broke my heart a little. But he’s our little bear and he’s a barrel of personality and obviously, a total mama’s boy.
At this very moment…
we have 24 snow-hating chickens shouting in the chicken coop. I mean, I get it, they don’t wear shoes so snow is probably pretty uncomfortable to walk on. They also can’t see any grass, bugs or worms because of the snow, so I get that aggravation there too. So my temporary remedy for their unhappiness will be to bring them a huge bowl of oatmeal after I finish this post.
Chickens looooooove oatmeal…
…and if there’s anything a certified chicken lady loves; it’s making her chickens happy. Along with the 24 cranky birds currently throwing tantrums in the chicken coop, we have 2 injured chickens resting in a makeshift rehabilitation center in our garage. One of our best layers, Brownie our Isa Brown hen, injured her leg and is now confined to our cat’s travel carrier. She’s eating and drinking and in good spirits, she’s probably also really enjoying being warm and away from the snow. About 2 feet across from her is Newman, our lone Blue Laced Red Wyandotte rooster, he also has a busted leg. Chickens are very social creatures so there is something comforting about them having each other to recover with, not that I’m a fan of having 2 injured chickens, but it’s always easier to have a friend.
There is a such thing as a roost being too high…
I’m realizing now that the roosts in the chicken coop are too high off of the ground, they’re a good 10 feet high, the previous owners built them this way and since we had no idea what we were doing, being city dwellers and all, we just assumed they were just fine. So this past week has been all about building chicken ladders and ramps for the bigger birds to safely get down from the roosts in the morning. The drop is especially rough when they fly down out of excitement, which is basically only when I enter the coop with a treat. Because they know what it means if they see one of their humans holding a bowl!
Springtime is chick-time!…
So of course we also have 20 2-3 week old baby chicks in our homemade brooder in the garage. The brooder is a 6 foot tall wood wardrobe with 2 heat lamps inside. These babies were hand-picked from 2 different hatcheries in Iowa based on their breed’s egg color (in this case, they either lay blue or chocolate brown eggs), the rareness of the breed, their genetic broodiness and finally, some were picked to add a little unique coloring to the flock. As we approach farmer’s market season, it’s become important to us to offer a rainbow variety of egg colors since we discovered the vast color palette of farm fresh egg colors!
Chicken eggs come in a rainbow of colors…
To put it normally, there are so many awesome, natural egg tints and tones that exist in nature and that’s just so so cool! And if we think they’re THAT cool, other people need to see them too! So on that note…we are also currently incubating 14 eggs that I purchased and were shipped from a farm in Florida and a farm in Pennsylvania. These chickens will lay the most beautiful shade of blue/teal egg, naturally. Hoping for hens, of course, but considering our hatching luck in the past, the egg genders will be 3:1 roosters. But we’ll make it work no matter what the outcome because the thought of giving life to these sweet little birds makes me happy.
Our current egg color selection. It’s a mini-rainbow.
Our barncat is about to become a momcat…
Oh and on that note; we currently have our barncat, Lima, trapped in a makeshift delivery room in our garage. She is days, hours even minutes away from giving birth to what we guess are 4-5 kittens! She’s such a sweet cat. And if I’m being completely honest, she’s the nicest cat that we have! And she found us! When she arrived on our front porch last summer she was no bigger than a kitten herself, even though she had clearly just weaned or was still nursing kittens. She’s very small, her height seems to have been stunted, we’re guessing because of malnutrition, but regardless, she’s the nicest little girl. So cuddly and affectionate and appreciative. She will happily watch tv with us on the couch while our 2 actual indoor cats, Oscar and Tika, would rather not be touched and certainly not cuddled!
Our housecats are jerks…
Don’t get me wrong, we love our 2 cat babies that we brought into this marriage, but they are spoiled. So Lima is now more of a farmhouse cat than a barncat, which is a good and bad thing, we enjoy her cuddly company so much that we’ve taken her away from her work of being a master mouse hunter! So we’re looking forward to assigning posts to a couple of her kittens. One will be on mouse patrol in the chicken coop and the other will live in the garage. They’ll pay for their room and board with hard, fun work that they enjoy, which when you think about it, is a wonderful setup!
So back to the to-do list for today…
We currently have about 80 seed starter pods budding in our kitchen. We have a really fun variety of multi-colored peppers and tomatoes planted and prospering at the moment. We also have about 140 pods waiting to be used. But if I’m being honest, last night’s snow and the cold temps this week are giving us an urge to hold off on starting anything more at the moment but it’s the Midwest. Next week it will feel like spring. And then the week after that it will snow one more time. And then maybe after that it will be Spring for good. But maybe not. My wife is from NE Iowa and I’m from Chicagoland, so we know the games the weather plays. But to answer my own question, yeah we need to start some more seeds today. They need a 6 weeks head start before going into the ground anyway.
Pallet chicken coops are awesome…
We also need to finalize our pallet chicken coop and garden fence project by planning out the layouts and drawing up blueprints! We took about 30 pallets from a local tile shop with the intention of building a fence around our herb garden and a small chicken coop. As part of our future chicken breeding program, the four roosters that are currently 2 weeks old, will need to be separated from the hens in about 6 weeks and live in a bachelor pad.
Rooster bro time is important.
If there are no ladies around, they will live happily with each other bro-ing it up, watching sports and drinking beer like bros do. However, if they’re with ladies, they will fight each other to the death for alpha status. And we need these beautiful boys to be healthy and available for egg business this fall. There’s a very cool science about their specific breeds and uniqueness that I’ll explain later. And the roughly 2 foot tall garden fence will be to keep the rabbits and the chickens away from our herbs!
Well, we should probably get to work on today’s farm to-do list, and one of us should probably go check on Lima in the delivery room! Again, Welcome to Archie’s Acres!
$614 later, in the state of Illinois, we are officially a business! Future logo, below? Maybe. Archie to the right. Nellie to the left.
Below: is a pic of Archie in his reflective vest last Fall. He wears this vest during legal hunting weekends to prevent any possible mistaken identity issues that could happen if a hunter had been drinking all day. Hey, you can’t be too careful!
