You can't call this better timing than this....
Well, after our long four day weekend, as John took of Monday for vacation time, He decided to work on building our nesting box for our chickens. We built a community box since it was going to be easier and more efficient on keeping it cleaner better. We finished it that afternoon and I put many layers of straw down. We have not gotten a handle or lock for the box yet but that will be soon. Well... a couple of days ago we have had a VERY loud hen that seems to squawk for many hours in the morning and JUST would not STOP. She was acting like she wanted out of her coop and paced up and down the fence line. She would finally settle down after a couple of hours. I figured she wanted her daily scrapes from us (corn on the cob, and garden veggies). I figured it is several week before we'll get our first egg as they are only 17 wks old.
Well... the box got finished on Monday and Tuesday evening the girls went in to play with them and I hear Ashley and Hannah running in the house saying.... "THERE'S EGG'S IN THE BOX". I just dropped what I was doing and thought, it's too early for them to start laying, have I counted wrong. Sure enough as I opened the box from outside, there were TWO Beautiful white eggs, small ones. I just ran in the house got my camera and wanted to embrace our first eggs in our memory. The girls wanted to hold them and I did not want them to drop them, it was hard for them to contain themselves.
WOW... Our first Two golden/white eggs and I'm SOO excited for opening that box everyday now to see those eggs in there and to finally have a taste of my raised chicken eggs. I came home today and found two more eggs in the box so there is two of my four laying now.
We have named our chickens finally but we can only tell one for sure since we put food coloring on their backs.
Red--- Trixy (the only one who still has the color left on).
Blue--- Sarah
Orange--- Hannah (who named that one?)
Green --- Beauty
We are having predator problems now and we are seeing opossum's nightly lately. On the 6th (Sunday) we had a BBQ at our house with bunch of our church friends over and a few people stayed late to see some of our fireworks show. As John went back to show our coop to a friend John noticed there was movement in their run area and saw a tail hide behind a wooden spool we put in. John realized that it was an opossum, baby one at that, and it slipped in by praying the wires open a little bit and jumped down. Now this opossum was too small to kill the chickens, it was after the corn on the cob's we left in there. To put it lightly, John and the friend stabbed it and it was lying wounded on top of the fence. We came back later to dispose of the body and it had disappeared from the fence. It must have slowly rolled itself down and crawled away. It wasn't going to live much longer since its insides were hanging out. I decided to get my dad's live animal trap since my chickens are in danger now.
My chickens are my pets and I will do whatever it takes to protect them. I have a shovel right by the back door as my weapon if I see any predators in the backyard. I'm not afraid to smack one (as I have already killed one baby that was in our garage). I had no problem on doing it. I will not be one of those sissy girls who send their man to do all the killing.
I uploaded pictures and they are coming out in code so I can't easily write my descriptions about the photo's, so you will have look and figure it out yourself this time.
Our east side of our house, first place where we started. That took all day Sunday and one hour on Monday.. We are doing the work ourselves with help with family and friends. We are using hardy board to reface our house.
During mid day yesterday... Look the disaster zone..
About finished by the end of the day yesterday...
What our back of the house looks like right now. We are replacing bottom of the boards all the way to the end of the house since there is dry rot from that white line and bellow. That's me working on closing the chicken coop up more with wire. As we have caught four baby opossums so far, as we drowned them. We are still needing to get the mommy who we hear some night's . We also have seen raccoons too. When we do catch the bigger ones, we still don't know what to do with them yet. One thing for sure, there're not getting released alive. As you can see in the picture we have a censer light that tells us if any predators come close. Our bedroom is that window right across from the coop, so we have our window open and can hear things well.
