Rudi Is Gone And Ginger Is A Rooster

Yesterday was a very interesting, yet also very sad day.

About 4 months ago, we set up a chicken coop and run in our yard. Over a period of several weeks, I tried to collect specific types of chickens. At two different feed stores, I had my name down for Americaunas and gold wyandottes.

All of the chickens I would get would have to be pullets, which means they would have to be females. Some people at the hatcheries where these chickens are hatched, are skilled in determining if a chicken is a female or male. But, there is a little bit of room for error.

The first three 'pullets' I got were a Rhode Island Red and two barred rocks. The Rhode Island Red was named 'Ginger'.

This is a picture of me holding 'Ginger'

The chickens were only a couple of days old when I got them. Ginger loved to come out of the tub. She was very selfish and would try to be first. 

Two weeks later, I got five more chickens. One was a New Hampshire Red, another was a black sex link. Then I got two Americaunas and one gold wyandotte. Hopefully, all these chickens would be pullets. But there is about an 8% chance that you could end up with a rooster.

Ginger seemed to be developing much faster than the other chickens were. She probably was the oldest, so I gave her some room for that. 

About two months later, Ginger had a nice red comb on the top of her head. Not too long after that, she started getting wattles, I think they are called. 

Around this time, a rooster ended up in our yard. After a couple of weeks of this rooster being here, we found out that someone had dumped him into the neighbor's yard, and their roosters chased him into our yard. He never left our yard, so we adopted him. We named him 'Rudi'.

We liked Rudi a lot because he was good protection from the hawks. As the girls got older, and used to their coop and run, we let them play outside more. Rudi didn't have a house to stay in though. He stayed in the bushes. Then he started roosting on the barn fence at night.

Yesterday morning Rudi never came for his morning feeding. I went out to look for him and found him. It was terrible. At first, I didn't recognize him. It looked like someone deflated him. I could tell it was him because the feet were sticking up. 

I am pretty sure a raccoon got him either early Sunday evening or Monday morning. It was very sad.

As my husband was burying him, the neighbor's peacocks came over and watched. It was like having a memorial service for him. He will be greatly missed, not only by us, but also by his peacock friends next door.

Meanwhile, as each day goes by, we are more and more convinced that Ginger really is a rooster. Yesterday, the final decision for that came about. 

As I let the chickens out to play, well, I noticed Ginger, let's say, he is now sexually mature and actively looking for a female chicken to be his partner. In this case, his selected partner was one of the barred rocks. He tried a couple of different times today, with the barred. 

We know now that Ginger is really a rooster. Or something is severely wrong with him. 

Ginger will be good at replacing Rudi for helping protect the girls from the hawks. We also have the peacocks to help as well as the neighbor's turkeys. 

I will keep the name 'Ginger' on him though. But that means we will get less eggs for the next six years. Glad I didn't count my chickens before they hatched!

I Didn't Expect This To Happen!

There must be some kind of learning curve for raising Chickens. Whatever it involves, I must be missing something.

I came up with the brilliant idea of training the chickens to go into the run where they will be secure, by coming out with a yellow cup filled with dried mealworms. My plan worked for a while.

Just when I thought the chickens would be all excited about the time of day when the worms would be offered, either they changed their minds or lost interest in the worms.

I managed the other day, to get 7 of the chickens back into the run using the worm bribe. But Esther had a mind of her own. She either doesn't care for dried meal worms, or was so absorbed in whatever it was she was doing that she didn't notice.

I thought I could outsmart her by putting the cup holding the dried worms under her beak. Nothing happened.

My next thought was to get her into the coop first. So, today I just picked her up from her dust bath and put her in the coop. Of course, I am hoping that all the others see the cup holding the worms and go into the run when I put the cup inside the run.

It didn't happen today. Since Esther was inside the run, I had to keep the door shut or else she would find her way back outside the run and I would have to figure out how to get her back in. Try getting 7 chickens back into the run with the door shut!

Usually Ginger is the first one to come in and eat the worms. She is a selfish chicken! But this time, I caught her and put her inside the run. And this is what happened to my arm after I got her put in.

I didn't realize anything had happened until I saw all this blood on my arm. I got out some melaleuca essential oil and put it on. Since I was in a hurry, I couldn't tend to it. 

It's not that the cuts were painful or anything like that. But some of them were puffy. When I got back home, I cleaned the cuts up and put coconut oil, more melaleuca oil, and oil of oregano on the cuts. 

Ginger. My favorite chicken. How could she do this to me????

Ginger is one of the first chickens I got. She is, at this time,
the biggest. The 2 Barred Rocks are about the same age,
and they are almost as big as Ginger. Ginger is the one with
the big red comb. And we all know that it is possible
that Ginger might really be...George.

New Baby Chickens - Dual Purpose Animals

We have the cutest little critters in a bin right now, and we have already built a house for them. All 8 of them have names and they are all (hopefully) females. They are the chicks that we bought from feed stores in the last 3 weeks.

Why are chickens important? How do they help with gardening?

Chicks can do some really good, helpful things for the gardens. They can till gardens and they can also produce chicken manure which is great food for plants.

The neighbors have chickens and those little birds are over here all the time. They love our yard. I am glad they come over and I provide food for them to eat while they are here. They also serve as a natural insecticide as they spend hours looking for bugs in the ground. At first, that sounded gross to me. I'm eating an animal that eats bugs. So, therefore I am eating bugs. Well, maybe in a sense I am, but bugs provide good protein for the chickens.

The chickens also till our yard. There are places where the soil has been seriously turned over. I have to give the credit to the neighborly chickens for that.

I just used up a bag of chicken manure that I had. Probably won't have to buy that anymore!

Ginger, our Rhode Island Red

The chickens already have a section of the yard fenced off for them. They can roam that part of the yard and mow our lawn for us! The grass will be good for them to eat.

What a neat cycle in nature God made. We all are made from the 'dust of the ground'. We eat plants that grow out of the ground. Chickens do as well. Then they have the whole yard to use for their bathroom and the grass gets fertilized by their waste products. That helps the plants to grow and we eat those plants and the cycle continues.

This will be their new home in a couple of weeks. The weather needs to warm up some more and they need to have a full body of feathers to keep them completely warm before they can live here.

Of course, I almost forgot, one of the best things chickens give us is their eggs. Eggs are full of nourishment. Don't listen to the Old School of nutrition that says eggs give hardening of the arteries. New studies have been done and have found how powerful the nourishment is that we get from eggs.

Most eggs are either white or brown. Some are speckled. I opted for getting two chickens that will give either blue eggs or blue/green eggs. Some eggs are large. A few are huge. And then some are just small or medium. Most of the eggs I will get will be large.

There is a 98% chance that all my chicks are females. And they don't need a rooster to produce eggs, unless one wants fertilized eggs.

Huge Sweet Potato

I was digging in the garden today and felt a rather large sweet potato buried in the dirt. Actually, I was pulling out weeds by the roots, and found this sweet potato. Had to get a shovel to dig it out with.

As I work with cleaning out the garden bed, I get a little produce here and there. Here is a compilation of what I collected recently.

Am ready to pull up some of the carrots. I planted 3 different colors. So far the yellow has definitely done the best. The purple did ok. The beets really didn't grow well, for some reason.

I have a few snow pea plants that are bearing fruit right now. Not much though. What can you expect from 4 or 5 little plants?

Lemon tomatoes are growing ok. They had brown spots on them, but that might be due to the cold weather we have had this year. The plants made it through the cold, but the tomatoes that were on the plants did not do all that great.

While I was at Tractor Supply yesterday, I picked up some strawberry plants. Most of the last strawberry plants I had died. I have 2 or 3 that are still alive. What I didn't realize was that in the package (which is labeled non-GMO), there are 20 strawberry plants. Now I have to find places to plant them.

All of the squash plants I planted died. They all seemed to have some kind of virus and all appeared to die from the same thing. I planted cucumbers in a new garden bed and will see how they do.

Today's Garden Produce In Winter

We were gone for 5 days last week, and I didn't have much time to cater to the gardens. But, I went out yesterday and picked some things out of the garden.

A couple of small ears of Dakota Black Popcorn, A couple of ears of flint corn, a paprika, and a small variety of tomatoes.

Wade's Flint Corn, Black Dakota Popcorn, Lemon Tomatoes,
Blue's Fahrenheit Tomatoes, Paprika, Green Zebra Tomatoes,
and Purple Jalapeno. 

  The papayas are still green and we will have to pick them if a freeze comes.

   Hey, I have a plan that may work to protect the chickens that I will have one day. We have a hawk here who would love to eat chickens. I have seen feathers from birds on the ground. But, I have a plan. In the area where we will keep the chickens, I will plant my papaya plants that are in pots. I will put a wire from one plant to another that will appear somewhat invisible to the naked eye, unless you know to look for it. I know it won't be a 100% safety net, but it will help. Plus, there will be enough space between the papayas that the sun will still be able to shine through.

   There is this really cool device that you can get that helps scare animals away, but it only works at night time. It doesn't need batteries as it works by solar power. It is called 'Nite Guard'. I have a couple of them already.


   As soon as the sun goes down, a red light starts flashing. The directions say to have it at the eye level of the animal that one thinks would be a predator. This product has a fairly good rating. It even helps to keep burglars away!!

   The product 'Nite Guard' (above) is an affiliate link. This simply means that if you click on that link and order anything from amazon.com through that link, amazon.com will give me credit for the order. There is no extra charge for the customer. Thank you for your support.