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A good shot of most of the starters! They are growing like weeds!
(I promise they aren't actually weeds though!) |
Isn't that about how long it's been since I last got a post up? I have the pictures to show for it, just ended up not having the time to get the post done (or when I did have the time it was always on a Thursday or something so I would feel like it would be two posts too soon). That being said, I'm not promising to post every Friday at this point. It seems as though, even though they were always a slow day for me in the past) Friday has become my new "it" day. Everything falls on a Friday lately (which has kept me away from updating you all with adorable chicken/garden photos/updates. Our little chicks have been making some crazy changes! It's actually really amazing to watch them grow and loose their "fluff". At four weeks old (geez I can't believe how fast time has been flying) they are full of spunk and their own individual
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| Coco ready for her picture to be taken 10 days ago! |
personalities. We have one that adores human attention and will do anything she can to perch on fingers or get loved/held, one that wants nothing to do with us unless we have treats (there's always one, isn't there?), and one that is a bit of a ring leader and a camera hog (she is very happy to pose each week). Everything with the chicks has been easier than we expected (but of course it felt like we found every problem website or discouraging website in our preparation process). When the chicks hit two weeks old, we did have a problem develop! One of our chicks (we're still working on names for all but Coco) started to have a toe curve! We tried everything we could find online to try and help her, but
between her managing to remove any "shoe" we placed on her and her behavior when we finally got one to stay on (she threw a very "life is meaningless" fit and plopped down and refused to move for hours until we removed it) to extensive research and observation, it's going to stay with a curve. Thankfully, we weren't the first ones to have this problem and we found some amazing answers from the folks at backyardchickens.com and our
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| The three chicks plotting escape today! |
fears were lessened (but of course we were still worried that she would be one of the chickens that would never learn to walk correctly or perch with it). As things stand now, she's adapted quite well! (This is the chicken that loves pets and interaction.) She was the first one to master the "baby" perch we put in the box to help them learn to perch and she's the first one to successively fly out and perch on the side of the box (they are at that point where they try to escape when I'm tending them/taking pictures and remove the screens over their box). Originally we had the chicks
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| One of the baby tomato plants growing! |
downstairs in our basement (it was easier to keep the cats out of there) and our plants in our spare room, but with the addition of a grow light (my father-in-law was kind enough to give us two that he didn't need anymore) we needed the additional space of the basement for the plants! So, the chicks are now upstairs in the spare room and the plants are chilling downstairs under a huge grow light (we haven't set up the second one yet)! Moving the chicks and the plants to their new respective homes was not an easy challenge though (there may have been cross words between M and I >.>). We needed to figure a way out to move the plants in the tray lids (what we had on hand when we started) safely without the "trays" breaking. In the process of figuring this out, there was a communication error between us and it resulted in some pretty battered tomato plants. In the long run we used a heavy duty storage bin lid to carry the not so sturdy trays downstairs (we moved the plants first because it was easier to find places to temporarily store them than it would have been to do so with the chickens...with
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| The rosebush |
cats...and dogs). Bringing the chicks upstairs was actually a good deal easier than I expected and went smoothly. I think the chicks prefer it a great deal. They've learned that if they want attention, they only need to make a big chirping stink now and not only with the dogs go crazy (they are used to defending the big chicks outside) but we'll come running in to see what's going on. The plants are doing well in the new conditions (well we did have to open a vent down there to add extra heat since the heat bulb went up with the chicks). It hasn't been a week since we've moved them there, so I guess time will be the true test. I know the plants were doing well with the fluorescent lights we had them with, so I'm eager to see the difference a true grow bulb will make. The rose bush really seems to like it! We've also added a grape vine plant to our little collection, but there isn't any growth on it yet (we just planted it a few days ago to be fair though). In other news, we've been working with the cottage laws here in Michigan and doing a good amount of selling. So far, the jams are popular and the breads are well loved! The eggs are by far the most popular! This seems like such a small post to catch up on three whole weeks! It's been the type of busy that keeps you busy but you don't have much to talk about! I did design a boxer pattern for M, but I'll do a post about that all on it's own right! We'll see you all at the end of this week or next!
