All is cruising along nicely at the Crack of Dawn Farms. We’ve been in a bit of maintenance mode for the most part. All 6 of the “big girls” are laying, and we are anticipating the four “chicks” to start laying really any time now (they are almost 6 months old now!). It is REALLY nice to not be buying eggs. I haven’t bought bread in a while either, and have really enjoyed using these farm fresh eggs in my bread. In fact, we are considering a plot of wheat (likely winter wheat since we won’t have things prepped until Fall), but that’s a story for another time.
Atlas is almost 8 months old, and he is starting to mellow – a bit. BUT, he keeps it all interesting. Just when we were really getting into a maintenance mode, he decided to start going under the chicken fence into their yard. Blocked his entrance one place, he found another. Finally, we put up some hot wire at the weakest link. We decided to use a polycord-type of rope/wire (it’s actually a horse/pony fencing) instead of traditional wire thinking it would be more visible, and he would be better about staying off it once he recognized the zing. All was working well, until he decided one night – while it was off – to chew through it.
So now, we have replaced the lower part with actual wire wire, so he moved to a non-electrified part to go under. We came home from Ryan’s tennis practice Wednesday morning to find him standing IN the chicken yard. Fortunately the chickens have caught on to his reindeer games, and they just scoot to the coop.
We spent some time with him today while the chickens were out in the big yard, and he is doing much better about chasing to play. But, the instinct is still there and he requires CLOSE supervision when they are all out together.
All this to say, I can see that in a year or so Atlas will probably be ready to “live” with his chickens, but until then we’ll also be extending the electric wire (real wire!) all the way around the chicken yard to deter unsupervised visits.
As a compensation for the lag in posts, I’m going to end with a bunch of farm pics from the interim. Spring is coming, y’all. We’re trying for a bigger garden, so I doubt the posts will be super frequent! 🙂
Until next time… Happy farming!
Wendy