Eden learns about life on the farm!

I just got too busy to blog, and couldn't get back to it. Now I forget what day we did things, so the day-by-day event summary of Eden's visit is no longer in my memory bank. But I will relate events.

The first time Eden visited us, we had 6 chickens, 5 hens and one rooster. Now we have 42 chickens that are permanent residents, and 25 meat chicks on order, about 20 meat chickens in the freezer, and every few weeks we round up 6 or 7 roosters from a friend's farm for dog food.  She went with me to feed the chickens several times, and found out that it was a real production!
1. Prepare the chicken food: I prepare 3 buckets to take out to the chickens. One bucket full of brown rice, leftovers, crunched up egg shells, milk, leftover cat food, fat, etc. It makes a runny pudding-like mass that they love. Bucket two is their fruit. It's usually papaya that we get from the market garbage; they always have lots of overripe papaya. Sometimes during mango season they get mangoes. I cut it in thirds or fourths. Bucket three is filled with lettuce, bits of meat, bones, other vegetables, scraps, all cut up small. This preparation takes 30 min plus.
2. Take it down to the 5 pens and split it up between all the pens. The rice goes in the bowls, the papaya is laid out so they can eat it, and the other bucket gets thrown out by handfuls - lots of fun to watch them run for it!
3. Give layer pellets to all the pens, and spread scratch around in all the pens.
4. Collect eggs.
We do this twice each day. Yes, we love our chickens! Eden was a great help to have around for 5 days to help with this production.
She said one day, "I guess I'd like to see you guys butcher a chicken." We called up our friend, and asked her to lure some roosters into the coop, and we'd pick them up! It took two tries, but she called on Wednesday to report a bunch of roosters in the coop! We packed up the truck and headed on over. We had a large dog crate in the back of the pickup to put the chickens in, and we were ready to go!

I have to go to sleep now, so I will continue this (hopefully) tomorrow!

Sue