Lavender Araucana comes home and the girls get a new home

Last weekend, after 2 nights of no Araucana we had already said our goodbyes-after all, no one feathered walks through the valley of the shadow of death and lives to tell the tale. Even the fur men (Doza & Diesel) shy away from it. Husband was minding his own business on the perimeter of our yard weeding or something, and lo and behold he spots a certain Lavender Araucana that used to belong to the Manor on our henny girl fat farm. He jumps the fence and recruits a passer by to scoop up the dastardly beast and plopped her back into the pen. The other ladies huddled around eager to hear stories about what went on 'on the other side of the fence'. N.B. In truth, they had actually forgotten who this henny was and thought she was a new intruder to be hen pecked to the bottom of the order.

While Miss Araucana was gone we thought it high time to improve their surroundings. Thanks to Bunnings and the clever Husband we purchased an aviary and adjusted it to suit our hennies.

Doza-foreground- and Diesel-the white dog- checking out the new digs.

Dark Browny inspecting her quarters.

 

 

 

They get a flash new house but they don't get it levelled.

 

 

Winter project update

As I re-quaint myself with my blog I realise that I left my 'Winter chicken egg-laying project un-updated.

My winter project was to see if I could keep my egg production up throughout the winter days. Now we don't get winters here like America sees ->check out Ohio Farm Girl for what REAL winters are all about. However, our hennies have been born and bred in our climate so our cold is their cold.

My idea was not to falsify light for them, tricking them into thinking that the days were still long, my idea was supplement their diet to see if this made a difference. I have read a few theories on Hennies and their winter egg lay-off (pun intended). One theory talks about during winter and moulting periods, hens need all of the nutrients they are getting from their food therefore not leaving anything left over to create eggs with.

I'm not a huge fan of falsifying light hours as I think if the hens need a break then they need a break. We are just a small household so if we don't get eggs then so be it.
On top of their current egg-layer pellets I started giving them warm, milky porridge twice a week. They LOVED that! I also gave them sunflowers seeds. I have read that 1TSP per bird per fortnight is plenty. I probably gave it to them once a week.

Well it worked. It worked wonders. My hennies stayed nice and fat and the 3 of them (Mrs. Purebred Lavender Araucana doesn't lay at the best of times) kept laying throughout winter. We had a few days here and there where we would get less eggs or  noone would lay at all but we had a steady supply.

In fact, we havent seen a halt in the egg laying at all until this Summer, dark browney and light browney decided they wanted to hatch out some eggs. We don't have a rooster.

This, is another story for another day.