Enfarminated
On Friday I moved into a relatively comfy one-bedroom flat on a fairly derelict lifestyle block just out of Awahuri in the Manawatu.
When I was a kid I used to go to summer holidays at my grandparents' place by the beach and they used to refer to the couple of days that it takes you to become "beachified". I have been here in Awahuri for nearly a week and it's taken me this long to dig out my gumboots.
One of the fantastic things about finally being on a patch of land we can grow stuff on, is being able to compost our food scraps.
Today I took over the care of the chickens. This is my introduction to farming at the shallow end. I now have all the responsibility that one would give a 10-year-old. Currently there are 6 hens, 2 roosters, one half grown chick with no comb yet, and about 4 babies and they are all Rhode Island Reds.
Today I moved the brood hutch because it had a dead chick and a few rotten eggs in it so none of the hens were going in there. There is a good chance that the clutch of chicks are being picked off by cats due to the chicks not being locked in the hutch for long enough.
Now that I am taking care of them hopefully we will have a little more success at keeping them safer. I may need to do a bit of maintenance on the main hen house itself because some of the nesting boxes have no bottoms, the house is not secure enough to hold chicks, and the straw needs to be replaced at the moment and I think their water could do with a good clean-out. It's all a bit tragic.
I am armed with a few people I can ask, and the mighty wisdom of the internets, to make sure we have healthily eggily factories and leet enfarminating skillz.
When I was a kid I used to go to summer holidays at my grandparents' place by the beach and they used to refer to the couple of days that it takes you to become "beachified". I have been here in Awahuri for nearly a week and it's taken me this long to dig out my gumboots.
One of the fantastic things about finally being on a patch of land we can grow stuff on, is being able to compost our food scraps.
Today I took over the care of the chickens. This is my introduction to farming at the shallow end. I now have all the responsibility that one would give a 10-year-old. Currently there are 6 hens, 2 roosters, one half grown chick with no comb yet, and about 4 babies and they are all Rhode Island Reds.
Today I moved the brood hutch because it had a dead chick and a few rotten eggs in it so none of the hens were going in there. There is a good chance that the clutch of chicks are being picked off by cats due to the chicks not being locked in the hutch for long enough.
Now that I am taking care of them hopefully we will have a little more success at keeping them safer. I may need to do a bit of maintenance on the main hen house itself because some of the nesting boxes have no bottoms, the house is not secure enough to hold chicks, and the straw needs to be replaced at the moment and I think their water could do with a good clean-out. It's all a bit tragic.
I am armed with a few people I can ask, and the mighty wisdom of the internets, to make sure we have healthily eggily factories and leet enfarminating skillz.