Chicks!

After 22 days wait, the chicks started hatching! You read so many contradicting things on the internet and so much information about what can go wrong that I had almost convinced myself that none were going to hatch and I'd have to buy some day-old chicks to sneak into the nest so that the whole project wasn't a failure and so that Lucy the hen didn't feel bad... But finally, they arrived!

Yesterday when we went up there were only three chicks and two of the eggs had cracks where the others were trying to peck their way out. The yellow chick was still a bit wet and sticky so I think it had hatched just before we arrived.

Today when we went up, there were six chicks!  four black, one white and one yellow. Out of seven eggs, (there were eight at the start but one disappeared, I think maybe she ate it!) six hatched so I think we did pretty well.  The other egg I've left in there for another day or so just in case but there are no cracks so I think it's unlikely it will hatch.

We moved the hen and her chicks into a new enclosure under the shelter and at ground level so the chicks cant fall out and although they dont walk about much yet, they are eating chick food and seem quite lively. I can fit four in my two hands easily, they're so tiny!  We got a new water feeder and filled it with small stones before puting water in because I read that they can easily fall in and drown.

Seemingly there's no way of knowing if they are girls or boys until they lay an egg or start cockadoodling so for the meantime they will all be kept together, growing and fattening in their enclosure until we see who's destined for which role in the future.  For now though, we'll just enjoy them as new pets!

The Birds and The Bees!

I know I talk about the chickens alot! Anyone who hasn't had chickens probably thinks I'm mad and those who have, could well think the same, but they really never cease to amaze me!  Although growing up I had a fair amount of contact with the countryside and farms I never really paid much attention to what was going on around me and from the questions people ask us about our hens, I can tell I wasn't the only one who didn't know anything about the birds and the bees, or rather poultry and apiculture!

Firstly it didn't make any sense to me that hens can lay eggs every day without ever coming into contact with a cockrel - but they do, it seems very pointless to me and a lot of effort on their part (not that I'm complaining!).  Also they hardly seem to eat anything compared to how much they poo and then on top of that an egg a day has to come from somewhere, it's a real mystery to me how that works. I read the little book from the National Trust about keeping hens which was great, explaining all the science behind things and teaching us how to be responsible hen owners. I thought I had it all sussed until one of the hens went all weird and stopped eating and just stayed inside, sitting on the eggs and biting me when I tried to move her.  Through my conscientious studies of the little hen book, I recognised this as broodiness. This is considered by the book to be an unusual thing in laying hens as the maternal instinct is pretty much bred out of them so that they will continue to be loyal egg producers all year round.  The book says that broodiness is generally a BAD thing which should be discouraged.

Intrigued by the whole thing and with the plan to buy a couple more hens anyway at some point soon, we decided to go against the recommendation of the chicken bible and see what happens. We borrowed a cockrel from a friend and after his week of wild parties with the other girls, we started collecting their eggs to slip under the broody hen who up until that point was absolutely focused on what she considered her important task of keeping unfertile (and sometimes imaginary) eggs warm.  We moved her to a solitary, improvised 'maternity ward' with eight (hopefully) fertile eggs collected over three days but all tucked under her on the same day (so that they should all hatch at once. If not, she might abandon the eggs at the sign of the first chick) and she got to work organising and warming the nest straight away.

Seemingly hens can lay fertile eggs for up to three weeks after just one 'intimate moment' with a cockrel but that until the eggs are warmed steadily and consistently, they wont develop. She has to decide to sit on them and she'll only do that when she wants to, it has nothing to do with the cockrel, some hens never sit on eggs. That's why I decided this was a chance we shouldn't miss! Eggs can lie there for days, fertile, waiting for a hen to incubate them but once she's on, she has to stay on or it's all over, the chicks die half formed.   Our hen seems to know this as she wont even come out to eat or drink. I put food in her 'ward' every day (avoiding her sharp beak) and she eats as if she were starving but refuses to come outside.  In the wild I think she would have starved by now.  I don't really understand how that works, although much of the time she seems to be in a kind of trance, like they go into at night, not asleep but very slow and starey, so maybe she saves energy that way.

We're now two and a half weeks into the three week incubation period, so this weekend, if all goes well we should have some chicks hatching. I have read that the success rate is fairly low without an incubator and especially with laying hens so I'm trying not to get too excited about it. It'll be brilliant if it works though! Cant wait!

Bees seem altogether even more amazing than hens and I did in fact buy a bee bible too from the National Trust but I'll wait until we get bees to go into all the details on here!

So finally, I can say with some confidence that I'm starting to understand a bit more about 'the birds and the bees' and it's  much more complicated than I originally thought!

Rain Water Harvesting...

Tony is designing a rain water harvesting system for the house and it's nearly finished.  Here's a summary of what he's been up to:

The roofing material we chose specifically as it is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a suitable material to collect drinking water for humans and animals. It doesn't release any particles or chemicals like some rooves and it has no nooks and crannies where beasties or algaes could collect. It's also made from recycled and organic materials which I think wins it some extra points too. It's called Onduline and is available in brick red or dark green.

The gutters were installed a while back and although we have a slight gradient issue, they are generally pretty good.  They are PVC type material and are white which is supposed to prevent them heating up too much in the sun and preventing algaes and germs from growing. 

There's only one downpipe so far and it goes down below the house, round the back, where it channels the rainwater into a first flush system.  This is a 50 litre tank which I think used to be used to tranport some type of vegetable and has a tightly sealed lid (or should have had - in the end it took a bit of work to find a seal to make it water tight). On top of the tank there is a 2 inch pipe, fitted onto the lid with the help of the neck of a water drum to connect the two. There is another pipe coming off at a right angle to divert water to the storage tanks. On top of the pipe is a catchment tray (half a gallon water bottle) with a rubber filter on it to allow the water from the down pipe to pass into the tank but to divert away the beetles and leaves from the roof. They basically just slide off the filter because its at an angle.

Inside the first flush tank is a plastic ball which floats when the tank fills up, blocking the neck of the tank meaning that any fine sediment which got through the filter cant slosh back up the pipe but rather stays in the tank. The tank also has a tap at the bottom which allows the water to dribble out slowly after each rain meaning that the first water from each rainstorm will always go into that tank, repeating the process each time. Once the tank is full, the rest of the water from the down pipe is then diverted along another pipe which comes off the first at a right angle and flows into the top of one of the 1000 litre storage tanks.  On the top of the storage tank is a very fine, stainless steel filter which will catch any unexpected flies, grit etc so that they dont contaminate our water supply.

We are just waiting for two more 1000 litre tanks to be delivered so that we can connect them up in sequence and have our water storage organised.  Some sources suggest clorinating the water and others say that it's fine as it is for household use.  I'd rather not clorinate as we plan to have a filter system for the kitchen anyway, either UV or the standard carbon systems that you see in a lot of houses here.

The house is already plumbed up. There aren't any loos or sinks or anything yet but we are assured that everything is in place for the moment we install them.  The header tank is back on the roof having taken a short flight into the neighbours garden a couple of weeks ago and the pump is wired up to the solar panels so that with the switch of a button, water starts making its way up to the roof giving us clean, pressurised water straight from the tap - or it will when we install one!

The platform is there by the water tank ready for the solar water heater and all we need to do is climb up and hook it up to the water when we get it.  We also saw a solar water heater on show a couple of days and they had it out in the open, it was not especially sunny but it was certainly not dark either and we tested the water, it was piping hot! I'm now more hopefull about the whole thing as up until now we hadn't really seen one in action and I had my doubts about how warm the water would get - now I'm wondering where we can get mixer taps because we could be at risk of a scalding!

So, we're getting closer!  Tony's itching to get the water tanks delivered because it's raining torrentially most afternoons and with his system pretty much done, it's frustrating to be giving the hens mains water from the neighbours!