The Chicken Diaries - Week 10

This week, guzzleguts Mary has overtaken Cacciatore in weight!

Bubbles has put on 113g this week (compared to 75g last week)!! I found that hard to believe. The kids have been picking her up more frequently though she is still very skittish. She does like to eat freshly chopped vegies though!

Cacciatore put on 91g this week (compared to 76g last week). She still jumps up on me, but with my son chasing her around, she isn't quite as welcoming as she used to be. Still comes readily when they seem my hand out with food in it!

Everyone's favourite, Mary, has put on 124g this week (up from 90g last week). She really does eat A LOT. If someone is in the Dine-A-Chook eating the crumble, it would be Mary. She is still a docile thing, but yes, she is now heavier then Cacciatore!

Look at my big boy! Weighing in at 901g (he put on 124g this week compared to 114g last week) he is still a scaredy-chook and it's so hard to get him to stay still on the weighing plate. But he will be 1kg next week!

The chooks have enjoyed perching on my garden furniture and nibbling on my container garden vegetables. But I have had enough of THAT.

Look at the poop everywhere! And my poor vegies being eaten to death, I had just made some new pots and planted some seeds and found the chooks had dug out some of the seeds (bean seeds are so big), so I decided THAT'S IT, time for some fencing.

This Omlet fencing was quite good, and portable and temporary, and though it took me a while to set up (because of the difficulty trying to figure out where the enclosure would be), I finally figured out that this was ok. The tops are a bit saggy and the chickens can get out the big squares but they can't get out the little ones down below. It's gonna make mowing the lawn a bit of a bitch now, though.

I tried sprouting some oats - ugh, that didn't go very well. Only got 3 sprouts out of it after a week, and so I fed it to the chickens but they seemed to really love it, especially Bubbles. Looks like wheat is the easiest to grow. I'll try barley next week and see how that is.

This week the chickens really got into the garden - they have decimated my wild bok choy which I didn't really mind, but they ate some and sat on the rest of it. I wouldn't mind it so much if they would EAT all of what they destroyed rather than having shredded leaves and plants lying everywhere.  So I'm giving my bok choy a break from the chooks and see if it goes to seed, and then I can have a whole lot more NEW wild bok choy.

Bubbles has the chicken clucking now (especially when stressed) but Mary is still cheeping like a chick at times. Spot does squawk when chased too. Oh, and I clipped Spot and Cacciatore's wings. They could actually fly quite high. It's not as bad as it sounds, I just chopped off the primary wings as per instructions in this picture.

It didn't hurt them and my son helped me hold the chickens, so that wasn't as traumatic as I thought.

I am worried about going away and who is going to look after the chooks. I can probably get a friend to look after them, but imagine how much poop there will be when I get back 2 weeks later! I did ask if someone could take them for 2 weeks, but people tell me that they would be killed or maimed if I tried to insert them into a new flock for 2 weeks!