Winter Farm Chores - December 4, 2019 @goldenoakfarm

Wednesday morning at 2:30AM or thereabouts he left to go deepsea fishing. He would hopefully get more pollock for the hens and some other varieties for us for the freezer. This meant I had to do farm chores morning and night.

Before I head out in the morning I prep the fish trays for the layers. Our flock of 18 gets 4½ oz of ground raw pollock every morning. This provides the animal protein missing from poultry feed and helps prevent feather picking.

We use red chick feeder trays because red is an attractant for chickens. The trays are set wide apart in the pen so no hen can bogart the fish.

Then the organic alfalfa mash is made, sometimes with cheese whey, or just water. The herb mix is sprinkled on top.

Look carefully and you can see the red trays empty and upside down

I grab the egg basket, collect the food and head to the barn. I put the food out in the pen and open the outside chicken door. We have both an outside and inside door due to the walls being so thick. It also provides extra protection from predators.

The pen has shrunken a lot from the snow. My husband snowblows out what he can get with the snowblower, then puts down the leaves we collected in autumn. This gets the birds outside and gives them something to do, digging through the new leaves.

As I open the door to the barn, I see an orange flash. We have 2 spirit cats for barn cats. They are so named because they will never be lapcats. Dennis the Girl is the worst. Usually all I see is the flash. But on Wednesday, she hung around, on the outskirts of my travels, watching me.

She wanted her food, which I had put out, but was too leery to go eat until I left. I was able to get this photo of her.

Lily was around and she actually went in and ate while I did the chores. I let the hens out and they made the mad dash for the fish. I decided to get one of my jobs done while I was up there: put the storm window over the coop window. So I got the steps and the window and put it up.

Then I cleaned their waterer. They have mash for feed (not the alfalfa mash) and as it is ground fine, when they drink and come back to eat, it sticks to beaks. Then when they go to drink again, it falls into the water. So the waterer needs cleaned at least once a day.

I knocked the ice out of the cats’ water bucket and refilled that. Then I fed the hens. I looked over the pumpkins to select one to feed them at evening chores. I swept out the butchershop. Before I turned the electric fence back on, I got the fish trays out of the pen.

I closed the barn door behind me and headed back to the house. The addition looked so forlorn in the cloudy gloom and snow.

Back at the house, I’d noticed the Hoya rope plant was flowering again.

I was doing evening chores very early on Wednesday. I go to a wreath making workshop in Old Deerfield each year, and it’s usually on the Monday after Thanksgiving. But due to the storm, it was pushed to Wednesday.

As my husband was fishing, my helper friend offered to pick me up, as he was going also. He wanted to go early as he makes 2 wreaths to my one. He would be picking me up at 4PM, so I had to do chores around 3PM.

I really don’t like locking the hens in early. They have a timed 60 watt bulb in the coop to keep them laying all winter. So they don’t settle on the roosts until 8PM. That would be 5 hours they’d be inside a 70 sq. ft. coop, all 18 birds. So I make sure they have something to do beside pick on each other.

That’s why I had selected a pumpkin earlier. It was the white one from the front steps. I sliced it open with a shovel and put it in the coop, after I had put down a little more bedding.

We do deep bedding in winter, only cleaning the coop once over the winter when the bedding gets too deep. There must always be enough carbon bedding to neutralize and stabilize the manure. There should be no ammonia smell at all, ever.

I collected the eggs, fed the hens, and checked the waterer. I put the cat food away, making me unpopular with the cats, which I did not see at all.

I was done and headed back to get ready for the workshop.