It’s definitely been a chaos, cows, and chickens week! Last Friday we picked up 20 chicks that we had special ordered from the local feedstore with a coworker of mine. These are meat chickens and will grow super quick so they won’t be around long. The plan was to get them Saturday afternoon but the store called on Thursday to say they needed to be picked up before then. Needless to say I had procrastinated a bit with getting the little stuff ready for their arrival – you know, like buying chick feed – so I wasn’t quite as prepared as I should have been. But we had some dried meal worms to tide them over for the night. We got them set up in a giant storage tote that had been converted into a brooder box of sorts with a wire lid for ventilation. I wanted to keep them in the garage the first night so we could check on them regularly to make sure the temperature was staying steady and warm enough for their little four day-old selves. Baby chicks need to be kept at 95-100 degrees F for the first week and since we are still getting some pretty chilly nights it was hard to keep the temp just right. I guess the “mother hen” in me kicked in a bit ironically and I basically sat in the garage until past 10:00 watching over them before I just made the decision to move them into the master bathroom where I could get some sleep but still keep and eye on them.
First thing the next morning we headed to our regular feedstore where we buy all of our livestock feed to pick up some chick starter. Boy can these little guys eat! They devoured the first plate of food I set in there. We plan to get some more laying hen chicks in the next month or so and I’ve read that you don’t want to mix laying chicks with meat chicks because the meat chicks are such aggressive eaters. They will supposedly trample the more docile laying chicks in order to get all the feed they can. I believe it. Really glad I learned that and we’re holding off on getting the others. Since they were well fed, it was only a matter of time before all 20 of them decided to start pooping, so it was time to get them out of my house. Last year my husband built a “lid” to go on top of a metal water tub. It covers half of it, has a hole in the top for a heat lamp to shine down through and a bar over the top of the hole to hang the light. So we got everyone transferred over to their bigger accommodations and moved out to the shop where they’ll hang out for the next two weeks or so before getting to go outside.
And the cow related chaos? I got a cow-calf pair for Mother’s Day! To make a long story somewhat shorter- We have two cow pastures that wrap around the sides of our property that are owned by two different neighbors. There were only a couple of cows in the field to the right of us and one little calf in particular like to climb through the fence to hang out with all the other little calves in the pasture behind us. One evening momma was standing on her side of the fence by our chicken coop bawling for him, milk bag full and ready for him to come home. Like kids, sometimes he listened and sometimes he took his time. The first time or two we tried to watch where he came through and fix what we could. That was easily done by feeding mamma a little grain so she’d stick around. She was a bit on the thin side from the winter and raising a calf on her own so I didn’t mind feeding her a little. Of course she started to take advantage of that like a stray cat and would show up at least once if not twice a day at feeding time. I’m sure it was the feed talking, but she’d let me scratch her nose over the fence and seemed to like being talked to. Much to my husband’s dismay, we kept sneaking her bits of feed or range cubes, and I secretly told Lando that I’d like a cow for Mother’s Day which he dutifully relayed to his dad. He told me twice to call the neighbor and ask so after the second time I did just that. Of course he tried to sell me the other cow-calf pair along with the bull that he had over there. Even I agreed that we didn’t need to go quite that far LOL! But we do need an extra calf to butcher for next spring and she does seem awful sweet… and she’s obviously a tough old girl… and actually she’s not very old at all-this is her third calf…and all we’d have to do is open up the fence and lead her over with a bucket…and….And so while Lando and I enjoyed an outdoor Cinco de Mayo picnic at a friend’s house, Ed gave the neighbor a call and negotiated for my Mother’s Day gift 🙂 I love that guy!
