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Category: Laying Ducks

Which Laying Hens Are Best?

Which Laying Hens Are Best?

You’re all very lucky! With Rachel and I both temporarily out of work due to COVID-19, you’re likely to get a lot more posts than we’ve been providing these last six months or so. At the moment we’re in need of more hens. With the grocery stores cleared out of essentials, I told Rachel that we’ll never again be caught with fewer than 8 laying hens and 2 goats in milk at all times. She readily agreed. So, a few…

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Eggs With A Vengence

Eggs With A Vengence

This is the time last year we were buying both milk and eggs from the store. This year, Pepper hasn’t dried off yet and has been consistently providing us with a half gallon of milk a day. So we’ve largely avoided having to buy milk this year, and with Peony due to kid any day now having just delivered this evening (!) we will probably not have to buy milk for the foreseeable future. Eggs have been a different story….

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How to Clip A Hen’s Wings

How to Clip A Hen’s Wings

“But don’t they just fly away?” We field a lot of questions about homesteading, and this is one of the more common answers when people ask about the poultry. The answer is that they can, so we clip their wings to keep them in their pen. Most people understand what wing clipping entails, but others wince, not realizing that clipping a bird’s wings is no more painful than getting a haircut. And, if you want to keep your birds out…

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Fall Chickens

Fall Chickens

Things you don’t know until you have a homestead: it’s amazing what a relief it is to move young poultry out of the upstairs bathroom and into the barn. They’re not exactly smelly, but the odor from their food is kind of odd, they kick shavings around, and they take up space. And the bathroom is an awfully private room to have to share, even if they are just chicks. This is the fourth (ish?) time we’ve had young poultry…

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Homestead babies of all sorts!

Homestead babies of all sorts!

We have ducklings! Three of them, to be exact. They hatched over this past weekend, and I’d forgotten just how adorable baby ducklings are.  In terms of looks, I’ll take a baby duckling over a chick any day.  I had however, also forgotten how messy they are!  Ducklings love water, and it’s next to impossible to keep them from playing in their drinking water.  Combine that with the fact that they often toss food around when they eat, and we’re…

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