Tomatoes and New Hutch

 A lovely morning, and a very pleasant change from the rain and grossness of the past few days gave me an opportunity to get some photos of our rapidly expanding tomato plants. As you can see, this Cherokee Purple is thriving. In fact I had to re stake it because it was sprawling all over the place on us.

Ups and Downs

 Dawn is doing fairly well in the wake of giving birth to her second litter. She has been a little nervous and jumpy lately, but has been a good mother to her 5 babies. The main signs of her nervousness is trying to dig at the cage and occasionally chewing on the wire. I've been considering whether it might be good to shift her to the growing out hutch when butchering happens on Wednesday.






Dawn's second litter is still in the huddle in small balls in their nesting box. In this case, a literal nesting box. They are doing quite well for being at that age, and are very very energetic. I'm not sure how much of that is the warmth allowing them to use more of their food to move around rather than just live, how much of it is them, and how much of it is Dawn being a more experienced mother. In any case, they are all over the place. I look forward to seeing how fast they grow.

Preparations For Litter 2, and Reality Reminder

Dawn has begun nest building preparations for her second litter as of this morning. When the Lady of the House went to put hay in, Dawn was so eager for it she was taking hay from the Lady of the House's arms. We were a bit surprised by this turn of events needless to say, given that this is day 24 of her pregnancy, and we wouldn't be expecting kits for 4 more days.

Bears are a Problem!

Bears. This seems to be the time for them from what we can tell. Last year we didn't see a single bear on our property, but this year we have seen them many a time. I'm now starting to see potential correlation between bear visits and lack of weight gain for the day. 

(Picture from http://www.weforanimals.com/free-pictures/wild-animals/black-bears/1/black-bear-5.htm)

Breeds We Selected

Our Primary Considerations
The factors we are looking for in a chicken are:
Hearty, especially to cold.
Relatively docile to human handlers, specifically those that they are familiar with.
Able to defend themselves at least somewhat from predation.
Lay well.
Decent meat.
Good at foraging.
Medium to large eggs.

 This reused image is a picture from some local friends of ours with chickens showing their laying flock.

Note: We had hoped to have pictures to go with words from the Big E, but sadly they didn't have chickens there when we were there, so sadly this will be a post sans pictures of what I'm talking about.

Below the cut will be specific breeds and the benefits we want from them.