More picture updates

Peck examining her nest box on the outside.  The new chicken house has two nests in its side.

My modified chicken waterer turned into a gravity feeder.  Cutting holes beside the seam of the thick plastic was tough but well worth the effort.  I can fill it up and don't have to worry about feeding the chickens for about a week.

Using a Langstroth hive this year.  These are my unpackaged American bees from Draper's Apiary.

The front pasture with my raised beds, the composter, the old hen house and kenyan hive.  Gardening and yard work consume most my time this spring.

Update in Pictures

As promised, an update with photos.  The speckled sussex hen Peck enjoys her new Ware Chicken house and run.  She is inspecting the nest.  She is a very broody hen!  Can't wait to introduce Rooster Fred to Peck, Penney and Prissy!

My daughters visiting me over Easter.  I was so happy to have time off work to enjoy Easter Sunday and Easter Monday with my girls!

American Bees arrived Thursday a.m.  More of my girls!

Oil Baroness

Growing up in Alabama I heard about oil rich relatives in Mississippi who left mineral rights as an inheritance to our grandmother.  Every few years my Dad would talk about getting a letter from an oil company seeking to lease the mineral rights or a natural gas company wanting to drill on the land where our family retained the mineral rights.  The total amount of money my Dad received was a few hundred dollars for granting those rights.  My Dad was always hopeful that they'd strike a productive vein of oil or gas and then we'd be like the Beverly Hillbillies.

There is a new process called FRACKING that drills deeper than the traditional straight down till you strike an oil pocket.  Fracking's environmental effects are not known yet.  I receive a letter from a representative of an oil company seeking rights to drill using the Fracking method across the land we own in Mississippi.  They are highly confident that they will hit oil.

Our land is in Clark County Mississippi sitting between two productive oil fields.  The Company is 99.9% certain they will have a productive oil well in 2 years.  If so, then for the next 30 years I will receive a monthly stipend.  Not much, no going to Beverly Hills but it will pay for chicken feed.

Chickens Update

My oldest daughter was home for a visit.  She lives in Japan currently where her husband is a sailor for the U.S. Navy.  While she was home the chicks arrived.  There was one dead on arrival and then two more died within the next 48 hours.  I don't know why.  The remaining five are thriving and their pin feathers are getting longer and they look less like fluffy chicks and more like young chickens.  There is a brief cute fuzzy stage for chicks where you look at them and just go "AWWWWW".  They are beyond that now.  I believe I have two Freds and three Henriettas.

My niece, Jima, put together the Ware chicken house and run for me.  I am very impressed with how easy it was for a pregnant woman to put together by herself.  She put it together in less than 4 hours and I was able to move it from its staging location, our carport, to its permanent location in the new pasture I created for the older hens, Pick, Prissy and Penney.  The new chicken house was a bargain at PetCo's online store and was about two-third the cost of the one I bought from My Pet Chicken.

I need to scrub the older coop and recondition it for the younger chickens.  I will need to separate the younger chicks from the older ones for a bit before pasturing them together.  Flock dynamics.

Pictures of everything soon.