It’s that time of the year when all the fun catalogs start coming in the mail! We got our chicken catalog the other day and have decided it’s time to get our chick order in so we can be sure what we want is available at the time we want them to arrive.
Even though we don’t quite have our fence and coop ready to put the chickens in the garden yet, doesn’t mean we can’t go ahead and encourage the chickens to hang out in the garden as much as possible. I’m feeding them their soaked grain every morning in hopes it will make them want to spend more time in the garden. After our one really nice day, it turned really cold so we haven’t been able to do more in the garden. I decided to take advantage of having to be cooped up in the house by getting the Christmas tree taken down.
I’ve been watching Justin Rhodes’ channel and have been inspired to try putting the chickens in the garden. He uses his chickens to work up the soil and help beak down the mulch. I’m hoping to get them moved in with in the next couple weeks that way they will have plenty of time to get the garden ready by planting time.
My experiment on using bottles filled with salt water to keep buckets of water from freezing is over. Check out the video to see my results.
Well, there wasn’t any ice in the bucket this morning. I’m not sure if it actually worked or if it was because the coop is insulated and the temperature didn’t get as low as it normally has. So I’m continuing the experiment.
I read about a little trick you can do to keep water from freezing in chicken waterers so I decided to give it a try.
The storm’s over so we ventured outside to get fresh air and see how all the animals are doing.
The winter storm made it here and it turned out to be everything it was predicted to be. It was the perfect day to stay inside and make candy. The turkeys roosted outside the evening before the storm came but then decided that the barn is a much nicer place to be once the wind picked up and the snow started to fall.
I’ve been worried about the turkeys getting too cold at night since they don’t like to go up. I finally took some time to do some research and found that turkeys are actually cold hardy and do fine being left to fine suitable shelter for themselves.
We’ve got really cold temperatures coming so we’re getting a few things done that need to be done so we don’t have to worry about doing them in the really cold temps.
Humble Little Homestead 