I just finished reducing my flock from about 40 to 21. Woot!
My current number/breeds are as follows: (ahem)
(Roosters)
1 BCM
1 (mystery) bantam I named Little Mister
(Hens)
2 Ameraucanas
2 Barred Rocks
2 Phoenix
2 Olive Eggers
1 Barnyard mix
1 Tolbunt Polish
1 Silver Laced Polish
1 Buff Laced Polish
1 Spitshauben
1 Black Tailed Black bantam
3 bantam mixes
2 EE bantam
(I've still got three bantams to sell, though aside from two of the mixes, I haven't decided which will be the third.)
Other fowl:
4 Bourbon Red turkeys
1 Black Spanish turkey
2 Embdens geese
2 Buff duck
3 Khaki Campbell ducks (selling)
2 Muscovy ducks (suspect one is a mix)
Once I get the ones I want to sell gone and get our turkeys down to a pair (hooray for holiday dinners), our feed bill will dramatically decrease. Yes! I already see a difference in the amount I feed. I was going through 2 bags of layer pellets, plus a bag of starter/grower every two weeks, plus a bag of scratch a month. The past two weeks are almost up, and I still have most of the one bag of starter, and about a half a bag of layer pellets. Looks like I am going through a bit more scratch as the turkeys are gaining weight, but I can deal. I mean, we are planning to eat them, sooooo.....
"Why did you sell half your chickens?" may be the question of the day. The answer is quite simple, really. Firstly, for having so many hens, I didn't get a good number of eggs. I had over 20 hens able to lay, but I would never get more than 9 a day. Ridiculous numbers, if you ask me, and with the other young hens not expecting to become production breeds, we had to make a change. Secondly, I needed the room. My large coop is only big enough to comfortably accommodate about 20-25 chickens. As it stands, I will be close to that capacity when the large fowl grow and integrate with the large coop, there will be 16, and if I plan on adding more, well... At the time I needed room. Before getting on the selling binge, there were 29 in the large coop. Talk about cramped. Then the little coop is supposed to be for my bantams. I will need another coop at some point for breeding purposes, but I'm not really in a hurry for that.
The goats are little pigs, that's for sure. If eating the "other" fowl food wasn't enough, Mary has figured out how to get the chicken feed straight from the coop (#goatshaming). What's that? I haven't introduced the goats yet? Well! Let's remedy that right now! We have two young Pygmy girls Mary and Bootsie. Bootsie is the grey one and Mary is the blue-eyed white one.
Socks is still doing well. She's been moved outside in her own hutch (formerly known as the brooder).
<b>What else happened in the last five months?!?!</b>
Uhhh... Well, we sold Oreo, the donkeys, one of the turkey toms, many chickens, and one of the geese (if that wasn't mentioned before). We still plan on buying a cow at some point, but it might be a little further in the future than I originally anticipated. I expect to get the pasture secured with a decent shelter so the goats will stop pooping on my porch, and so the cows can get out of the rain/wind/cold/sun/etc. The goats already have a house out there, but Mary and Bootsie have figured out how to get between the two yards, and Mary can get out of the pasture and back again. It's crazy.
