In August a made a lettuce/mesclun bowl. I should have thinned it out so I could have cut and come again the greens but didn’t. If I had thinned it out, I would have gotten some great greens. So I gave the lettuce bowl to the chickens this morning. They gobbled it up! Glad to share.
Sophia, one of the giantveggiegardener’s ‘girls’ is a beautiful Ameraucana chicken and lays blue green eggs. No chicken little here!
For several years now, some of the Eldorado residents who wanted to raise a few chickens fought with their Homeowner Association (HOA) as to whether they can keep chickens as pets. The HOA said they could not raise them in the Eldorado subdivision just southeast of Santa Fe. The homeowners took the HOA to court at great costs and now the appellate court has ruled in their favor of allowing them to keep chickens. YEA!! It’s about time that the courts saw the value of keeping chickens even if the HOA does not. Chickens are not noisy, they are friendly, and they lay eggs! What pet gives that for you! A pet with a purpose! Nothing better than fresh eggs! Congrats to all who fought for their right to have chickens! To read the story in The New Mexican, go here.
I posted the pullets started laying eggs and now they are laying full blast! Nice to have fresh eggs again and the eggs are getting bigger! Chickens stop laying eggs in the winter and start laying eggs when there is more daylight in the spring and they are right on time!
I got 5 new pullets in November from my friend Mike Warren who raised them from chicks and sold them to me as pullets once they grew up enough. Their names are Sophia, Odetta, Rosa, Nina and Alice
This way they would be ready to lay in spring and are starting to do so now. The pullets were big enough that we didn’t even have to acclimate them to the older hens. The old girls accepted them right away.
Notice when pullets start laying, their eggs are smaller than adult eggs
and sometimes in the beginning, they don’t even have hard shells!
I still have 5 older hens that are 10 years old this year! They had stopped laying several years ago except now that the new ones are laying, 2 of them are laying again! They have remained pets since their laying days.
What does BT the cat have to do with chickens? Nothing, he just loves his chicken!
I put the lettuce bowl outside under heavy rowcover cloth (.09) as it wasn’t getting enough light inside. Yesterday I thinned it so the baby lettuce have room to grow and gave the seedlings to my chickens.
The girls eating the lettuce seedlings
They are nuts for lettuce anyways but fresh baby seedlings? yum! Here are some pictures of the chickens eating it and some closeups some of them as well. Speaking of chickens,besides providing wonderful eggs they help make compost with their manure.
Chickens eating lettuce seedlings
They are pets which each having a name so I don’t eat them, just their eggs. I feed them lots of scraps from the kitchen which is what makes their egg yolks so orange. The rest of the kitchen scraps goes into the compost pile. Their manured compost is great for the veggie garden but don’t put it on fruit trees-it has too much nitrogen.
closeup of 'Chimay'-a Belgium Campine chicken-hence the name!
closeup of 'Kielbasa'-a Polish chicken
'Grayhawk' drinking water-an Andalusian chicken
'Ari'- an Auracana chicken-lays green eggs!
giantveggiegardener 