Chickens can be strange little creatures when it comes to laying eggs. All kinds of odd anomalies exist in the realm of abnormal chicken eggs. Most of them are sort of gross to be perfectly honest. The exception to the "gross" rule are the cute ...
The ranch office is open for business.
The sun-room is done! I used it twice this weekend for people picking up chicks. Dawn and her daughter were my first customer to pick up chicks in the new ranch office. They bought a beautiful assortment of a dozen Icelandic chicks. Thanks ...
Icelandic Egg Overload…BOGO Sale!
We are collecting at least a dozen Icelandic hatching eggs every day. We decided to have a BOGO (Buy one Get One Free) Sale until our surplus is gone. Visit the store and order your eggs and we will double the order. Shipping is still $15.00 for up ...
Just hatched a $96.00 chick!
Meet the newest addition to my flock of crested cream legbars. This little cutie and another are the two eggs that hatched from six I ordered on ebay. The other chick is a male who will be staying only until his rooosterly behavior begins, then ...
The Big EGGstravaganza!
I cooked over 300 eggs today. You may be wondering why or you may be wondering where I got 300 eggs. Let me explain. I have been holding Icelandic eggs for 30 days and not selling them. I had to do this because my broody girl Lukka returned to the ...
Random thoughts in my head
Here are just a few tidbits of the musings floating around in my head. I finally got an Isbar egg closer to the promised color. This was laid by either Anna or Frida this afternoon. I am really excited about this and hope the egg color continues ...
I’m always chasing…banana bread.
I know. I am supposed to always be chasing rainbows but this has been the driest winter in history so, with rainbows few and far between, my thoughts turn to banana bread. We like bananas so I buy a lot of them and we don't always eat them before ...
Broody Condo
When your hen decides to sit on eggs it can be a real disruption for the entire flock. She usually decides to sit in her favorite nest box which happens to be everyone else's too. Stubborn hens get in the nest box with the broody and add eggs to her ...
Adding a Screen Room!
Our house is oddly constructed with a two story patio right outside my home office door. While trying to clean the chick dust off my desk and cars in the garage, I started thinking outside the box for another place to hatch eggs and brood chicks. It ...
One Bad Egg
Most of the time sales of hatching eggs go well. Occasionally shipping damage will occur even when the eggs are packaged well. I can only remember one incident when an egg I shipped was even cracked upon arrival. My luck as a buyer has been mostly ...
Best done solo
There are certain jobs around the ranch that are best done solo. Unfortunately, there are few chores around the ranch that can be done solo. I just finished cleaning the goat shed and Icelandic coop with the help of 23 chickens, 2 goats, and 2 emus, ...
CONTEST! Why did the chicken cross the road?
Enter to win six (six) Blue Isbar Hatching eggs! All you need to do is answer the question "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Answer in the comment section, leaving an email address so we can contact you if you are the winner. The winner will be ...
Update (Day 51 of 51) Emu Baby!
Copied from Main blog page! I came downstairs at 5:50 this morning and as I was turning on the lights I heard a sound like a glass breaking. I looked in the incubator and saw this: Egg "B" had pipped! I spent the next seven hours ...
Egg “B” Update (Day 49 of ?)
We have reached the hatching phase with egg "B." I moved it from the incubator to the hatcher. When I bought the two emu chicks, I also bought a spare Hovabator incubator from the seller that he had been using to incubate and hatch the ...
I replaced the dud emu eggs…
With emu chicks! I decided to replace the non fertile emu eggs and found some for slae on eBay. To my shock and surprise the seller was a stone's throw from my house! I bid on and won two of his auctions for two emu eggs each. He ...
Then there was one… (Update Day 42 of 51)
I did every test I could find online to determine the viability of an emu egg at this stage of incubation. I tried the float test, sounding, and the cooling test. All indicated that there was not a live chick in Egg "C." I got the courage up just ...
We’re Incubating Emu Eggs!
Stuart and Louis, our sweet emu boys need at least one girlfriend, possibly one for each of them. Raising emus as babies allows them to bond with humans resulting in friendly, non-aggressive emus, for the most part. In the emu world males are ...
Phyllis Diller and Eggs-in-a-Hole
This is more of a recipe than a main blog post but I like it here so it stays here. I want to talk about the benefits of having a little bantam frizzled cochin named Phyllis. Well, the name doesn't really matter but when you look like Phyllis Diller ...
Icelandic Chickens Could Escape Alcatraz
If you already have Icelandics you know this already. If not, here's a little known factoid. Not a true fact because it has not been proven scientifically but anecdotally by myself and my friends who also raise Icelandics. They can and will break out ...
Blue Isbars, Crowing and Growing!
My trio of blue Isbars are out of quarantine now and in with the layer flock. They are having a bit of a slow integration and stay to themselves most of the time. I am not sure they are even roosting yet, rather sleeping in a pile in a corner of the ...