I’ve had chickens for about a year now. I keep waiting for the big occasion to come up on Facebook memories and I’m just sure it will be any day now. (I just looked back on the blog and it looks like the first post I wrote about them was on May 28, 2018..so over a year ago. I wonder why it hasn’t come up on Facebook memories. Regardless.)
During the time I’ve had them, I have refined my routines of caring for them.
For instance, I bought a feeder like the one above when I first got them. Then I abandoned that feeder because where I had it it just wasn’t staying dry and I was wasting a bunch of feed. Not to mention that the girls were scratching their feed on to the ground constantly. There was another feeder that came with my Omlet Eglu Coop that I thought was ridiculous but as it turns out, it keeps the feed completely dry and is hard for the girls to spill. So, silly feeder it is!
For most of my time having chickens I have prepared a tray of food for them consisting of feed, some dried mealworms, scratch grains depending on the season and cut up fresh herbs from my garden. Then I noticed that all of the wild birds in the area would gather to my pasture whenever I pulled up in the morning. I was feeding all of the birds in Texas! So, I took that big feeder that I had stopped using before and I bought a length of chain and I hung it from the ceiling in the building on the pasture. They still get some food on the ground, but not as much. And the wild birds aren’t as willing to walk into the building to steal food. That, and my life got one step easier when I’m not delivering trays of food out to the pasture each morning.
Another way my chicken keeping has evolved is the addition of my automatic chicken door. Rather than being a slave of sunset times, my door automatically senses the light and closes up the coop. You can read more about my wonderful door here. My door also means that when I am out of town I only need someone to visit the girls once each day to collect eggs, count beaks, make sure there is adequate food and water and just make sure all is well. That makes it much easier for me to find people to help when I’m gone.
So the longer I do this, the better I get at it. I learn what to be concerned about and what to not worry about. (Most things fall under the “do not worry” column.) Isn’t that just the way with life too? The longer I’m around, the more I learn to stop worrying.
Tell me about how your chicken keeping has evolved!
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