We've been ripping up the gardens. We keep what's good and give the rest to the chickens. Kelly collected a tub full of squashes...

We still had some tomatoes hanging out and ripening...

And, then, the chickens lay eggs. The bucket in the last picture was from the last two days. There will be a dozen today. Here's more than three dozen that have been washed...

There are eight dozen in the house fridge...

There are four more dozen out in the kennel fridge. If you're keeping track, that's about eighteen dozen eggs. If you want any, come get 'em!

I picked up this year's twenty-five baby piggies yesterday.  They are down in the basement for a few weeks.  I stuck an old phone on a tripod and took a video.  One of them tries to fly at 3:17...

Happy Baby Chicks Day!

Our chickens have laid 4886 eggs so far this year.  The current record for a year is 2014 when they laid 4887.  I think we're going to break it.

Alright...  What kind of contraption has Nemo built now?

It's a Chicken Transport Pod...

They are a mix of breeds I picked up from a friend-of-a-friend.  There are Australorps, ISA Browns, Rhode Island Reds, and Gold-Laced Wyandottes.  She had already sold the ones I really wanted, but these should do fine.

The chicken in the middle with the grey head is Cole, a bonus rooster I got when I picked up the meat birds two months ago...

He is a Silver-Laced Wyandotte.  I think he'll like fourteen pullets better than the thirty bruisers with which he was originally living.

We slaughtered twenty-two piggies and nine hens who weren't earning their keep in the egg department...

The meat-birds arrived yesterday...

The picture is red because they are under a heat lamp.  No, we're not cooking them already...  They wouldn't even make a single nugget, yet.  They'll be in the freezer by Independence Day.

We had a pretty good frost this morning.

We heard the second Guinea chirping about 6:30 this morning.  We went out looking for it, and found it in the chicken runs.  I had shone the flashlight into them a couple times last night but didn't see it.  It must have been hunkered down.

We went in and caught it. We found the hole we think the one got out yesterday and closed that up.  Then we clipped the primary feathers on one wing of each Guinea.  It won't keep them flying but it should interfere.

I came home from work today and both were still in the runs.  We went out to dinner for a small celebration and came home after dark.  Both Guineas were roosted up in the coop with the hens.  So, the current count is back to two.

I found a woman on Craigslist selling chicks.  I drove over yesterday after work to pick up a dozen hybrid Reds to replace our older hens...

She had all kinds of birds running around the yard... Turkeys, several different ducks, pheasant, and geese...

So, I also got a pair of Guinea fowl.  (I forgot to take a picture when we put them in the coop last night.)  I put them in with the hens figuring they would be able to hold their own if they were in a yard with geese.

I didn't figure that they would escape.  Kelly let the chickens out into the runs this morning as always, and the Guineas went out with them.  They then found some way to get out.

When Kelly went out to close the chickens up, the Guineas weren't in the coop.  She went outside thinking they were still out in the runs, but they weren't.  She found one roosted up in a tree.

When I got home, we went out and knocked that one out of the tree, then wrangled it back into the coop.  I spent some time looking for the second.  I thought I heard it a couple times, but didn't see it.

We have a Freeze Warning tonight.  Temps could get down into the mid 20s.  Good luck to you, dumb bird.  You better roost up in the balsam trees.

The dictionary defines "chicken feed" as slang for an insignificant amount of money.  Well, then, I guess this isn't chicken feed...

Kelly brought home 500 pounds of it.  The purple is for the pigs.  It has a higher amount of protein for meat production.  The green is for the hens.  It has a higher amount of calcium for egg shell production.

Our order of chicks came today.  There are forty of them.  They're down in the basement peeping and cheeping...

In other news, the first male hummingbird showed up last weekend.

The chickens laid their 4,800th egg for the year today.  That's 400 dozen!  And we still have a week to go for the year.  It will be a new record.

Today was the big chicken day.  (They are one of the reasons I haven't had any time to post here for a while now.)  All the piggen meat birds move into several freezers around town. We had four friends come help us slaughter them.  Three families took seven birds, and we get the rest...  Something like fourteen. Here's a full cooler...

And a cooler I've been working on...

And the parts of three chickens out of that second cooler...

Kelly went to the store to get more freezer bags. We'll leave five-or-so whole to cook in the rotisserie, but the rest get parted up into legs, wings, breasts, and carcasses for soup.  The birds weigh about seven-or-eight pounds cleaned.  Each breast is a pound.  Each leg is a pound.  That's four meals for the two of us.  Then we still have wings and soup.

Our 28 chickens laid 520 eggs this month.  First time we've ever officially broken 500.  We had 499 in February...  Prob'ly a couple more that didn't get counted because the chickens broke them.

One of the "new" Easter Eggers laid a green egg...

I found it while out closing the chickens up for the night. It really is an olive-drab army-green color.

I cracked open yesterday's little eggs for breakfast this morning. Can you guess which two they are...?