Egg shells for many purposes

Right now we sadly don't have poultry. All hen houses was "cleaned out" by a huge dog, which slaughtered our beautiful chickens.

We therefore have an overstock of chalk for chickens and don't need some until spring.

Even though, there should still be an overstock of chalk, since the chickens also pick in the ground and eats insects, worms... and gets it naturally.

Homemade sunflower seeds for free

Sunflowers are so wonderful to have in the garden. Its nice to look at, feeds the wild birds, can make a hedge when the summer is best and makes great food for poultry. A wonderful plant.

It's always nice to be self sufficient in food for livestock, but almost always impossible if you want to feed them thru winter without buying anything.

Also this almost always happens for one or more types of seeds... As soon as the summer is over, the rain and moist starts to make everything go bad.
Last year our corn seeds went "down with the rain", so we had to use store bought seeds for this year's harvest.

Otherwise sunflower seeds is easy food... You just dry them and give the hens a "head" a day, they enjoy picking the seeds free of the dry plant. But this year...

The closed up henhouse

The fence is down, the doors are closed, and there's no chickens to light up the life in the garden. I have decided to wait until spring to get new chickens though.
Hopefully the uninvited guests has forgot everything about them at that point, and I'll have time to build an even stronger fence.

For life in the garden, and in the house as well, we "ordered" a puppy a year ago at a breeder.
So now we are fortunate to share our lives with 2 schipperkes, with all their fn an unconditional love.

Unwanted guests III

I'm so sad.
Despite all our effort, we lost all our chickens today. In The middle if the day, that's an odd time for a fox!
SO, after a whole afternoon searching, we found a loose dog with one of our hens in the mouth.
We confronted the owner, and we made a deal. We won't call the police if it never ever happens again, and he will contact his insurance.
We will get reimbursed, but it's not the same tame chickens, and I'm sad to loose them in such a violent way.
What to do with the dead hens(?)
Well, selfsufficiency is living with nature, so when stuff like this happens, we lay them in the field or in a forest. There's no reason for not giving them to the wild animals, at least they get a meal out of the tradegy.

Chicken House Destroyed In Storm

Approximately a month ago we got out hands on an old play house, which we quickly decided to use as chicken house. Not only would the chickens provide us with fresh eggs, meat and add to the farm life here - however...
We had a huge storm, and this is unfortunately the result... I'm just glad we didn't get the poultry yet but had decided to do that in the spring, since theres a lot of other projects here, that demands our attention.

Chicken House

We have picked up a playhouse for chickens today. We got it for free, as long at we picked it up ourselves, and to tell the truth, that was a hard job for the "boys".

We are very excited to start to prepare for poultry, but first we have to decorate the house and build the fence, so we have decided not to get chickens before next year. Theres a lot of other projects, that demands our attention before that.
But I can't wait until we are able to collect our own eggs, from poultry that have been living the good life.