Salad with tomatoes or BLTs? And Baby Chickens!

Salad with tomatoes or BLTs? Hard decision. Around here, we eat both! We can’t get too much of a tossed salad with lettuce, arugula, sweet peppers, tomatoes, grated radishes.
Garden Harvest for September 10th:
lettuce, arugula, collards, kale, Swiss Chard, sweet peppers, tomatoes, radishes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, squash!

BABY CHICKENS!

We are getting some young chicks soon to raise for laying hens.  We also saved some eggs from our egg collecting so we can incubate and hatch some chicks.  None of the hens are setting (sitting on a nest to hatch out eggs), so we are incubating them ourselves in a little incubator box.  We turn the eggs 3 times a day so the little embryos don’t attach to the shell wall.  Mama hens sometimes turn and adjust the eggs every 15 minutes in order to make sure all the eggs are covered under her feathers.  Our incubator has a thermostat that keeps the eggs near the 99.5 F mark.

Incubator with thermostat

The eggs that we are hatching are from our Araucana hens, or “Easter Eggers.”  The Araucana breed lays blue eggs, and that trait is a dominate trait that gets passed down to almost all offspring.  So if we take blue eggs from our nest boxes, then we already know that the female chicks that hatch from those eggs will lay blue eggs!

There is an "X" on one side and a "O" on the other side, so we know that we rotated the egg fully.

All shades of light blue and green.  The eggs are usually a robin blue or bright blue green in the spring

  

Check out the amazing incubating process!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtU4M3lhCTk

...We are mainly hatching our these Easter Egger hens as a fun hobby project. I love hatching out chicks- I like it even better when the mama hens get to do the work themselves!

 If I wanted to hatch out all of my layer hens, I would need several incubators and they would all need an automatic egg turning rack.  It takes about 5-10 minutes 3 times a day to turn the eggs!