Enjoying a Spring afternoon...

....finally we've had better weather for a few days now. Today we even had a clear sunny day so I, of couse, took advantage of that and hung my laundry out to dry. Nothing beats clothes with that crisp, fresh scent of drying in the sun and breeze..if you don't believe me, try it...save some energy, gain some wonderful crisp laundry.
It is getting late in the afternoon, but this is what my drying rack looks like, very traditional european style rack, it holds 4 loads of laundry...

The dogs are also enjoying the day, laying about and just taking it in, unless of course a squirrel break their relaxing day by running up and down from the trees on our property...the nerve...

My girls are out, scratching and pecking, looking for bugs, fresh shoots or whatever else cathes their fancy....it is so peaceful to watch them go about their day....

Well, I think that is it for today...sending this post via my phone, that is how much I am enjoying the outdoors today. Next time we'll talk chicks in the mail...until then, have a great life...

Our girls and boys old and new....part 1

Today I wanted to introduce you to our boys and girls that have been or are still living in the Pecker Palace....we have had many birds come and go...some from dying of natural causes others from having had a too close of an encounter with either Gus (our premier chicken killer), Bogus or Otis....you haven't even met Otis yet...but he will be introduced at a later date.
We have also been giving some of out girls and boys away, to friends and family when they wanted to get going on chicken keeping, it is addicting you know...having these little funny critters.

But before that you have to see a picture of our first egg...boy the kids were happy when they found this in the nesting boxes...this is not our first "first" egg, remember they laid one on the way home from our evacuation from IKE, the menacing hurricane ..but this is our first laid in the actual Pecker Palace. Sofia was holding it so gingerly as if it was about to break at any given moment..but come to find out.."homegrown" eggs have a much harder shell than the store bought once do. You can drop them on the ground and they would bounce..not break

This is Duchess, the hen that laid that first egg..her name was Duke at first as we were convinced she was a cockerel..but nope she is a Duchess..
She is a Buff Orpington and that is definitely my favorite breed, we have had a slew of different breeds, but I always come back to these..they look like butterballs out in the field when they are free ranging and I just adore that....

This is Viola, named after one of my grandmother's sisters..but we call her "crocked beak" or hairlip, as her jaws are miss aligned, so her top beak goes to the right and her bottom one goes to the left..usually these hens starve to death as it is very hard for them to eat, but she is our oldest hen to date and she is holding her own...We do baby her somewhat, with extra scraps or a deeper bowl to eat out of so she can get more food in her. She is an Australorp.

This is Helga, she is also an Australorp and she is like hell on wheels..I would not want to meet her in a dark alley, if you know what I mean.
She always had to sit on the top perch, which in poultry lingo means "I am the BOSS"...so here she is sitting on her favorite high perch...the roof of the Pecker Palace..not one other hen tried that ever..                


This goofy looking fella is Vida Blue..he is young here, in that weird teenager looking stage..although we didn't even know he was a rooster until he crowed....
He is a Giant Blue Cochin...oddball 




This is Vida Blue once he is fully grown..he is a stunner isn't he?
He ended up breaking his leg at one point and I babied him and made a "chicken sling" and had him in our bathroom in it for 6 weeks before his leg was all healed..but he did it..

This is Little Miss Muffet, she is a Partridge Cochin, although I think she might have been a bantam (a smaller version than the standard), as she was much smaller than Vida Blue.

She is the only hen we've had that went broody on us, meaning sat on eggs until they hatched...out of her broodiness we got two roosters, Spring and Guld...
Spring was later given to friends, Guld is still with us today..pictures to come, he is stunning just like his father Vida was.

This is Summer, she is a Barred Rock/Ameraucana. She looked like a Barred Rock hen, but layed olive green eggs, a trait from Amerecaunas.
She is the mother of Spring, the rooster hatched under Little Miss Muffet.
He was striped just like her, but had feather legs just like his father.

This is Grace, she is one of the two Welsummers we had, the other one was Calloway..they were both named after the two cows in the children's movie " Home on the Range"..why?  Because just like those two cows..these two girls chatted up a storm, all the time..so Grace and Calloway it was.

They both laid really dark brown eggs, almost like chocolate covered eggs.
Ventura really like dark brown egg layers, so these were his favorites..among a few more.

This is a normal day the Palace..traffic jam by the nesting boxes...

Not an uncommon scene either..each hen has a favorite box to lay in and that very box might be another hens favorite laying box as well...

Petra's Pecker Palace...

...a few years after we moved out to the 'burbs, we decided to add some chickens to our menagerie of animals..

We searched, or should I say, I searched the internet for cool looking but also cool temp. chicken houses, coops and hutches, until we settled on the A-frame style. The reason we wanted a cool temp. coop is because of where we live and how darn hot it gets and stays throughout all of summer..which in Houston TX is longer than summers are elsewhere..

This is what the Palace ended up looking like after much planning, lots of work and way more money spent than I had in mind..but oh well..it is what it is...my hubby can not do anything half ass..bless his heart..

We got the girls as day old hatchlings in the mail..what that means is that the eggs hatch out at the hatchery, ours favorite is Ideal Poultry here in TX, and as soon as they are hatched they go into a box, get labeled and sent off, so we effectively get them when they are a day old..mighty cool I might add, to get a package from your mailman with little squeaking lives in it.. . We ended up getting 6 Buff Orpingtons, they look like butterballs, and 4 Australorps, black to the point of almost blue. We named them Duke (later to be known as Duchess, as she was not a rooster like we thought), Buttercup, Flora, Saturday, Blackie, Oreo, Viola, Maja and Esther. 

Needless to say the kids were ecstatic with joy and seemed like the coolest kids on the block for a while..they had after all their own egg laying machines now..many months would come before we would get eggs out of these little suckers however..about 5 to be more exact. If you don't know this let me tell you...chickens only stay cute for about three maybe four weeks, after that they get to looking like scrawny teenagers, with legs that are too long, feathers coming in at rates and just plain odd looking.

Months progressed, they grew like weed, summer came, we went to Sweden to visit with all of our loved ones and also to get out of the darn Texas heat..while the neighbor took care of our new brood and other pets.

Once we came home in August school was about to start and everything was hunky dory...until IKE, that little name for a storm of epic proportions...hit....

so we evacuated to Corpus Christi, further down the coast to get away from the winds, the huge rainfalls, floods and also falling trees, as our neighborhood had lots of trees in it....we brought the girls along, yes we evacuated with our chickens..weird maybe, but we had the chance, as we were taking two cars, one with kids and dogs + me..and one with hubby and the coop brood..hehe.  My father-in-law has had chickens in the past so he had a coop in his backyard that ours just moved into..worked great...We still didn't have any eggs from them and I was darned if they would get hurt or even die before we got our first egg..it would not happen on my watch.....this is the picture of Ike, which is why we decided to get the heck our of dodge..it is huge...                                   

While we were down in Corpus Christi, we added another little family member to the brood..Luna. She is Sofia's little angel, they even almost share the same birthday...just a day apart. Luna is a miniature schnauzer/ Yorkie mix, and she has grown up to be our beta bitch..we don't have alpha males in this house....we have Luna.

On our way home from our evacuation we stopped at a local burger joint to let the kiddos use the restrooms well as the dogs..and what did we have...but one little egg..The girls had laid an egg in the dog kennel on our way home..isn't that the coolest..see we were supposed to bring them along...just so we could see that.
The other really cool thing, in my opinion....our Pecker Palace had not sustained any damage from Ike, although our yard and the neighborhood was in complete shambles...not even the hay in the nesting boxes had been disturbed by the hurricane force winds..amazing.