Life has been a bit hectic recently, hence the dearth of posts, and the lack of nice photos for this one too. Looking at the statistics for hits on this blog, it would appear that others have been busy too, with broody chickens the main area of concern. Last week there were 42 searches for advice on broody chickens - get a grip folks.
Herewith my final wisdom on broody chickens:
- Spell broody correctly! It is broody, not broddy, or other permutations.
- It happens and it is natural, and yes it is a bit of a pain, particularly if you only have one or two chickens, but it is a bit like saying to women don't do the PMT/curse thing. There are ways around it - ISA browns do not seem to go broody particularly, but I find them rather boring chickens and they fall apart quickly (see this post on my thoughts on this type of chicken).
- Some people find broodies useful if they have fertile eggs and can't be bothered with an incubator - ask around among your local chicken fraternity.
- Look after your broody - she will neglect herself a bit.
- My way round it? Once the others have laid for the day, take broody out of the coop and lock it until just before dusk - it saves between a week and 24 hours on the normal brooding time.
On a slightly different note, we do tend to use a period of broodiness from one chicken to introduce new birds to the flock as then you don't get two chickens picking on the new bird(s) at the same time. This comes to mind as rather sadly our Speckled Hen (imaginatively known as Spot) succumbed to sudden chicken death. For about 24 hours beforehand she was a bit depressed - but I don't go in for chicken psychiatry, so I told her to pull herself together. Sadly she just keeled over in the evening and I found her dead the following morning - the other two were unconcerned but hungry, and have shown no other symptoms, so we have bought a replacement, or rather two replacements - another Light Sussex type and another Black one. Black is brooding, so only White is bullying the two newbies (Salt and Pepper - many thanks Dick Willis for the names).
On other fronts, the peas I procrastinated about are up and starting to flower, while the cherries are fattening up and starting to turn colour. Fortunately they are not too red as we are forecast rain in the next week and rain and ripe cherries means exploding and split cherries. Nice for chickens and a pain for us. The aubergines and pepper plants are in, as are the first batch of tomato plants and now I need to concentrate on courgettes, chillies, pumpkins and sweet corn. The iris I hoped/thought would be jet black turned out to be maroon - very handsome, but I must find some black ones.
Next post will have photos - promise!
I don't really know why I read all that stuff about broody chickens, as I'm not likely to ever have chickens!! Looking forward to seeing some photos ....
Posted by: Anne Donald | 24 May 2010 at 07:32 PM