Thursday, March 31, 2016

Incubating Eggs

Baby chicks.  What could be cuter than that?!?  Well in 21 days give or take we should have some baby chicks.

I sourced my blue egg layers, Araucana chickens, from my local Amish egg producer.  He has them in with Rhode Island Red roosters and I think Araucana Roosters.  At least that is what I could decipher.  Sometimes they (Amish) are difficult to understand, more of a worldly difference than age or language.

I purchased 36 eggs (3 dozen) for $12.  That left me with 5 spots open on the turner (holds 41) so I threw in some of my own chicken eggs.  I know for sure 2 are from my black hen, not sure of her breed, and the others are either Red Sex linked or Silver Laced Wyandotte hens mixed with a Wyandotte Rooster.

I know the Sex Linked won't breed true and revert back to what the parents were.  Either a Rhode Island Red or New Hampshire Rooster and Delaware Hen were used in the breeding so it could possibly be one of those breeds mixed with the Wyandotte.

Who knows and does it matter?  Not really.  Just as long as they lay eggs.


I will be candling them around 10-12 days and again at 17 or so just to check viability.  I can't possibly do them all without keeping the lid off the incubator so I'll do a random sampling.  And hopefully catch the ones I didn't get first on the second round.  Not all are expected to hatch, I'm hoping for 75%.


So far important items for starting eggs:


  1. Temperature at 100 degrees.
  2. Humidity level 55-60% while incubating.
  3. Turning eggs, mine has an automatic so no need to manually turn.  Otherwise mark one side of egg with an X and the other with an O.  They should be turned at least 4 times a day,  Get an automatic turner!
  4. Place incubator in a room with static temperature of 60-80 degrees.  Helps the incubator not work so hard to keep the temp steady.


That's about it....until hatching occurs.  We'll talk about that more later.



YouTube Channel

I thought long and hard about what to do with my YouTube Channel.  I have over 100 videos and over 1600 subscribers that I didn't want to start all over and drive traffic to my channel.  So, going forward, I'm going to just link videos here.  You can subscribe to my channel and just ignore the old stuff, some of it's boring crafting videos on outdated items but people still watch them,   But I may have videos there and no blog entry here.....or vice versa!

You never know so it's good to check both places.

Oh and I'm going to get the Rock Hill Facebook page back up and running.  Ugh so many places to keep track of!

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Resurrecting the Blog

I am finally going to resurrect this old blog.  I do have things on here already and will be leaving them for you to view.  I may be re-doing some of the topics and definitely adding better and more content.

This blog is intended to help you garden and create a healthy lifestyle.  From time to time you may get posts relating to gardening, raising animals, working out, cooking, healthy stuff and anything I think you may enjoy.

Let me know what you think and if you want to see more, less or even something different.

I'll be busy organizing my thoughts over the next few weeks.  I'm not going to have a posting schedule only due to my schedule.  I urge you to sign up for email updates so you know when new items are posted.

That's it for now and see you soon!