Vanilla Frozen Custard

We had our foray into ducks last year. I did not like it to say the least. They were dirty and smelly. The only perk to having ducks was cooking them for dinner! Thankfully, there are many people who enjoy having ducks on their farms and (even better) sometimes they share their excess eggs with me. Yay! That was exactly what happened to me recently. To get an idea of how big these are, they are sitting in a "jumbo" egg carton and it wouldn't close.

After the Hatch

Our chicks are nearly three weeks old now and they are growing so fast! They started out so very tiny. These guys are less than 4 days old.

Here they are about a week into life.

We ended up with a couple chicks with scissor beak. One of them is fairly pronounced, the other is relatively minor. Here's Skizzers. Amazingly, she eats and drinks just fine, even though her beak is crossed.

And we have one who's legs didn't develop quite right.

We had her separated from the others in their tank, but she got too big for the box, so now she's in her own chicken mansion. And now I have a spare bedroom that looks like this:

Now at nearly three weeks old, they are over half way feathered out and just about ready to go outside to their grow out pen. 

New Spring Chicks

Things sure have been busy in our house lately! It all started about 7 weeks ago when our favorite rooster, Deuce, was attacked and had to be put down. We were planning on incubating some eggs this spring because we wanted to have some of his offspring, but that cold, snowy day in February was much sooner than we anticipated. But if we wanted eggs he had fertilized, we knew we had to act then, so we collected eggs for about a week. With the super cold temperatures, we didn't know how many of those eggs would develop and hatch, but we decided to give it a try anyway.

We started out with 42 eggs. After candling on day 7, we were down to 36. On day 18, we had 35.

On day 21, they started hatching. Hatching continued all the way thru day 24.

This was our first time incubating chicks, so I was just a little obsessed with watching them!



We ended up with 26 chicks. Two more of them died during the hatching process, But considering the temperatures when we collected the eggs, we had about a 75% hatch rate and I was very happy with that!