Just the Right Size

She just turned two and is already a pro at collecting eggs and putting them carefully in the carton. Not only that, but now I don't have to crawl in myself. **insert maniacal laugh here**

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others...

You guessed it! We got two new chickens. Naked Neck Turkens!!! You don't even know how excited I am about having two in my flock... I've only posted about them twice in the last six months. I actually held back from posting about them more frequently, but I thought you might get annoyed.

One of Trevor's customers graciously sold two of them to us and in the few hours we've had them, they have already laid an egg. The two Naked Neck Turkens are crazy cute (even though everyone's first response is 'those things are ugly') and I love them so.

But they need names.... any thoughts?

Scary Color Genetics :: Thistle

I feel like I've learned so much about rabbits in such a short time. Today I have been trying (very very hard) to teach myself about the complexity of rabbit color genetics. It is so much easier for me when I have something to look at and compare to examples I am being given. I am a tactile learner, so reading text doesn't put a clear picture in my head. I need to see, note, and classify.

What I have done today, thanks to Three Little Ladies Rabbitry's site, is put together the color genetics of my three rabbits. Once I took notes from TLL Rabbitry's site I looked at Thistle's pedigree. Thistle was probably the hardest to come up with because he is a Ruby-Eyed White (REW). I have learned that a REW is just masking other color traits.

Imagine dipping a colored rabbit into white paint. Obviously you don't really want to do this... But theoretically, it would be difficult to tell what color is underneath or what color babies that rabbit is able to have until you breed them. That is where I'm at.

Thistle's genetic color sequence is: aa B_ cc D_ EE

"aa": the most recessive Agouti gene. This means he got an "a" from each parent making him fully "self". His hair is one color throughout his body and the individual hairs are also one color. If he had just one of the more dominate genes, either "A" or "at", he would be chinchilla colored or colored with a white underside respectively. Since he has two of the recessive "a" genes he is all one color.

"Bb": the Black/brown gene. Thistle has one known gene, dominant Black. His second gene in this set (one comes from each parent) could be either a "B" for black or a "b" for brown/chocolate. We won't know until he throws out some black and or chocolate kits because of that masking REW gene below.

"cc": the Color Saturation gene. He has two of the most recessive genes here as well which makes him a REW. "c" is the also known as the albino version of the gene. If he had just one of the more dominant genes ("C", "cchd", "cchl", or "ch") he would be full color, chinchilla dark, chinchilla light, or pointed-white respectively. Instead he has two of the albino "c" genes which is the only way you get a REW.

"D_": the Dilution of Color gene. "D" is full strength and "d" is diluted. Here is where it gets a little messy. When I do Punnett squares to figure out this gene Thistle has a 50% chance of being "DD" and a 50% of being "Dd". Since I don't know what the second gene is I put in a place marker until I figure it out with future litters

"EE": the Extension of Color gene. With "E" the color extends fully along each hair, "ES" extends dark color, "e" extends light color, and "ej" makes the harlequin coloring. Thistle's father and mother are both "EE" which makes it easy to tell that he is as well.

Look at that! We just painfully joyfully went through color genetics for a rabbit using a 3-generation pedigree. Aren't we fancy!

Our Half of the Garden and more...

As I've said before, we are sharing a large fenced in garden with our neighbors this year and we have been working on the soil. Our house and garden are situated on top of an old riverbed so most of our soil is decomposed granite and sand. Not really ideal. In addition to sad starter soil, the horse manure that was added to the garden bed when it was built two years ago is long depleted. So needless to say, the dirt needs a little TLC. We have started adding organic material and compost and next week we will be adding rabbit manure, more compost, vermiculite (to help with water retention), and we will top it all off with black garden cloth to heat up the soil and ready it for planting next month.

You can see our half of the garden the best in this photo. Yes... That is a super high fence. But if you knew the deer around here, you would know that this 8-foot fence barely keeps them out. They practically have springs for legs. Our part of the garden is 13 x 22 feet. Using the "square foot method" we should be able to get quite a bit of food out of this space. I'm hoping for enough for a veggie every night for dinner and some leftovers for canning. Cross your fingers! I'm ordering seeds on Thursday.

As a mother, I am obligated to include a picture of our daughter giving "her" chickens hugs. Enjoy your weekend!

Unicorn Poop

Frühlingskabine Micro-Farm just acquired a unicorn. This unicorn poop manure should magically fix all of our garden soil woes. After all-- what are unicorns for but to repair depleted soil?

Just kidding.... It was my mom's birthday and I found this weird idea for cookies on Pinterest. They are just a batch of sugar cookies that divided into five, colored with regular ol' food coloring, and rolled together into poop piles. Real attractive sounding huh!?

Yeah. Those are real sparkles and silver shine stuff for cakes. Didn't you know unicorn poop is sparkly? Silly you.

Aren't you glad you read this ridiculous post?

Purple Egg Layers

Don't these speckles look purple? I thought they did, but when I washed them off (excuse the muddy footprints in the picture) they turned dark brown. So sad. But I was pleasantly surprised when they dried and the speckles were purple again. It's fun to think your chickens lay purple spotted eggs.

Egg Count :: January 2012

Wow! Look at that egg total for January... I actually had to count that twice because over 100 eggs sounded crazy.