Found a hen in the street "Backyard Chicken"

[Great-Kazoo]

And BACON!

Lived in California in the 50's and Mom made the best avocado and bacon sandwiches. Dad cooked the bacon in an iron skillet over a slit trench fire.
Back when a picnic was an adventure.

Haven't done a trench fire since scouts.

[BladesNBarrels]

Haven't done a trench fire since scouts.

We had it down to an art. We could stop, build a fire, cook bacon, eat, bury the fire by replacing the dirt removed in about an hour.
There would be almost no sign that we had been there when we moved on. And no danger of a fire getting out of hand.
We each had our own chore and there was no guess work of what needed to be done.

[fly boy]

TTT!

I remembered this thread and came back to it for some info. We will be building a coop/run this weekend in hopes to have about 10 birds by spring. Building a nice 8x8 shed, and will then incorporate a feeder, water with a heater, possible light on a timer, and roosting spots, and nesting boxes. The run will be a modified dog run.

Don't know yet how/if we will cover the Run, and don't know if we will be doing a door to keep them safe at night. Just subscribing so I can see any updates as they come through.

[Irving]

You'll need a roof on the run, especially if you don't do a door.

None of my hens seems to have molted, and egg production barely dropped off, maybe for a month, so I never bothered with a light. This is only my first year though, so I don't feel like that is necessarily indicative of how most chickens behave.

[sniper7]

I?m in the same boat Irving, I don?t think mine molted hardly at all, and egg production had been very consistent. We have 12 hens and getting 7-10 eggs a day. Even the silkies are keeping up production quite well. I read they lay only a little over 100 eggs a year and all three are laying almost daily

[Irving]

Of my five, one of them has still never laid an egg and she is a year old now. She tries every day though, and her hip bones seem like she's getting there. One of the hens looks like she lost some feathers just on her crop, so I'm not sure if that was a conflict on some day they stayed in the coop too long, or if it was some mild molting. I have a lot of four egg days, but not every day, especially since about December to now.

[meatman]

The newest upgrade to our chicken run is a motorized door. I used a 12 volt, 12 inch linear actuator, a DC converter, and a controller with remote. The door itself is made from Hardiebacker. It'll eventually get hooked up to Smartthings so that it's automatic at sunrise and after sunset, but the current remote works from inside the house. It takes about a minute for it to open or close fully.

We had two chickens get killed in the past month from either a racoon or cat (both have shown up in the middle of the night on the game camera).

[kwando]

After the blizzard last week, while digging out in the chicken coop, we found a hen buried a little snow cave sunday. She prob had 2' drifts on top of her, she was fine just a little hungry.

[Irving]

That's crazy!

[ChickNorris]

This thread is doing that weird secret page you can't get to thing...