Week 5

Week 5 with the chicks was fun in the sun. The girls have been outside some more, and they have tried several fruits and veggies now--their current favorites being strawberries and lettuce. I like to lay out a blanket and read or paint my toes alongside the girls while they dig, forage, and play in their run for a few hours. I have switched their original feed out for an organic grower's crumble. I bought a 50 lb bag of it at Blue Seal, and the girls seem to like it. The simple difference between a grower's crumble and a layer's crumble is that grower's crumble is fed to young, growing chickens that have yet to lay eggs. Chicken raisers are supposed to switch out their chickens' grower feed for layer feed at the sight of the first egg. Now that I have introduced the girls to their run outside, they're all a bit stir crazy once I take them back inside in their smaller cage. Luckily, they will be six weeks old this Wednesday and I plan to permanently put them outside in their coop this Wednesday or Thursday.

Excitingly, yesterday I heard the first "cluck" from one of the girls! They are growing so fast that they're close to retiring the "chirp" I guess! This morning I finished painting their heart-shaped sign that I will hang on the front of their coop for all who visit to see. It reads, "Laid with Love," which I figured was cute and appropriate.

I'm happy to say that all of my chicks seem to be healthy. I was nervous about the runt, Nugget, who seemed to sleep a lot more than the other chicks in her earlier weeks of life, and had pasty butt. For those of you who don't know, pasty butt is when the chickens' waste stays stuck to their hind feathers, and turns into a large, hard-to-remove chunk. I tried to gently remove the chunk when Nugget was really small by wiggling it back and forth with a warm, wet paper towel...but it wouldn't budge. If this happens to one of your chicks, DO NOT simply yank the chunk off! What I did which worked for me was monitor the chick to make sure she was still able to 'go #2' every day, and when she was about 3-4 weeks old I removed it with a little stronger of a pull back and forth. It came off and it hasn't happened to her since.