Chickens Laying Eggs

Last Tuesday, the 23rd of August, I put in some rice straw that we sourced out from one of our neighbors in the chicken's plastic nest boxes. Earlier in the day, we heard Henrietta the pet hen, making the usual cackling sound as if she is demanding for us to provide her with a nest as she is about ready to lay an egg. As soon as I finished lining up the nest box, I brought it inside the coop and was tying the nest boxes so it would not fall down when all of a sudden, Henrietta flew right in and started scratching in the nest box. It's like she's saying "Hurry up and get out or I will lay an egg on your head!" Well I really got out as fast as I can and left her making her still cackling as if she's letting the whole neighborhood know that she is about ready to lay an egg.  The brown chicken from Kapangan who looked ready to lay an egg too was cackling also and she went on the roost and was peeking at Henrietta. She was curious on what the latter was doing or why she is scratching inside the nest. Then the brown hen jumped down and went flying on one of the nest boxes while Henrietta was making a sound as if saying "Don't get near me!". As the brown hen was contemplating on what to do next, Henrietta got out of her nest and was cackling away and by this time, the brown hen went into Henrietta's nest box. By this time, the big rooster joined Henrietta in a cackling singing contest and brown hen chimed in so there was a trio! I really believe that they are trying to tell the young brown hen that the nest is where she could lay her eggs. Since it was about lunchtime, I left the singing choir of chickens doing their concert and went inside the house to fix lunch for my hubby and myself.

As of today, the 28th of August, in spite of the rain that is lambasting our city, the native chickens are laying their eggs, well two of them anyway. Henrietta who claimed the first nest has laid 6 small eggs and the one brown pullet that came from Kapangan also laid her first egg today in the last nest box. I am assuming that they did not use the same nest box together because there is one egg in the last box so I figured that must be from the brown pullet. The brown pullet and the big rooster both came from Kapangan and they are siblings. Since one of Henrietta's chicks turned out to be a roo, so I don't know which of the two roo mated with the brown pullet. I know that Henrietta is always being chased by both rooster including all of the other chickens in the coop. They pick on her all of the time which is why her feathers are all ruffled up. Both roosters likes to jump on her whenever they get a chance. She tries to stay away from all of the other chickens but for some reason, they wouldn't let her eat in peace. Whenever she gets down from the roost or from the nest to eat, the others would chase her away. I guess maybe because she didn't grow up with the rest. I wonder if I should put her in a separate coop of her own. We still have the small coop where we used to house her when she first came to us. Maybe I will do that to keep the peace in the coop. It's just that I am wondering if I should put the big rooster in with her in the separate coop? What do you think?

Roosting Bars

The chickens just hanging out together under the shade. There is a cherry tree behind the chicken coop and this gives a shade on this side of the chicken run. The one in the forefront is a dominant roo and he likes chasing all the girls around although he is only 7 months old. The runt in the group whom we thought to be a female turned out to be another roo and he likes to keep his distance from the dominant roo. Henrietta, the mother hen, likes to keep by herself as well because she is still moulting but the dominant roo still tries to mount her whenever he gets the chance. Henrietta is inside the coop when this pic was taken.   

The dominant roo is facing the steps that leads down to the pop door in the coop. There is a small rain water gutter at the bottom of the steps just before the pop door which prevents the water from getting inside the coop. Where the chickens are sitting on, that's not a roosting bar actually. Those are the top parts of the trees that we cut off and used as posts in the chicken run which is why they are thinner. We tied them together and used them to keep the river sand inside the chicken run. It's just that the chickens likes to sit on these dividers. The low roost is just beside them and they use that too. 

These are the high roosting bars in the chicken run at 5 feet high. They like to use these high roost specially in the early morning. It gives them the space to run to when one of them is being chased. There are two of these high roosting bars and two of the lower roosting bars. The size of the chicken run is only 6 feet wide by 10 feet long which is just right for their number since there are only 6 of them.

The chicken run with the chickens up high on the roosting bars.

Cleaning the Chicken Coop

This is a pic of the access area at the back with the two doors open. We open these two doors to clean the roosting area which is just above the nest boxes. When the chickens sleep on their roosting bars at night, they generate a lot of poop. Their poop falls through the welded wire floor which is about 12 inches below the wooden roost bars and it settles on top of the river sand that is at the bottom of the 8-inches high green box. There is a hook attached to the ceiling to hold the welded wire floor as seen in the picture above. The ceiling over the roosting area is covered with a plywood.

In cleaning the coop, we first take off the wooden roost bars from their slots. The slots are made of metal and the wooden bars are made to fit snugly in them. The roost bars are about 4-inches high above the welded wire floor.

Then we lift off the entire wire floor and hook it up on a wire that is attached to the ceiling just for this purpose. This gives us the space to reach out to the farthest part of the box to clean the poop.  

Then we use a sifter such as the one that my nephew Jim is holding to separate the chicken manure from the river sand. The sifter is actually a kitchen utensil that is used for taking out the food when doing deep frying. Their poop is usually concentrated in one spot and fortunately for us, it is always near the two doors so it's easy to clean it up.

I have been doing a lot of research on the Internet about the kind of litter to use in the chicken coop and run. Finally I settled to using rough river sand in the chicken run and wood chips as litter over concrete floor in the chicken coop. We also use river sand underneath their roosting bars. The river sand dries up the poop and these can be easily scooped up with a strainer.  We put the poop in a covered compost container. When the container is almost full, we bring this to the big garden on the hill where they are dried before being used as fertilizer.  Since this is now the rainy season here in the Philippines, we could not dry the manure so these will have to be stored in the compost bins for four months or until the weather improves. There are no houses over at the hill garden so it's the best place for us to dry the chicken manure, that way no neighbors will have to complain about the odour.  Besides, this hill garden is where we will be using the chicken dung as fertilizer for the coffee trees and banana trees that are planted there.

On Using Pro-biotic

The one-galoon waterer placed on top of a training potty that was turned up-side down. The drinking water is brownish in color because of the FPJ. 

We give our chickens pro-biotics called FPJ ( Fermented Plant Juice) which is mixed in with their drinking water to help them stay healthy. We also use this FPJ as spray in their litter to fortify microbial activity after diluting it with water. We collect the young shoots of sweet potato plants, kangkong or watercress then chop them and mix them up with crude sugar. For every three kilos of chopped shoots, we add one kilo of crude sugar and mix them all up in a basin. Then we put this mixture in a net bag so it is easier to take the whole thing out when the fermentation is done. We put the net bag with the mixture in a plastic pail and put an aluminum pot filled half way with water and put this on top of the net bag to weigh it down. We cover the pail with an old thin cloth and tie it around the mouth of the pail so no insects can get in and set this aside for about three days. After three day, we take off the aluminum pot of water and cover it back again and let it stay for a week in which time the fermentation should have been completed. We remove the net bag and let it drip to extract the juice. We keep the collected juice in a 1-litter plastic soda bottle with a cover and keep this in the refrigerator. We use two tablespoons of this FPJ concoction and mix it with 1 liter of non-chlorinated water and give this to the chickens as a drink. The fresh water in our place by the way comes from a natural spring so it is not chlorinated.

Feeding the Chickens

My DH likes to cut up the greens before giving it to the chickens. We were feeding the chickens with chick booster when they were very young but now that they are growing, we give them PDP Plus or Pullet Development Pellet Plus. This PDP Plus chicken feed is in pelleted form and it has a higher protein content at 16%.   We also feed them cracked corn and any left over cooked rice or table scraps and they eat them all, they're not really choosy when it comes to food. I usually just throw some cracked corn on top of the litter and with their scratchings, this helps to aerate the wood chip litter on the floor. 

We often take off the bottom leaves of whatever green leafy vegetables that are currently growing in our small garden in the backyard and feed these to the chickens. They love pachoy, pechay, dandelions, parsley, leeks, grass clippings, etc. Whenever I am weeding the garden, I would just pull out the whole weeds with some clump of soil still attached to the roots and just throw these out into the chicken run. They go crazy scratching over the weeds and they never seem to get tired of it, they really are voracious eaters of grasses and vegetables. I tried feeding them some banana leaves that were chopped finely and they eat these too. We have plenty of Impatiens flowers and I feed the leaves and flowers to them and they go crazy over it.

Litter in the Coop

This is the chicken coop with the door open. The bottom of the front wall about 1/4 of it is covered with scrap tin materials over a concrete base. The rest of the upper wall is made of 1 x 1 inch wire mesh material so it is very airy inside and this serves as the coop's ventilation. 

This pic is inside the coop with wood chips as litter over the concrete floor.

We use wood chips as litter on the floor inside the chicken coop which we sourced out from a furniture shop along the National Highway in La Trinidad Benguet. The owner is giving these away for free as long as we do the bagging ourselves because his workers were busy with their own work. He said that we just missed some people who were there ahead of us to get some wood chips since they too are using it as litter in their pigsty. So I bought three empty feed sacks from across the street and filled these up with the wood chips. Luckily for me, my young nephew Jim was with me so he helped me in bagging the wood chips. The only expense we made was for the cost of the 3 feed sacks at 12 pesos each or a total of 36 pesos and the expense for the taxi which amounted to 60 pesos from La Trinidad Benguet to our house in Baguio City.

When we arrived home, we spread out the wood chips over the concrete floor inside the chicken coop. The three sacks of wood chips just about covered the whole floor at 2-inches deep. I wish I had taken more wood chips but then again, the ones that we did not bag were really more of a saw dust and I read on the Internet that this is not good for the chicken's lungs which is why we did not bag all of them. We have been getting a lot of rains lately because this is the rainy season now in the Philippines and the litter was getting damp. However, it's been sunny for the past two days and the litter on the floor dried up fast. This is what I like about wood chips, it's capacity to dry up fast. Anyway, I will have to get more wood chips to top off the litter because it looks like it could use another inch or two. To make the wood chips friable, we throw cracked corn on the floor and the chickens love to scratch and this loosens up the wood chips on the floor. I read somewhere that some people use Diatomatous Earth or DM over the litter in the coop but I am not sure if we have that here in the Philippines. I'll have to ask around the agricultural shops if they carry this product.

Nest Boxes

Our three nest boxes are store-bought and these are the stackable plastic boxes that are used as file trays. They are easy to clean and disinfect and they are light weight. I don't have to worry about mites hiding in any crevices because there's simply nowhere to hide. Based on my searches on the Internet about providing nest boxes to the chickens, the suggested ratio is 1:4 or one nest box can be shared by four hens. So we have more than enough of nest boxes that is good for 9-10 hens. Henrietta is the only hen that we have at the moment and she stopped laying as she is in molting mode. The other three young pullets will not be ready until after 2-3 months maybe and the two young roos, I don't know yet if we're going to keep them. We use cut-up newspapers to line Henrietta's nest box.