Saturday, January 14, 2012

Eggs!!

  My incubator is a re-purposed wine fridge with a light bulb for heat and a small fan, Mike found it on craigslist. It's not very big but it works for me. To help hold the heat I have a little collection of rocks and a wine bottle filled with water on the bottom shelf.
The light bulb, rocks and wine bottle
 There are any number of reasons NOT to hatch eggs right now. It'll be too cold to brood them outside. I'll have dusty, smelly and loud baby chicks in the house for at least a couple of weeks. But these were sitting on the counter...
 
10 Easter Egger eggs from my girls
 I swear, they were calling out to me! "Hatch us, hatch us!" I went back and forth all morning. I should, I shouldn't, I will, I won't...but  I DO need new hens for my flock. And the boys can make soup or be traded on craigslist. It's not like I would just be hatching because peeps are so fuzzy and adorable (much.) So I plugged in the incubator and set the thermostat. It came up to temperature perfectly .
The humidity will come up a little when I put the eggs in 
 So I did it, I put the eggs in the tray and set in the incubator.

The eggs, the fan and the thermometer/hygrometer 
I'm only doing 10 eggs right now, I could fit 50 but I want to hand raise them. So, now it's time to wait and turn them 3 times a day. If all goes well I should have babies around the 4th of February. I'll be candling in 3 days and I will try to get pictures of that. 
The whole set up
Here is a picture of daddy chicken and possible mommy chickens.
Any but the golden one could be the mommy (s)

Daddy



1 comment:

  1. Very cool! Thank you for explaining it so well.

    Good luck!!

    ReplyDelete