With all the excitement about the chickens I have forgotten to fill you in on the progress of the building. It wasn’t last week … but the week before that we had the Mawebeni boys come back to Willow Park to complete a little bit of flooring as well as clean up some of the mess they made whilst mixing the cement as well as get taught on how to fix lights. They had a great time learning how to fix the lights, but as with many young males didn’t really like the cleaning too much.
The other day when I was bringing all the eggs back into Bulawayo I noticed that a couple looked a little larger than the others. When I got back to our place I pulled out the trusty scales to find out how much larger they were. Apparently, an average sized egg is about 50g’s (according to my sources) and the largest one this week was 75g’s. These chickens are finally starting to pull their weight at Willow Park; just the other week I was getting worried that they were not laying enough and now they are pushing out massive sized eggs.
What a big egg
To be honest, before last week, I had never seen a chicken lay an egg. Now that I have witnessed this interesting event, I thought it is imperative to share this occasion with all with my fellow bloggers …. Enjoy!!!
Our property manager recently retired and so I have been helping in getting things sorted around Willow Park. This man was a good farmer, but not so good on the administrational side of things and the office and quite a few of the storerooms are an absolute mess. Just last week, Jodi and I spend a few days cleaning out the office and getting it back into a workable state. I could not believe the amount of “historical” documentation that was being kept (in no order) and had definitely passed its date of necessity. The property manager, I think, had a phobia of throwing things away, thus we had a wide range of old (and not working) nick knacks spread all throughout the office (including behind the lounge chair). Well, the office is looking tidy again and we can start to get the administration side of Willow Park in order.
On Thursday, a friend and I had to cross the border to collect a few items. As it was only going to be a day trip, we decided to go over to Francistown (in Botswana) which is only a 2 hour journey (not including waiting at the border). Our day began at 4:30am; we started this early so that we would miss the bus loads of people that get to the border on or a little before opening time (6am); this plan failed … we got there at about 5:45 and there was already 3 buses and numerous cars already waiting for the gate to open. As we are both thinkers (and we had a 4wd) we explored in our minds the possibilities of trying out the other border crossing about 90klms away (we had been told about this crossing but had been advised not to go unless you are in possession of a 4wd). We made a quick U turn and started our adventure to the “other side”.
It all began smoothly, the road was nicely tarred and was incredibly smooth; at 30 klms the road turned to gravel, but it wasn’t too bad. It only took another 10 klms and we started to see the reason for possibly needing a 4wd. At the 60 klm mark it was obvious that nothing less than a 4wd was mandatory for this trip as we were venturing into large (but dried) sandy river beds and manoeuvring our way through thick red dirt. With the petrol tank running only on the remaining fumes and both of us feeling incredibly lost (as we were driving through rural villages and guessing our way though various cross roads) we did eventually find ourselves at the border post about 4 hours after our departure from Bulawayo.
I have to admit, our previous crossings (at the more heavily used border) has been very ordinary, with very few smiles and not a huge amount of help given and then the Botswana side is even worse (incredible rude and EXTREMELY impolite) but this crossing was totally different. The guys on the Zim side were so friendly and we spent a small amount of time chatting with them mulling over news and current affairs. As we ventured over the dried river bed to the Botswana border post, I was wondering if they also would be different … and they were … it was GREAT; the guys at the Bots border post were so helpful and also enjoyed a good chat. I think the thing that made this all worthwhile was the fact that on both sides there was absolutely no queues and we didn’t have to wait 5 hours just waiting in a line (like our last South African trip).
Along with moving into the house we also took on the responsibilities for looking after these little critters; we now have 3 Guinea Fowl and 3 Bantams under our care. Two of the Bantams lay eggs semi regularly … they are so small … about half the size of a normal chicken egg … but the yokes are quite large and EXTREMELY yellow.
You may remember last year when we planted our maize crop in November … well according to my sources, if you have a well irrigated crop area than it is possible to harvest two crops of maize in 1 season. Because we have a good bore water system running under Willow Park and our pump delivers more that enough water to irrigate the crop we are going to go for it. It will be great to get double the crop size this season without having to expand our garden area. We are in the process of setting up traps for the wild pig so that they cannot destroy our crop this year … if we can catch 4 or 5 pigs then we will be able to send them to the abator and we will be able to have meat to feed the girls at Samkele for one meal each week for the whole year.
In my last post I was a little down because my chickens at Willow Park were not meeting the quota of eggs required. We tried the method given by Gordon (he commented on the previous blog) and it only seemed to make them a little nervous seeing the chopping board and knife on the wall. So we resorted to plan “B”; this was installing the light timer. OH MY GOODNESS … it only took them three days and they began spitting out eggs like it is going out of fashion. We have now hit the 90% lay rate (210 eggs in 1 week) and things are looking at improving; from the sales alone this week “project chicken layers” can finally support itself by purchasing its own layers mash (I have had to purchase the layers mash in the past because we there was not enough eggs being produced to sell to make the revenue to buy even one bag of mash). We can now look at starting to save for our next bunch of day old layers in 6 months as well as ALL the feed and muthi (medicine) for them until the new chicks reach point of lay … hooray!!!
The layer chicks which some of you bloggers chipped in for are all doing really well; they are healthy and are enjoying life in their open coops. However, I think they may be enjoying life a little too much and are forgetting to thank us by laying eggs. By this stage we should be at a 90% lay rate (having 40 layers means we should be getting about 36 per day) but we are only getting a maximum of 30% lay rate (I’ll let you do the maths on that one). We are about to initiate a new light schedule for them; according to various chicken scholars a strict lighting regime means a successful laying season. I was able to purchase a light timer when I was “down south” so I will let you know how this goes.
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