Spring is sprung and things are on the up :)

Well, what a week of glorious weather we have had, the birds are all certainly enjoying having some sun on their backs....and so am I :)

We have recently been offered space on a farm to keep our breeding groups, which is great news, as we can now expand our groups and have more breeds to offer. The last week has been very busy setting up the new pens, moving birds to the farm and getting them settled in. It is very much a work in progress and will be fine tuning for months to come.
Both Charmain and I would like to say a very special thank you to Hugh and Sally for allowing us to keep our breeding groups on their farm and for all their help and support with setting things up.

More and more of the ducks are starting to come into lay now, I have just put some Saxony and Runner eggs in the incubator to test fertility, we are now only waiting for the Muscovy, Cayuga and Pekins to start laying.

I think it's safe to say it is going to be a very busy spring and summer and I for one am looking forward to getting stuck in and making Petersfield Poultry better than ever.

Charmains latest book, Vampire: Child of Destiny is doing extremely well with sales going better than expected in both eBook and Paperback. The first book in the series is still achieving 4000-5000 downloads per month too

www.amazon.co.uk/Vampire-Destiny-Charmain-Marie-Mitchell-ebook/dp/B00HZL4VDE/

For news on Charmain, please visit www.charmainmariemitchell.com

What horrendous weather

  

I just want to start by sending my thoughts to those of you that have suffered in this terrible weather. We have been quite lucky here, we have a river out the front of the house which has been extremely high and almost come over the flood defenses a few times, but touch wood, it's not come over yet and hopefully it won't. The biggest problem we seem to have at the moment is the rear garden where our ornamental wildfowl live. With the ground so saturated at the moment, any rain we have is just sitting on the top and today it was ankle deep throughout 3/4's of the garden. I guess it's keeping the ducks happy tough lol

We had our first ducklings of the year hatch yesterday, 2 Khaki Campbells, from the only ducks we have that are laying at the moment. We also have another 12 in the incubator with 3 weeks to go and have just topped up the incubators with a mixture of Pekin Bantams, Lemon Millefluer Sablepoot, Black D'Anvers, Gold Laced Polish and a few others. We now have both incubators running, but the MS Broedmachine has 31 eggs that are due to hatch on the 20th (All from our Sablepoots, D'anvers, D'uccles and Serama), so once they go down to the hatching try during the week, we will be able to move the ones from the Brinsea Octagon into the Broedmachine, which will all be due on the 27th.

 

We have already had a few smaller hatches this year, the last hatch was a mix of Pekins, Polish and D'uccles with a few others thrown in, that are now coming up to 2 weeks,

We have added to our breeding groups, so now have Gold Laced Polish, Black D'anvers, Chamois Polish, Lavender Splash Pekin Bantams And a mixed group of Silkies to go with our Sablepoots and D'uccles. We sadly lost our Serama boy, and I have a young one we're growing to put with our girls. We're also growing on a pair of Silver Millefluer Sablepoots, which will be laying in about a month or so.

At the moment, the only birds we have laying are our Gold Laced Polish, Lemon Millefluer Sablepoot, D'uccles, D'anvers, Japanese Quail and Khaki Campbell ducks.

I'm hoping to announce some exciting news (for us anyway) next week, so as they say..Watch this space :)

Keep safe!

I can't believe it's been 5 months since the last update :O

 As the titles say...5 months!!!, I don't know where the time has gone.. Well I do actually, We we moved here, we decided that this year we would concentrate and making the facilities better, so we're ready to hit 2014 running. 

We have built a new hatchery and brooding shed, which is also doubling up as winter breeding pens for some of our bantams. 

We also invested in a new incubator to improve hatch rates and numbers of eggs set at once, so now we can set up to 100 eggs at a time plus 20 duck eggs in a separate incubator. Although in reality, we will probably only set up to a maximum of 50 eggs per setting.

we have also built 3 roofed pens, which can be divided to a maximum of 6 pens to house our growing stock.

We have also started to take a very keen interest in ornamental wildfowl and now have an area to accommodate our pairs of Mandarin, Carolina, Ringed Teal, Red Crested Pochard and Fulvous Whistling ducks, which we hope to breed from this year.

Everything is now set up and we're all ready for 2014, having plenty of stock available for the spring orders. All we really need now is some of our ducks to start laying, so we'll have some ducklings available too.

I have just updated the website www.petersfieldpoultry.co.uk with our latest list of available stock, which I aim to update as often as needed.

 

There's no really much more to tell you on the poultry front, but my wife has had an extremely successful year with her writing, which includes a number 1 best seller with "The Lust for Blood" and the first in a series of historical vampire series "Vampire - In the Beginning" of which the second novel of the series is due to be published in the first quarter of 2014.  For more information on Charmains working, please visit www.charmainmariemitchell.com which I shall be updating in the coming weeks.

Al that is left to say is a big thank you to our customers and friends and to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a hatchingly good new year :)

More babies

We have had some eggs hatch, so far in incubator 2, we have had 5 Buff Pekin, 4 Silver Dutch, 4 Gold Millefluer Sablepoot and 1 Friesian Fowl.There are still another 6 eggs to go, which I have moved into incubator 1 with the remaining duck eggs. We have only managed to hatch 1 Call Duck and 1Saxony so far, although we have another Saxony pipped and one more with movement. The Miniature Silver Appleyards were due on Friday, but nothing yet and can see no sign of life, but will leave them for a few more days. The Khaki Campbells are due on Tuesday and we have 3 that are still going.

We also have some new arrivals in the shape of Black Tailed Japanese  Bantams. We managed to get a lovely pair of them along with 7 chicks which are in the brooder with our new hatchlings. Thanks Sarah!!! Also along with the Japanese, we have 2 new young Lavender Pekin boys, one straight and 1 frizzle, so when our babies grow, we'll have an unrelated group, as this is one of the colours of Pekin Bantams that we have decided that we will keep, along with Chocolate (we have 2 frizzled Chocolate boys) and not 100% sure if any of the others are girls yet, if so, we'll be keeping them.

Our Silkie finally began to lay just over a week ago, so we now have her eggs in the incubator along with some of our Silver Dutch and 4 Buff Pekin eggs (but they are 2-3 weeks old, so not holding out much hope for the Buffs). They are due on August 10.

I don't think there's much more to tell at the moment?. We have some Warrens for sale and 1 Runner Drake who is available for free. We also have the Blue Fawn Call baby available too. The younger ducks (now 5 weeks old) have been living outside for a week and are now integrated with our other ducks.

I'll update if I remember anything else worth mentioning

update and catch up

Well, I have finally got around to sitting down and updating the blog!. Life's been pretty busy over the last few weeks. I'll start off with the hatch, last week, we had 30 Pekins, 2 Porcelain Sablepoots and 2 LF Brahma's hatch, the Pekins are Millefluer, Chocolate. Buff, Lavender and Blue. All are doing well in the brooders. Our East Indies, Runners and Call Duckling are now spending the day outside and will be moved out permanently in a week or so. I have also vent sexed them and have a pair of East Indies, 2 Runner Girls and 1 Call boy.

 

The Call Duck that was sat on eggs, decided to give up (I'd guess at about 2 weeks), so I have put her eggs in the incubator and the seem to be doing ok. I couple stopped developing, but the other 7 seem to be growing.

We also have the following eggs set in incubator 1, which is due from the 18th July: 6 Khaki Campbell, 6 Miniature Silver Appleyards and 6 Saxony. All fertile and developing well :). None of the eggs I got from the market were fertile, but it was worth a try!.

Incubator 2 is set with (sorry, can't remember exact numbers). Buff Pekins, Buff Mottled Sablepoots, Silver Dutch and a couple of Light Sussex. Most have candled as fertile, but there is still a good dozen or so that I'm not sure about yet. They are due to hatch around the same time as the ducks.

Our Friesian Fowl has gone to a new home thanks to my friend Tom, so that has freed up space to bring another group in if/when I find something I like.

I have also made a new small coop and run, which I plan on making more of and using them as breeding pens for our small ducks and broody coops. 

I got a pair of Muscovy ducks with the money from my in-laws for my birthday. The Drake is chocolate with lavender in him and the duck is lavender. They have settled in well and I am really enjoying having them around :)

We are also looking at a possible expansion plan at the moment, which I can't say much about, but if it works out, we will also have a new premises with space for Pigs, Goats, Hybrid Laying Chickens and Geese. It'll be a long term plan, so we don't expect to have any livestock there until next year, but will be a very exciting time for us if we can make it happen. As they say "watch this space"

I guess that brings everything up to date for now. Oh yes, I have also updated the website with our current stock for sale. please visit www.petersfieldpoultry.co.uk

It's been too long

I've not had time to update the blog over the last couple of weeks, as we have been busy decorating and all that "just moved in" stuff.

Following on from the last post, we managed to hatch 5 Runner Ducks, 2 Call Ducks and 2 East Indian Ducks. Sadly one of the Call Ducks had very badly splayed legs and was constantly shaking, so with no improvement after 3 days I sadly had to dispatch the poor thing. We also lost one of the Runners a couple of days ago, no reason why?, was just weaker than the others. 2 of the Runners have been sold, so we now have 5 ducks in the brooder.

Both incubators are due to hatch over the next week with incubator 1 going into lockdown tomorrow. Between the 2 incubators, we have around 50 eggs developing, mainly pekins in Lavender, Buff, Chocolate, Millefluer and Blue, we also have 3 Porcelain Sablepoots, 3 Buff Mottled Sablepoots, 3 Lemon Pyle Brahma and maybe a couple of others I can't think of right now. We also have a broody Call Duck sat on 9 Call Duck eggs, so will see how they go. 

I have already sorted out eggs for one of the incubators, I have ordered some Miniature Silver Appleyard Ducks, Khaki Campbell Ducks and some Saxony Duck eggs. I also bought 6 Duck eggs from the market today, so will throw them in and see if anything happens..if they're all clear, I've only lost £1.80.

Need to get some chicken eggs sorted out for the other incubator now, we have a few Buff Pekin and a couple of Light Sussex from some birds I bought at the weekend and have sold on.but could do with 18-24 more eggs.

As I just mentioned, we bought some birds at the sale at the weekend, we managed to get a nice pair of Silver Dutch which we plan on keeping for breeding and also some very very rare Red Blue Yokohama's, which again, we plan to keep. Also got a couple of Pekin Bantams and a few other chickens plus 12 2 week old Pekin Bantam chicks. As for the ducks, the prices were beyond us, we only ended up with 1 Mallard Call Duck, which goes perfectly with our Mallard Call Drake :)

Yesterday, I converted one of the old Pekin houses into a home for the cockerels to go into at night. They had previously been kept in pet carriers, but I think the plastic sweats and unless scrubbed out every day, became very smelly very quick. So now they're in a nice wooden house which sits perfectly under the worktop in the shed and seemed to work great yesterday :)

Finally, here's a list of all the birds we currently have for sale:
2 Creole Araucana Bantam pullets
1 Levender Pekin Hen POL
Pair of Friesian Fowl POL
Pair of Friesian Fowl growers
2 Pairs of Runner Ducks
2 1 week old Norfolk Black Turkey Poults

Please visit our website at www.petersfieldpoultry.co.uk for details

The first ducklings are here :)

We've had the arrival of 3 ducklings so far today, first was a Runner, then followed by 2 Call Ducks. At the moment there are 2 more Runner Ducks pipped and an East Indian Duck currently zipping it's way around the shell, so hopefully will be out tonight. Most of the others have internally pipped and we expect more to hatch over the next couple of days. One of the Turkey eggs has also pipped.

Been busy this weekend helping to lay carpet and decorating our bedroom as well as making a gate to the garden. As it was, it meant having people traipse through the house, so we thought it would be better to have direct access to the garden. Which also helps alot when mowing the front garden and getting any big items into the garden.

We still have more decorating to do throughout the week, but once that's done, hopefully we can relax a bit.

I have also put another 6 eggs in incubator 2. 6 Buff Mottled Sablepoots from a very kindly neighbour and chicken friend of ours. so it looks like we'll be having a week long hatch at the end of the week.