The little stinkers. Just when the brugs get growing nicely then they turn up! I've been feeding those suckers to my chickens. They all hang out under the brugs begging when they see me looking at the brug leaves lol.

It doesn't seem to bother them at all (being the cats ate brugs then the chickens eat the cats etc)

Even though I love hawk moths I finally got disgusted when there were too many hornworms and they had stripped down about 10 tomato and pepper plants overnight-fruit and all. So I threw some of those to the chickens too and they would fight over them and rip them to bits and gobble them up :) ~Revenge!!

I would love to build a little coop and get some chickens but DH is adamantly against it. The hornworms don't bother me because I grow tomatoes specifically for them but I don't even know what those little green f-ers turn into. I just plucked off two buds from my Day Dreams that were almost open. They were full of frass and each had a cat in it. Gross!

Karyn, my father was a farmer, he would give me a bag of self rising flour I would go row by row and dust his vegs. This would kill the green worms that were on his plants. They would eat the flour, when the sun would come out, they were gone. He sold vegs to "Handy Andy" grocery store in the 60's. Barbra

My small seedlings also have those green caterpillars, yuck!

Lenette, bet your chickies get all excited with the worms, LOL! Mine would do that with grapes.

Barbra, does it have to be self-rising flour or will regular flour work?

This is a funny post! I knew exactly what those green things were going to be from the symbols following. I found some rolled up leaves on my brug earlier in the summer and took out some worms, but I believe they were butterfly babies and I'm sorry now.

Eloise, it has to be self rising flour, but to make self rising flour you just need to add 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder to each cup of regular flour. Its the baking powder, that makes the worms explode in the sun. Barbra

Thanks Barbra, I can do that. I just didn't want to go buy "self-rising" flour (is there such a thing?) since I only use the unbleached flour.

Eloise, don't you remember making home made cakes from scratch as a young girl. Before we had cake mixes. We used Cake Silk, intead of regular flour. That is another name for self rising flour. It was just sifted flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Gosh, don't you remember how wonderful the texture & taste of those cakes? I know you can still buy self rising flour, because I hear it used all the time in the cooking shows on TV. Since I am retired, that is pretty much all I have to watch at the coast. Its probably more expensive than regular flour, but its so easy to make your own. He did put it down at the first sign of worm damage. Barbra

Gosh now I want to try some of that self rising flour lol. I wanna see them explode in the sun ~Cool!! The chickies will be disappointed haha.

Eloise: Mine go psycho over grapes too but I think watermelon is thier all time favorite. They are spoiled rotten :) Hey, I've got to show you the super dark eggs I've been getting from one of my black copper girls. I will post it in an OT topic when I find the pic....

I didn't know about the SR flour making them pop but I did try a flour water mix to kill insects. You made a thin liquid with the flour and water and sprayed it on the infested plants. Any bug it covered would die. I guess they suffocated but making them explode sounds like more fun ; )

Barbra, I don't remember using Cake Silk, probably because when I was younger, I didn't bake, didn't have the patience to wait for anything, not even to boil water! I don't know if my mom used it. BTW, my mom tried to teach me to cook, but I would cry the entire time as I wanted to get away from the kitchen! Now, I psych myself into thinking I am being creative when I bake/cook, then, I am patient, LOL! Thanks for the recipe because there are times I pass on a recipe if it calls for self-rising flour.

Lenette, not just watermelon, but strawberries and red toenails, LOL! I posted on craigslist asking for maran chicks, which I had seen in the past, but no dice. Patience :-) I bet those eggs are so beautiful!

Karyn, I was wondering if one could spray this stuff on plants for bugs. I will try at some point. Might end up making my backyard look like it snowed!

eloise: LOL@ red toenails, I'll remember that! I found out how much they love strawberries when I made a big batch of strawberry jam to can earlier this summer. I had a bunch of strawberry hulls and peices I had cut off that were too ripe and they really loved them! You should check out the site backyardchickens.com there are lots of people in CA who raise Marans on there and sell eggs and chicks.

Lynette DH's friend raises all kinds of fowl including chickens and always sends us eggs. We get pink, blue, green and yellowish eggs. Do you know what kinds of chickens produce them? They look like Easter eggs without the dye. The colors are muted but quite pretty. I really want to see pics of your chickens. The county fair is coming up and since I was a little kid one of my favorite things was the poultry exhibit. There's so many cool looking chickens. One day I'll talk DH into getting some.

You have so many pets (like us haha) that I'm suprised your dh cares if you get chickens lol. My dh told me no chickens till spring . That was in December. Sooo I ordered some eggs lol. I told him shipped eggs have a low hatch rate and I prob wouldn't get any. I got 13. Then I ordered more LOL! Next thing you know, he brought some home and now he has muscovy ducks and 5 baby Royal Purple guineas!
I bet you might like Silkie chickens...they are so snuggly looking..not the best for eggs but they do lay a small white egg. I'm soo tempted to get some silkies myself :P

The chickens that lay all those neat colored eggs are called Easter Eggers (EE's). They are a mixed breed. Some of the hatcheries will list them as Ameraucanas or Araucanas but they aren't because those two breeds lay blue or bluish green eggs only and also have other characteristics that the Easter Eggers don't. I love the EE's I had two but something bad happened to both of them. I do have some blue true Ameraucanas still though.
Martha Stewart has EEs that she refers to as Ameraucanas so it is commonly mistaken and it is the hatcheries fault LOL! Did you see her episode of the Chicken show? They are becoming so popular again that chickens have been in Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Some people have started crossing the Ameraucanas (blue eggs) with the Marans (dark chocolate eggs) to create Olive Eggers that lay a dark olive egg, some are speckled. They look pretty neat.

I'm putting the link to the Martha chicken show in case anyone wants to watch it.

Here is a link that might be useful: The chicken show

Thanks for the names and the link. I wonder how long it would take Bruce to notice if I had some chickens? I could just say their coop was a new rabbit hutch. lol I have an incubator already that I used to use for my gecko's eggs, hmmmm : )

The silkies are pretty but the ones I want the most have these weird tufts of feathers on their heads that make them look like the haircuts the Beatles had in the 60's. There's so many pretty ones. I don't want ducks or geese we already have plenty in the yard from the pond across the street. They even try to get into the pool and my itty bitty goldfish ponds. I just can't stand their poop, yuck! I've never seen a dark chocolate colored egg, just the regular browns. There's so many people in our neighborhood that have chickens but the big problem around here are the red foxes. They're sneaky and smart and almost always find a way to get into the hen houses. They even got my neighbor's phesants and I'd have had a hard time trying to get into their cage.

Lenette, you'll find out soon enough when you feed the chickens, and wear sandels and your toes are painted red, lol! Thanks for the link on Martha Stewart -- I love to see stuff about chickens. Also for the backyardchickens link, which I have now joined. I might soon post a want ad for marans.

Karyn, google 'marans' and you will see those beautiful dark brown eggs! A while back, one of our members from the gardening group I belong to here, offered me some eggs to hatch from his marans, but I didn't take them because I don't have an incubator. Silkies are so darn cute, but I've read that they go broody all the time. Guess that would be a good way to incubate maran eggs now that I think about it! You really do need some chickens :-)

Now about those Little Green %$#^&!!!!!! O.k., since we seem to have gone to the topic of chickens, thought I would just mention the green worms again, LOL!

You may have been on vacation when I put up a thread of some of the first ones I hatched out. There are some pics of the blue and chocolate eggs mine hatched from. Here is the link on at the bottom. Wow you hatched gecko eggs? Cool! Chickens are probably easier...The chocolate eggs are primarily from Marans which originated in France. Welsummers also lay a darker egg than most brown egg layers but not quite as dark as Marans. The most common Marans are the blk and white cuckoos they lay the lightest eggs of the marans and are available at hatcheries. The other kinds of marans are still rare in the US and mostly from breeders. That is what I am mostly raising.
Now I have babies from one of the blue copper marans, Bella. I set her first pullet eggs and some had even been in the fridge and they still hatched lol. I got 5 babies. Then I had ordered a few pure blue marans eggs from a lady in in MD who has really nice ones that were pictured in Backyard Poultry Magazine to hatch along with Bella's.

This is some of the eggs I'm getting from my blue coppers and blk coppers now. The dark one at the top is from a Blk copper (next to a Leghorn white egg) The others are from blue coppers which lay a little lighter of an egg but still pretty dark.
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Here is an especially dark egg (rates 8 out of 9 on the marans egg color chart) I got from one of the blk copper marans hens named Cheepa. Camera flash is on which washes out the color a little...

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Here are some blk coppers and one blue copper who are broody now, sitting on eggs. They are evil if you touch thier eggs. The one in the middle bit me twice for trying to touch them. She puffs up and looks like something from the Exorcist lol.
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Blk copper marans (except the blue ameraucana that squeezed in next to the roo) this was before I had them all separated.
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Blue Copper young roos still developing thier copper coloring..
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These are some young black split to lavender (meaning they are black but have lavender genes so when bred together will give some lavender and some split blk birds..u keep breeding to get to lavender) project Orpingtons. There is one couple in the US that developed Lavender Orpingtons which they have in Europe but not here. These are from thier line. My 2 hens just started laying :)
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Here is cuckoo baby. He is a (light) golden cuckoo marans. I have him in a different project to breed lemon cukoo marans (which don't exist yet lol). He is older now this is a pic from May. I am really loving the genetics of chicken breeding there is so much to learn!!
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Some pics of one of the coops while we were building it. I need to get updated photos. Dh is building another one now that has gothic windows LOL! He thought this one was silly because I wanted the moon windows cut in the sides and now he goes and builds gothic windows haha.

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Inside
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Nestbox Outside
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Here is a link that might be useful: previous chicken post

eloise: haha now you will really be addicted if you joined that site's forum lol. If you get on the section called
'Where Am I? Where Are You?' You can hook up with people from the SoCal area to get chickens/eggs, go to chicken swaps etc. I know there are alot of active members in that area.

karyn: Are the ones you want Polish chickens? They have the feathered tophats. I think there is another kind like that but I can't think of the name. There are some that are Polish and crossed with a frizzle gene to make Frizzled Polish. They are really awesome looking. My dd doesn't care for chickens but she really likes those.

Okay back to those little green %$** buggers...didnt mean to hijack the thread lol..my bad

Your chickens are so pretty and those dark brown eggs are so cool looking.

I love the coop and the little crescent windows are great. I like that it's blue. How hard are they (the coop) to keep clean? Birds are pretty messy to begin with. Do you let your chickens run loose or is there a pen around the coop?

Say you incubate a couple dozen eggs. What do you do with the extra roosters? Don't you only need one or do you need a rooster at all?

The Polish chickens are the ones and the Frizzled Polish are fantastic!!! Are they more difficult to raise then a regular looking chicken?

I use a rake and rake out the coop completely once per week. I put down pine shavings litter on the coop floor and nest boxes (like you can get in a big bag at walmart for other critters) don't use cedar because the oils can be toxic to birds. The pine litter absorbs odors and keep it dry. Some people use straw in thier coops and nestboxes and that is okay too.
If you buy some cheap linoleum flooring on the roll and line your coop floor with it, cleanups are much easier. You can glue or nail it down.

The best thing is all that chicken poo makes excellent compost for your garden. I store mine in those black plastic trash cans in a sunny area and they compost down to dirt really quick even with the pine shavings in them. I add the bunny poo and also thier timothy hay that gets left over and other stuff like egg shells and grass clippings etc.

The run is raked once a week too. I found large used dog kennel chainlink fencing on Craigslist that is 6ft high and comes in panels. It has two gates. If you hate the look of chainlink you can spray it black and it is much harder to see from a distance. You can also grow edibles up them like gourds or grapevines by leaning trellises against the fence at an angle so the chickens can't eat it all.
I stretched shadecloth across the top to keep the hawks out during the day. I am slowly getting it covered with welded wire fencing for added security. You should skirt your run with hardware cloth at least 18 inches from the outside fence line (connected to the fence) and either bury it or wiegh it down with bricks, rocks etc. so predators can't dig under the fence. Most won't dig that far..they dig down and then up and then hit the hardware cloth lol. I am still working on getting everything done on my runs.

I only let mine free range here when I can watch them because all our property is not fenced and there is dense woods behind us. I already had one EE hen dissappear back there and found her feathers the next day. No blood-just feathers! We have alot of stuff here that likes to eat chickens.
At night the chickens are locked in their coop which is pretty solid. The windows have hardware cloth on the inside which is framed with wood so predators can't pry it up.

With chickens, the hen determines the sex of the babies and you still end up with about 50/50 hen and roos (more or less). It is up to you if you want to process your extra roosters or put them on craigslist, take them to a swap etc. If you have good roos, you can usually sell them. The 4H kids like them for showing and you could donate them to kids if you wanted.

Nope you do not need a rooster unless you want chicks. Hens will lay eggs whether there is a rooster there or not and be perfectly happy. Haha the guys are only good for one thing :P If you want only hens get them from a hatchery that sexes them or get them at POL (point of [egg]lay) so you know that they are girls.

I don't know that much about the Polish. If they are similar to silkies, they are a little more delicate to raise. I think silkies are prone to injury partially because people breed them to have vaulted skulls to get their head feathers to look more poofy for showing. So head injuries can be fatal because there is no actual skull bone covering part of thier heads! I don't know if they do that with the Polish or not. The other breed I know of with the head feathers (I finally remembered)is called Houdan.
You could check out the backyardchickens.com site and research the breeds you think you might like. There is a 'breeds section' on there that really helped me when I was figuring out what kind I would like to raise.
There are also some good coop ideas on the coop building and protecting from predators part.

Great coop Lenette. Can't wait to see the one with the gothic windows! Love all your chickens and those dark brown eggs! I am still hoping to find some marans around here. I wish there was a way to muffle a roosters crow so I could have one. Yep, that site is addicting, and thanks for the lead to Where am I ...

Karyn, so after your questioned were answered by Lenette, are you getting some chicks :-) We won't tell your hubby, lol!