Finally! The Red Mite Story!

Sorry for the wait! Here goes. . .

I first noticed the red mites in the coop some time ago. I put my tee-shirted-naked-arm in to the nest box to gather a couple of eggs and when I drew it back out there were hundreds (I don't think that is an exaggeration!) of wee bugs all over me. When I looked closer there were loads everywhere, mainly underneath the shelves and nest box roof. Some were small and black, some were slightly larger and red. The red ones have already sucked the blood out of a chicken. *shudders* Looking back now, I wonder if this had anything to do with losing one of the original hens, Hetty, so suddenly.

Immediately I started applying a dose of Jeyes Fluid as per the instructions found on several forums. The coop was emptied and the birds turfed out on their ear all day while I sprayed EVERYWHERE with the fluid. Over two days I attacked these wee blighters and was mighty pleased with myself that they seemed to be gone. Unfortunately, after a couple of weeks, I noticed them coming back again. By this time I had put in the Ikea Hack nest boxes and wasn't best pleased that they weren't helping much - in fact there were now MORE lovely wee nooks and crannies for them to live in.

This would be the point where I started to temporarily lose interest in the chickens. They were very hard work. There were mites everywhere. When I had been anywhere near the coop I came away scratching my head, arms etc. Even when I collected eggs - the eggs had loads of mites on them. This wouldn't affect egg numbers or do anything to the eggs themselves, but it was very off-putting.

Then one day Iain asked me how I was getting on with the battle against the mites and I admitted they were winning. He told me of a product called a Sulphur Candle that he had read about in the paper (The Sun DOES have its uses after all!) that gardeners use to fumigate greenhouses at the end of the growing season and which he had found mentioned on several forums after doing a quick search for "red mites and sulphur candles." The idea is that the thick smoke the candle emits can get into areas that you might miss with the spray.

The very next day I made my way to B&Q to pick up two tins of this miraculous stuff (each tin was roughly £5) and had a lovely 45 minute long chat with the B&Q guy about chickens and red mite and sulphur candles - I heard his life story and came away with loads of images of him as a young child with red mites swarming over his skin after being in the coop for a few seconds!

I had to wait for several weekends before being able to use it though, what with family events and the weather and all. . . but finally finally, I was able to clean out the coop again, wash all the (very easy to wash) Ikea Hack nest box, and set the candle alight and shut the coop doors. After checking for obvious leaks of mucho smoke which would need taped up, I kinda left it for a while. It said 12 hours but I didn't think it would take that long to kill all those itty bitty mites, so, after about 6 hours I went to the shed put the candle out. I got as far as opening the doors and stepping half a step inside when the smoke transformed itself into a clenched fist and punched me in the left eye, leaving me sore and smarting, before moving through my nose and attacking my throat from the inside making me think that the last thing I would see would be chicken feet and legs as they ran over my dying body lying in the mud.

I managed to shut the doors before this happened and made it all the way back to the kitchen where I seriously considered life without the sight of my left eye! Needless to say I left the candle to finish its business over night. Even the next day when the smoke was well and truly gone, the smell still caught in our throats when we went to check the levels of mite activity. At first glance it looked terribly disappointing. There were thousands of mites all over the walls of the sheds, they seemed everywhere. It wasn't until I scrutinised the shed that I realised these were the dead ones. They must have felt the smoke creeping into the grooves in the wood and tried to make a run for it.

So far the news has been fairly up-beat. I did see one very small bug on one of the eggs yesterday which I am choosing to believe was something other than red mite. Play along with me on this for a while please. I suppose it is possible that there were a couple of mites still on the chickens while they were out of the coop. The good news is, if it DOES come back I have the other tin of sulphur to use immediately - I don't have to wait for months spraying and letting them take control - I can just zap them again.

So long as I keep my eyes shut and don't breathe!

So BIG thumbs up for using a Sulphur Candle rather than a spray. As long as you have somewhere else safe to put the chickens while the candle is lit, I would say it is a much more effective solution and definitely a lot less effort! Good luck - let me know how you get on.

Cookies and Crates . . .

I brought home some 'ready mixes' from the shop last night - crumble, sponge, and cookie mixes, you know, the sort you add an egg or some milk to and hey presto you get something delicious after a few minutes. While tea was in the oven David decided he wanted to make the choc chip cookies up.

He seems to have a genuine interest in cooking, always telling us what he is due to make in Home Economics in school, so I prepared the ingredients he needed and let him weigh out the butter and explained the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon to him. For about 80p we got 8 rather large choc chip cookies out at the end of it, with an oven that was already on for our food. That's not bad huh? He was mighty proud of himself as he allocated each of us two cookies! Yes, I know we should be making these things from scratch, but with the box being less than a pound and us only having a certain amount of time in the evening, it is much better to go down this route. Plus, the simpler and quicker it is, the more likely we are to keep the children focused on the job in hand.

Jessica's turn this evening. I bet she picks the chocolate muffins to make rather than the sponge!

Just a quick follow up on the whole "cleaning the chickens out over the weekend" malarkey. Iain very kindly donated most of his Sunday to helping me after my start on Saturday. We cleaned out the new chicks (which are quite a lot larger now), letting them join the main population now. They kept very much to themselves in the enclosed run, preferring to hide behind the feed bins rather than stretching their wings in the big outdoors.

We then cleaned out the guinea pigs who have had a 6 foot long run outside most of this year. I tend to think they would do ok outside over the winter too but erring on the side of caution we moved them into the normal cage and have them now in the garage. They will have more company there as the children are in and out of the garage all the time. So far they have paid more attention to the poor gps in those few days than they have in the past 6 months!

With two cages/runs now empty in the enclosed area our intention was to save space by doubling them up. We then noticed that there seem to be two distinct groups of chickens. The originals plus a couple of hand picked others, and then the two we got at the last fair and all the new chicks. The second group do not go anywhere near the nest boxes in the shed, preferring to stay outside at night. They have taken over the space created by the two cages and seem quite happy to brave the cold. It is said that they don't mind cold but don't like drafts. This run is more or less enclosed on all four sides and as I don't force them to stay out they must find the accommodation to their liking!

And to finish off this tale, I found three bread crates abandoned in a car park a few months ago. I knew I would find a use for them sometime so hung on to them. We have now added them like nest boxes to the 'shelves' of the cages. You need to see the photo to work out what I mean. So far they have also been a big hit with the 'outsiders.'

I do have an update on the red mite problem. I'll post about it tomorrow. . .

Busy Saturday . . .

The chicken run has been getting me down recently - well - the chickens, the run, the coop, and the covered run - they have all had problems which have been annoying me. Today I put on old clothes and started out by cleaning the shed out, while the kids helped by tidying up loads of empty food bags etc for me. It rained the whole time. We got extremely wet. The chickens got wetter! They were locked out in the outside run which is pure mud at the moment. They got loads of corn for their troubles though and there IS an outdoor coop which they all squeezed into.

After the shed was cleaned out I hosed down and disinfected the Ikea Hack Chicken Nest Box which was super easy - much easier than the old wooden nest box, and when it was all put back together in the shed I lit a sulphur candle which is still burning away to itself. This is something that Iain discovered for me after a little bit of googling our red mite problem. Sulphur candles can be bought in the likes of B&Q and are used for end-of-season killing of pests in greenhouses. He found that some people have been reporting great results when attacking red mites with the same candle. I'll let you know how it goes. I do feel a little guilty that the smoke will kill the spiders as well as the mites though. (I have to say that I am a little disappointed that none of the neighbours called the fire-brigade.)

The covered run has a leak (or two, or three) which drips into a bucket. The bucket then has been knocked over and made the run extremely muddy and smelly. I scraped all that up today and put it on one of the flower beds. I am hoping the roof holds together until we get a chance to fix it.

Once all this housekeeping malarkey was over Jessica joined me in the rain to knock the rest of the apples off the tree to much hilarity as one hit me in the chest and another one bounced off Summer's tail which made her squawk and flap as heartily as we laughed. We got about 20 apples of various sizes - about four of them were fed immediately to the chickens as birds had already been pecking at them on the tree. I have already chopped up the ones that were worst bruised in the hope that we will have crumble for dessert tomorrow.

So, all in all, a very busy burst of activity for us today - the things you get up to in the rain! Hoping to thaw out any minute now. Brrrrrrr.

Fair, Chicks, and Camerabag

So - did we go to the fair? YES!

Did we get rid of all the birds we took with us? YES!

Did we come home empty handed? Umm no, not quite, sorry!

We had ourselves a wee adventure and in the process found that David is quite the wee salesman - he sold four of the birds all on his own and as a reward was allowed to go off to find two black pekins. He brought back two hybrids, one brown and one black. I'm not too sure what the thought process was there. They are taking a wee while to settle in - the brown one is just a nice looking Isa Brown, the black one actually has a lovely green sheen off it - but the bad news is - it might just be a rooster - we will have to keep an eye on that one.

Also, we parked right beside a guy selling Barnevelder chicks. It would have been rude of us not to have bought a couple of them - wouldn't it? What with having a chick run and plenty of chick crumb left over. . .

So, yes, it might just be possible that we came home with more than we started off with. Oops!

In other, geeky, news a new application has been launched for the Mac - one that I have been waiting for! It is the lovely Camerabag. I have been dying for a standalone program that will allow me to change blog photos quickly, so this perfect for me! YAY!

Thursday Night

It's Thursday night, I have the house to myself for a couple of hours, and remember what happens when I have free time? Yup - rats!

Since the last time I told you about them I have found another two! This is good news, show me your happy face please. Keeping on top of the bait situation is paying dividends. The last one had managed to crawl along the bottom of the fence and alllmmmost under it into the next door neighbour's garden. It never fails to give me a start when I see them even though I am scanning for them. This one had wee paws in the air, n'all! Actually, it was pretty gross - I couldn't extract it from where it was wedged and had to get a pair of pliers to pull on a leg. . . just ever so gently . . . the leg came and came and came and I was quite convinced it was going to pull off the body!

After buying the last few lots of rat bait from B&Q this latest lot came from the farm shop. I have high hopes for it - it comes in plastic bags that they have to nibble through and I suppose this helps me see if it has been touched. The one I put out a couple of days ago hasn't been touched yet though. Bummer huh?

Anyway, the thing you need to know about dead rats is - they smell! Don't open a bucket after a week and expect to smell roses!

Tonight I managed to tidy up the run a little bit more and this evening's photo shows what happens when you fill up the water bucket for the second time in a day! You would think they hadn't had anything to drink for a week! Yes! There is one actually standing in the water!

In other news I'm starting to put together our kit for Saturday. The bottles of water are filled, the guinea pig cage has been cleaned out, the wood shavings are ready to put in the bottom of the cage, and I am narrowing down the choice of which hens to keep and not take with me.

Yay for Poultry Fairs! How excited are YOU?