I was worried. But I figured you were tired and fell asleep. I didn't stay too long myself. I have too much to do today and was still exhausted from staying up late saturday. But I have already done all my house work this morning and all the animals fed so now I am moving on to the laundry now!!
LOL! I'll be there eventually We've got storms predicted tonight, and we're not sure when they'll end, or how severe they'll be. We're not getting whole lot done outside today, cause it's spitting now
Well today is sunny!! After days of rain and flooding (not terrible flooding) it is nice to see the sun again.
The kids decided they wanted to make thier own incubator so we gathered the materials we had and tried to make one. They wanted to draw a picture of the farm and the chickens,turkey,ducks and quail they hoped to hatch so I decided why not? science and art together! So a friend had lots of styrofoam in her attic (from previous owners flower shop)so she gave us some and we pulled our 30 gal fish tank out of storage. Next we went to lowes and bought a thermastat and a thermometer/hygrometer , light kit and light bulbs, Cost about 25.00 (wish we could have found a old water heater for the thermastat).
So they made a picture on the styrofoam piece that was going to go on the back of the fish tank. Dh wired the thermastat and small pc fan and we wrapped the tank in styrofoam except for the front. We put in 3 dz eggs after testing the temp for two days. We have some mixed eggs from our own flock to see if we could hatch with our creation.
Well today is day 10 and 100% of the eggs are growing!!! We candled them and it was awesome seeing the chicks growing!!
Here is some pics of the incubator:
Well since our mutts were doing so well we decided to try some pure eggs off of ebay. The kids got to pick what kinds they wanted to try and of course they wanted to try everything!! So we found a assortment of eggs including duck eggs and bought them and now have them in the incubator!! All are growing!! We did have 3 that were broke but still had more than we had bid on to set. So now it is a waiting game to see if we get some chicks and ducklings!!!
We hope to hatch our own meat chicks this year. Last year we bought chicks from a hatchery and it was not cheap. But we want to raise our own meat so we will try to find some dark cornish eggs and hatch them to start our own self sustaining meat flock.
We will candle the eggs later today and I will try to post pics of them!