Don't Count Your Chickens (or Melons) Till They're Hatched

The heat is beyond belief. As I am new to this part of Israel, I am not sure whether this is normal or whether the whole world is burning up. 

 To do any work in the garden, we must now get up before 5am, a time when the chickens stir, the roosters cock-o-ri-coo, and both crickets and birds share the stage with song. This fresh and inviting time is short lived for by 8:30am, it is time to run inside for refuge. 

It may be comforting for us to run inside to the air conditioning but the chickens cannot! 

They crowd under the shade of the trees with their beaks open in a panting position. I add electrolytes to their water and give them several servings of cold cucumber. They have two awnings for sun protection and we hung a few bedsheets on the fences which we hose down a few times a day. 

The issue is that the water pipe is exposed in places so when the water comes out of the hose, it is so boiling, I can barely hold the hose. So now we are placing ice cubes in the chickens’ water to encourage them to drink. 

The heat is so intense, it is cooking everything alive. I wanted a red pepper for my salad today and went out around noon to pick a few. When I touched a pepper, it exploded into goop, literally broiling on the stem. I do not want chicken broilers. 

Yay, corn 'tiras' season!

This is also the time our silkie female decided to go broody. On July 1st, I noticed she was lying flat on her nest inside the coop. She was there all day long and this continued. As I did not know what a brooding chicken looked like, I actually thought she was expiring. 

On day 2, I saw her leave and ran in to see that she was sitting on two eggs – large brown Bielefelder eggs, not her own tiny white ones. Still unsure about what she was up to, I took one egg and left one there. 

I checked this online and learned that she was brooding, a behavior I thought was rare these days. I learned that it would take 21 days of sitting on the egg until a chick would hatch. It looked like a miserable predicament in the heat of summer, especially for a chicken wearing a mink coat. But at least this kept her away from the three overzealous roosters for whom she was easy prey. 

A Bielefelder and a Silkie co-mothering.

To add further complication, one Bielefelder hen also claimed this spot for laying her eggs. She would go in there and sit on top of the tiny overdressed silkie to lay eggs. By the following Friday, she was sitting on 13 eggs. 

I soon learned that I should have marked the original egg with a marker so I would know which ones were the fresh eggs. I did not as I could never predict when the silkie would leave her eggs. 

On day 18 there were 20 eggs there, some of which were cracked or pushed aside. Her tiny body could not even cover so many eggs. I don’t know why that Bielefelder could not figure this out and why she insisted on laying her eggs on top of the silkie. 

One morning, I saw the Bielefelder was actually sitting on the eggs in a brooding position. I thought the silkie was pushed away after all her hard work, but no, she too was back on the eggs a bit later. They were co-mothering. I had no idea what was going on and trusted that nature would figure it out or at least the hens would. 

Checking to see if the melon is ripe for picking.

Since broody hens stop laying, we were only getting two to three eggs a day for our own consumption, down from five to six. Fine with me, I thought, but how do the hens know when to get off their nest? Do they wait for one chick to hatch and then call it a day? I did read that hens can hear the chicks peeping inside the egg before they are hatched; I also learned that a broody hen will sit on plastic eggs, duck eggs or nothing at all. 

Day 21 came and went with no sign of chicks. Perhaps the eggs were not even fertilized. Meanwhile, the hard-working and over-devoted silkie sat and sat. She was getting thinner and her feathers looked forlorn. I was worried for her health. 

Adding more drama to the coop, we decided to give away one rooster. They were loud and aggressive, like nasty bullies on the block, and three roosters in one coop is actually two too many. Yesterday, a farmer came to get one rooster; he literally lunged for the rooster, grabbed him by the legs, and walked off to his car with the rooster dangling upside down while I was hiding in the house. 

Right away, the chickens rearranged the pecking order. The remaining Rhode Island Red rooster is now the officially proclaimed King of the Castle. He has taken control of everything in there and  forced the poor male silkie into perpetual asylum under our olive tree. 

We may be down one rooster, but back inside the coop, the Bielefelder had taken over the remaining five eggs, leaving the silkie to nest on empty straw. We had to intervene. 

This morning, Amir shooed the silkie away from her bare nest and into a second fenced-in area. She was so agitated, she paced the fence clucking out in despair. My vision was then to move the battered male silkie into the same area so they could have their own honeymoon suite. Not so easy. 

Critter damage.

I spent 45 minutes today trying to cajole him with lettuce and honey dew melon but he was too focused on evading the newly crowned and menacing King Red. I tried to throw a sheet over the male silkie but had no luck. Talya then came out and chased him into the coop where she caught him. 

Both silkies are now safely separated away from King Red and his hens, but they are not exactly celebrating their new life alone. This has been quite the learning curve and has proven (at least for me) to be more emotional than I could imagine. 

I did learn that broodiness is contagious so if I find another hen flat out on a nest, I will know what to expect and then how to proceed. 

It is now melon, squash and corn season in our garden, if you know when to harvest them. We have some critter with a sweet tooth who quietly slides under the electric fence each night for his banquet. He has methodically taken a bite from almost every melon in the garden using sharp teeth and claws. (So far, the the thick rind of the watermelon has shown to be critter safe.) 

We planted those squash and melon seeds in trays back in April, tended to the seedlings, planted them under the trees, watered them, and now we are feeding the  critter's banquet leftovers to our chickens! 

From broody chickens to domineering King Roosters, and from to exploding peppers to melon carcasses, every day brings its own form of overheated farm drama. The moral of this story is not to count your chickens or your melons before they are hatched.