Surrounded as they were by a
vast field of rye, our second batch  of chicks still managed to
get into trouble by the time they reached five weeks old.  Despite
the fact that we’ve raised several other sets of chicks in this
same spot over the last two years with all of them staying
earth-bound, our current flock thought it would be a good idea to fly
up into a young peach tree and run along the limbs.



To be honest, the
youngsters probably weren’t causing much trouble there (and might have
even been eating pest insects), but they were also ranging further
afield, and our strawberries are in the next zone over.  No way do
I want chickens eating up those berries we slave and dream over all
year.

So we loaded them up…

…and rolled them out.

Our miniature flock is
now fenced into chicken
pasture 1, which
hasn’t yet been grazed this year and is a chickweed
paradise.  I suspect the chicks will run through the
delicacies in about a week, at which point, we’ll have to put on our
thinking caps again.  For now, we’re leaving the brooder on the
yellow wagon for easy movement.

Thirteen days after pulling
the silkworm eggs out of the fridge, I awoke to tiny black
caterpillars in my bowl of eggs.  I’d put a mulberry leaf in the
bowl a couple of days before, and the miniscule silkworms were already
clambering around on the leaf even though it had dried up.  I
quickly added two new, tender, Illinois everbearing mulberry leaves to
the silkworm habitat, and the caterpillars had clambered atop their new
grub within half an hour.

I feel like I could see
the silkworms growing hour by hour.  The first photo in this post
was taken at 12:30 pm, versus the other two above which I snapped
around 8:30 am.  Notice how the caterpillars in the top photo are
already starting to expand the segments closest to their head as they
fill up on mulberry leaf?

I’m not sure all the
eggs hatched, but my 200-or-less silkworms did a lot of eating in
little time, even at this young age.  The photo above shows a leaf
that I added to the bowl at about 8:15 am, photographed at 8:45
am.  And the photo below shows the same leaf at about 11 am:

The holes represent leaf
matter that has gone into silkworm tummies, and all those little black
dots are frass (poop), which I suspect will be an excellent
by-product.  (Our
main goal with these silkworms is to feed them to chickens.)  Stay tuned for
another post about what we opt to move the caterpillars into once they
outgrow their bowl.