Author: Anna & Mark

Two days after hatching, our silkworms were growing
fast.  No longer did they make tiny little holes in mulberry
leaves.  Now they turned each meal into a skeleton, then wanted
more within a couple of hours.

I quickly learned that
silkworms will migrate to fresh leaves within minutes if you simply
place the old leaves on top of the new ones.  As the silkworms get
older, we may have to start removing old leaves, but there currently
doesn’t seem to be any issue leaving them to dry up below the fresher
material.

Although none of the
instructions I read mentioned this, I’m glad I left the eggs in the
bottom of the bowl for the first couple of days because silkworms, like
chickens, don’t seem to hatch all at once.  I estimated we had
about 100 sikworms by the end of day one, but then another big batch
hatched out and we ended up with perhaps 300 or more.  It’s easy
to tell at a glance whether the majority of your eggs have hatched
since empty eggs are white instead of blue-gray.

As meal-time began to
encompass four or five leaves instead of one or two, I figured it was
time to move our silkworms to larger quarters.  We’re trying them
out in a rubbermaid bin with sawdust on the bottom, just like they were
chicks.  I’ll report in a later post whether that works out or if
we have to change gears.

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.