Chicken Feed

I've had a custom chicken feed recipe borrowed from a fellow blogger friend for awhile now and I've been wanting to check around local mills to see if anyone could/would make it. There's a mill not too far from us that has been in business for 100 years. They were the first place we called and after reading off the ingredients, they could have it ready that afternoon! Talk about service!I wish I could have gone with Andrew to pick up the feed, but all 6 of us don't fit in the pick-up and it's silly to take 2 vehicles. Lucky for me, Andrew took his camera along! It's the original building and sits right on the corner of the main road. There's a 2nd building across the street where they sell garden supplies.

Inside the mill, still using all the original mill equipment.

Love the look of the gears on this. I'll definitely try and get there myself to see it in person.

Someone else's bulk order, waiting to be picked up. Such nice people there, they already entered our recipe into the computer, with our permission, so if we order from them again, and we will, the recipe will already be in the system. While there, Andrew looked around in the garden center and they had onion sets for sale. He called and asked if I wanted some and I said to get both red and white onion sets. Silly me, I said 5 lbs of each; silly him, he didn't correct me. When he got home and I looked in the bags, I nearly fainted! That's a lot of onions!! We are now itching to get the garden tilled so we can get those onions in the ground!

Feed on the left is commercial feed from the co-op. Feed on the right is the custom recipe from the Mill. We have 900 lbs of feed stored away that, hopefully, will last us a while. I already marked my calendar so I can figure out how long it goes for. Price-wise, it's cheaper for us to buy in bulk like this, so it's a good fit for us. I don't expect to go back to commercial feed and with Spring coming on, pretty soon there'll be plenty of fresh greens and bugs for the chickens to nosh on.

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In other Chicken News:

A Buff died yesterday. She hadn't been looking well lately and the past couple of days she confined herself to the coop. I had a feeling she might die. When I opened up the coop yesterday morning, there she was, face down on the floor, dead. Poor girl, she was 2 years old. After we buried her, I cleaned out the coop and laid down fresh wood shavings. Old chicken manure and bedding went to the garden where it will get tilled over with the dirt.

Makes me extra hopeful that I'll get a hen or two from the 3 chicks we have. Fingers crossed!

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