Red Mite!!

Unfortunately our chook house has been attacked, an infestation you may call it, I call it War!

The dreaded Red Mite, the vampire of the night that sucks the blood of chickens causing stress, reduction in egg laying, anaemia and in some cases even death!

This is a problem I was hoping we would never encounter, however we have and in a BIG way!

They are called the silent killers, for the fact that during the day they hide away in the nooks & crannies of your coop waiting until its dark to feed on your chickens. They appear white until they have fed, then they turn bright red! (hence the name, Red Mite!)

Red Mite leave a grey dust in the crevices they live in, we had this dust, but because I use a white mite powder on the coop, I assumed this dust was that! I have learnt my lesson!

Our chooks are cleaned out reguarly, disenfected and treated with a diatom powder, but we still managed to be completely infested by this horrible pest! As soon as we realised, the war was on!

We began by dismantling as much of the coop as possible, and giving it a damn good scrub, concentrating on every nook and cranny.
After we left this to dry, we applied an insecticide spray (keep it away from the chooks as they must not breath the vapours) to every inch of the coop, followed by a complete dusting of Diatom powder, which was also applied to every chicken.

We also had to take off the felted roof and burn it, Red Mite LOVE roof felt and can hide and breed in it quite easily. The only option to get rid of the major infestation was to send them to the depths of hell!
We have now replaced the roof with plastic corrugated sheeting. Much easier to keep clean and no hiding places for the mites!

The coop is now back together, and looking very clean, however this is not the end of the war, no, every few days we have to keep on top of it, by checking reguarly for any stragglers we didn't manage to kill in the first instance as they can breed so quickly. The average life cycle of a red mite is around 7 days and in this time you can go from a minor pest to a huge problem!

If you think you have Red Mite in your coop, get on top of it now!

Products I used:

Insecticde Spray: Ready to Use Smite Red Mite Spray (Sold widely on the internet and good pet shops)
Diatomaceous Earth (Diatom Powder): A 100% natural powder for use on animals, pets and birds against external parasites (lice, fleas etc) and internal (worms), and for general good health. I bought mine from wiggly Wigglers (www.wigglywigglers.co.uk)

I have also started adding garlic (either fresh or granules) to the chickens water. According to research, Red Mite HATE garlic, so the hope is, if the chickens drink "garlic" water, when the Red Mite feed, the chickens taste of garlic, resulting in the mites going elsewhere!
I'm not sure if it works or not, but I might as well try it!

There are LOADS of internet sites dedicated to information relating to Red Mite so if you need any further info, google it!

Have you had Red Mite? What did you use to eradicate them? We'd love to know!

Mel
@honestlyitseasy
@Tikobear

Elephant Garlic

I’ve never used Elephant Garlic before but we found some in our local farm shop (Wykham Park) last week and decided we would get some and give it a go – it came with a handy recipe card (recipe’s below) with it too.

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from it but the cloves were enormous! Some may say ‘elephant’ size! The smell was a lot milder than normal garlic (I’m not sure if it’s that way for all of this type of garlic or whether this one was particularly mild) but I will make sure when we get more to analyse the smell!

So we used some in a fab lamb curry on Saturday, spen makes one of the best lamb curry’s ever, it’s slow cooked for hours to make the meat tender, I will ask him for a recipe and put it on a blog for you all because it really does taste quite wonderful! We also used some with our roast beef yesterday and have enough left for our beef stir fry tonight (made from the left over roast beef from yesterday).

I desperately need to attack the garden at some point this week – I’ve done what I do every year (and vow not to do this every year), I get all excited about sowing seeds and growing vege’s etc and then I get busy with work and the garden has to take a back seat and then things get a bit overgrown and take far longer to sort out than what they would if I spent just a little bit of time doing it even when I’m busy.

We are also a bit over-run with chicks at the moment – Keith (our lavender pekin) has been very busy with his ladies and although we are selling quite a few, they keep hatching out so we have little mouths to feed all at varying stages. Hatching chicks out whether it be naturally under a hen or in a incubator never losses it’s magic though, they are just so cute and fluffy and affectionate!

Ok best get back to the grind stone, chickens to feed, house to tidy, emails to answer and businesses to get on with!

Claire
Xx

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