Counting my chickens before they hatch
I'm trying hard not to get my
hopes up too high about incubation
batch #2, but the
stars seem to be aligned this time around. The temperature
control on our new Brinsea
Octagon 20 Advance incubator makes our previous incubator look like a
toy. Despite external temperatures near freezing over the weekend
and trailer temperatures around 50, the incubator temperature didn't
change by more than 0.1 degree! For the sake of comparison, the Brinsea
Mini Advance internal temperature dropped down 5.6 degrees
when the trailer temperature plummeted to 40 one night last time
around, and the Mini incubator always seemed to be running a bit low
even on normal nights.
Meanwhile, I've gotten
scientific about humidity control in the incubator and am right on
track to make the eggs lose 13% of their weight over the incubation
period. (Every time I think about this, I feel like I've enrolled
my eggs in a weight loss program --- weight watchers, maybe?) I'm
learning to keep the night-time humidity in the low 40s and the
day-time humidity in the upper 40s, and am weighing the tray of eggs
every other day to monitor progress.
I'm hoping for 7 living
chicks from this batch of 24 eggs, but, secretly, I'm expecting double
digits as long as nothing drastic happens in the next two weeks.
Now, if only I could listen to ancient words of wisdom and not count my
chickens before they hatch.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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