The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

The Small-Scale Poultry FlockIf Attracting Native Pollinators is the prettiest homesteading-related book of 2011, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock is the most thought-provoking.  You can read my gushing review on our chicken blog, along with my summary of Ussery's most interesting points:

Breeding small flocks of chickens --- Homestead-scale tips on growing better birds.

Choosing mother hens --- Breeds and traits that make good broody hens.

Chicken feed: Beyond the basics --- Chicken food groups, mangels, and more.

Keeping chickens happy in the winter
--- Ussery has a variety of tips for dealing with this tough time of year.


Eating the whole chicken --- Parts of the bird you never knew were a delicacy.  (Mountain oysters, anyone?)

Diversifying your poultry flock --- Did you know you can train geese to weed your garden?

I would have made the book a lunchtime series over here, but as you can see, I couldn't summarize it in five posts.  In fact, there are dozens of fascinating tidbits in his book that I didn't manage to fit into a post --- go read it!

Our chicken waterer makes care of the backyard flock so easy, you'll almost forget they exist.


Anna Hess's books
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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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What do you do to prevent/ deal with worms,mites, and lice in chickens. Looking for natural prevention. Thinking DE or wood ash for dusting but not sure on worms.

Comment by cab Mon Apr 27 13:47:24 2015

cab --- We've never really had any of those problems. I always figure an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so we keep our flock on pasture at all times and promote a healthy coop with deep bedding (adding new bedding anytime I see manure standing on the surface).

Here's what one of our readers has to say about mite prevention.

Comment by anna Mon Apr 27 16:25:53 2015





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