The last video in this week's lunchtime series may be too scientific for some of you, but I highly recommend it to folks who are serious about giving biochar a try.  Ken Revell, graduate student at Virginia Tech, is experimenting with turning overabundant poultry litter at commercial chicken farms into biochar.  He'll tell you precisely how much biochar is beneficial in soil and why it shouldn't be applied beyond a certain rate.

This is Spike, it was nice of him to help me smooth out our 4th load of chicken manure compost.

It took the previous 3 loads for me to wise up to the idea of covering the entire truck bed with a large tarp, which most likely helped to save several 5 gallon buckets worth from blowing away during the trip back.

sk1ppy14 from somewhere in the United Kingdom has done a fine job fabricating this automatic chicken coop door closer/opener from an old gate opener.

These medium sized gate openers will sometimes get weak over years of heavy usage and require replacement. What a great way to extend the usefulness of this farm gadget.

Youtube user clintfisher has created what I would call the most sophistitcated automatic chicken coop door opener I've seen so far.

It uses Arduino technology that allows for wireless control and will be powered by a solar cell that charges a small 12 volt battery.

The locking mechanism is impressive and he makes use of an old battery powered drill for the motor action.

I doubt if there's any racoons out there smart enough to get through this level of security.

Stink bugs are usually bad news in the garden.  They suck the juices out of your plants and the chickens won't even eat them because of the noxious fluid they squirt out when disturbed.  But if I'm honest, my antipathy toward the insects dates from childhood.  You see, stink bugs love blackberries, and so do I.  Pop a blackberry in your mouth without looking and there's a good chance a stink bug might come along for the ride, leaving the most awful taste in your mouth imaginable.

Despite my scarred childhood, stink bugs have now been redeemed in my eyes.  I was out on my weekly bug-picking expedition Monday, squashing asparagus beetle larvae and tossing all of the other bad bugs into a cup of water to give to the chickens.  Guess who was already helping with the asparagus beetle control?  This predatory stink bug uses its long proboscis to spear insects and drain them dry rather than sucking a plant for lunch.

I'm glad I decided to use manual control this year on our insects, even though it is a bit of a pain to pick bugs for an hour a week during the growing season.  I've noticed spiders, ladybugs, and now this stink bug moving into the asparagus, keeping the beetle populations in check.  Maybe in a few years, our beneficial insect populations will be so healthy that I won't have to hand-squash larvae?

Everett and Missy (from Living a Simple Life) were kind enough to invite us over to their new homestead for lunch on Saturday and I leapt at the offer.  There are few things I like better than a farm tour --- a great chance to walk around someone else's operation and get ideas.

The farm was beautifully manicured (way out of my weed-overgrown league), and I'm sure lots of you would love to see pastoral photos.  However, being who I am, I took a few pictures of the chickens and then a whole bunch of pictures of the garden.

Everett and Missy made the wise choice to spend their first year on the farm focusing on infrastructure, but they didn't ignore the garden entirely.  Instead, they planted a few cucurbits down by the creek, hired a nearby farmer to plow up a field to plant a clover cover crop in a second area, and then spread thick straw mulch over a third area.

This third area, of course, was the one that caught my eye --- a patch of lawn being transformed into a budding Ruth Stout garden.  Mushrooms were already hard at work improving the soil, and worms had clearly been attracted to the moist, bare soil beneath the mulch.  The couple's free range Buckeye chickens loved scratching up the mulch to find critters...and depositing their own organic fertilizer in exchange.  I wouldn't be surprised if this plot turns into a bountiful and trouble-free garden next year.

Of course, we didn't escape the farm tour entirely unscathed.  Like they say, August is the only time you have to lock your car in Appalachia --- otherwise, you'll come back to discover it full of zucchinis.  Thanks for the produce, the delicious lunch, and the tour!

I've seen a lot of automatic chicken feeder designs and I think this simple use of PVC pipe with a cut out trough is an idea that works the best if you need to leave your flock for a few days and you want the feed to be automatically replenished with the help of gravity.

Usually I see these projects from afar on the internet, but today Anna and I were lucky enough to see this setup first hand when we got a chance to visit Everett and Missy's new awesome farm today.

I could even see a version of this being practical in a chicken tractor if someone was needing to be away more than a couple of days at a time.

I found this tomato being munched on by a few Japanese Beetles and thought to myself this is the day our youngest chicken gets to experience the tastiness of a tomato.

He seemed to be a bit perplexed and decided to go ask his mother what he should do.

Mark Stead from Melbourne Australia has created a clever, low budget, automatic chicken coop door opener that takes advantage of a cheap alarm clock.

I estimate he's spent around 45 bucks, which is not bad compared to commercial units over twice that.

What makes this design cost less is the fact that you still have to manually close the door at night. His instructions are clear with a generous helping of images to guide you.

I'm thinking this alarm clock opener could be modified to also close at night by incorporating the Chris and Keri limit switch method.

We killed the rest of our broilers this week, and while we were at it we deleted our three Plymouth Rocks for failing to meet their egg quota.  The farm feels very quiet without them.

We've learned a lot from this year's broiler experiment, mostly things we want to change for next time.  Our chickens were tastiest and cheapest per pound (and least wiley) when we slaughtered them at 12 weeks, so we'll be killing broilers young in the future.

We also plan to raise two or three smaller batches next time rather than one large one.  After spending two mornings this week covered in blood, my gutting skills have improved, but I feel like I also became a bit numb to the process.  We strongly believe that if we take a life, we should respect the animal and be entirely in the present, which means killing no more than eight chickens a day and killing them no more often than once a month.

Of course, that means we have to start hatching out our own chicks.  We're saving this year's Rhode Island Red chick and will breed him with our doughtiest Golden Comets next spring.  A hybrid of a hybrid is a strange direction to go for chicken breeding, I know, but our three oldest Golden Comets have proven to me that their genetics are exceptionally sound.  At four years old, they still lay nearly an egg a day apiece, and they're the only ones I trust to peck up a cupful of Japanese Beetles before the insects disperse back into the garden.  If raised by a mama hen rather than spending their early childhood stuck in a brooder, I have high hopes that these chicks could be prime foragers.

Yesterday's roof roosting prevention tin worked well to persuade the remaining pasture flock to sleep in the coop last night.

Now the mother hen and chick have the whole place to themselves and we have enough farm raised chicken to last most of the winter.

The problem with chickens roosting on the roof at night is that the roof gets fertilized and the chickens avoid the small coop where a guy like me has a fighting chance at catching one for dinner the next morning.

Maybe this sheet of tin will keep them off tonight?

The new chick continues to grow and is no longer attached to the mother hen.

I guess this growing up thing happened a week or so ago.

He's an outsider to the flock and flies by his own rules.

I first discovered permaculture pioneer Sepp Holzer when I posted about do it yourself aquaponics back in the spring.

The guy from Richsoil.com got a chance to spend 12 days with Sepp and he did a great job of documenting his visit with pictures, videos, and detailed descriptions of the Sepp Holzer style of permaculture.

Richsoil.com also has an in depth section on his experiences and observations with raising chickens that I found informative and useful.

Although I'm a vegetable conneisseur, I don't have enough experience to tell the difference between mediocre meat and awesome meat.  This is where Huckleberry comes in handy.

When I take a piece of meat out of the supermarket wrapper, Huckleberry naps on the couch.  I can even open a can of tuna, and our spoiled cat will barely twitch his nose.  But when I bring in freshly slaughtered chickens, he comes running to the kitchen where he meows (in vain) for a treat.

After its two day grace period, I roasted up one of Tuesday's chickens yesterday and Huckleberry was suddenly ready to help out with anything, no, really, anything.  Meow!  (Yes, this time I did give him a tidbit of meat to nibble on.)

To my untrained taste buds, the 16 week old Dark Cornish roosters are less flavorful than the 12 week old roosters, falling on the taste gradient somewhere between a storebought, organic, uncooked chicken and a storebought rotisserie chicken.  But to Huckleberry's nose (and mouth), our homegrown chickens are ten times better than either.  I suspect Huckleberry is sniffing out the superior nutrition, which makes me even more inclined to keep experimenting with a good way to raise our own meat.

In my opinion, chicken butchering is not something you want to learn out of a book.  We acquired the skill by helping out at a couple of different chicken-processing days on friends' farms, picking up lots of hands on information that we never would have found in print.  So when we read on Everett's blog that he'd had a hard time with poultry processing on his new farm, we invited him to our next kill day.

We thoroughly enjoyed meeting one of our long-time readers in person, and hope that Everett got something out the experience too.  He certainly sped the processing along, not only with his hands but with his fascinating tales of his business endeavors (beginning with selling gum in grade school, progressing through writing about surfing in Australia, and culminating with his current SEO skills.)

We feel very lucky that Everett ended up settling only two hours away, and we're looking forward to meeting his wife.  Maybe next time, Missy will come along to paint our fence...um...er...kill our chickens.

I got this scar today by not obeying the first rule of the Hitch Hikers Guide to chickens which is to always have a clean towel handy.

This round of chicken catching was twice as difficult due to their increased size and speed. One of the more aggresive roosters jumped up and karate chopped me during my first attempt.



Once I took a moment to catch my breath it became obvious where I went wrong. No towel.

A good sized towel can act as a shield/net when you're going up against a coop full of roosters.

Once I developed my towel technique it started to feel similar to what you see during a bull fight, minus the sword and dangerous horns, but those chicken claws are nothing to sneeze at.

"That fence is just there to keep the dogs out, right?" said one cockerel to the other as they roosted on their coop roof and peered out into the unknown wilds.

"I think I'll stay inside anyway," replied his brother, drowsily.

(I consider this evidence in support of the domestication contract.)

This was my first attempt at the latest automatic bucket waterer. I think it once held cooking oil.

The main problem with a container like this is the thickness of the plastic. Two of the nipples screwed in fine, but one of them didn't seem to have enough plastic to bite into and ended up leaking.

This automatic bucket waterer was easy to put together with a DIY kit, a shelf bracket, some scrap wood, and a handfull of drywall screws.

A future system will make use of a 50 gallon plastic drum with some sort of  gutter collecting run off water from the roof of the chicken coop.

Despite their uncomfortable roosting arrangement, the mother hen and her chick are clearly midway through the weaning process.  Our youngest chicken is no longer glued to its mother's side, and instead opts to spend most of its time foraging with the cockerels.

With her first chick ready to fly the coop, Mama Hen has decided to move on.  Tuesday, I noticed her exploring the cockerel's coop, and Wednesday I found two eggs tucked in an out of the way corner.  I'm tempted to leave the eggs alone and see if our broody hen will successfully raise a larger clutch of chicks, but I'm not sure whether our cockerels are actually mature enough to be fathers.  Some of them are crowing, but the sounds are far from a real "cock-a-doodle-doo!"  What do you think?  Is a three month old rooster old enough to be a father?

This automatic chicken coop door design is called the up swing version for obvious reasons.

You can get the complete kit from a guy named Jeremy for around 135 dollars which includes an adjustable timer.

I like the way the movement goes out, which seems less risky than the guillotine like action of most automatic chicken coop doors.

There are really only two environmentally and ethically conscious ways to eat meat --- buy from very small farmers who raise livestock as part of permaculture systems or raise those animals yourself.  We're still a long way from reaching this optimal state, but I hope you'll let me show you what I hope our homestead will eventually look like.

Here in the eastern United States, forests are the native ecosystem for most areas, so I envision creating forest pastures to raise both chickens and pigs while allowing many native plants and animals to coexist.  In the prairie states, long-grass pastures are probably more appropriate.  In either case, it's also essential to spread livestock out so that manure becomes a boon rather than a pollutant --- don't raise more pigs than can be used to fertilize your garden.

We already feed all of our food waste to the chickens, but we don't waste much, so the scraps don't make up much of their diet.  We've approached all of the local grocery stores, hoping that they might give us spoiled produce, but unfortunately that is against corporate policy.  Those of you who live in urban areas would probably have better luck approaching small restaurants, and might be able to feed your livestock on food waste alone. 

Hunting is another way of feeding ourselves high quality meat in a relatively natural setting.  Since deer are overpopulated in our area, we'll be focusing more on this option as time goes on.  Then there are honeybees --- while they only provide empty calories, it's hard to complain about a source of food that takes up no more than two square feet of land and produces roughly 49,000 calories per year.

Unless you make weekly airplane flights or turn on the air conditioner with the windows open, changing your eating choices is probably your best bet for helping the earth.  37% of the earth's terrestrial area is currently devoted to producing food, and at the same time habitat destruction is the biggest cause of extinction on the planet.  Isn't it time that we put some deeper thought into our food choices so that there will be a bit of space left for wildlife to survive?

I've been curious to know how long it might take for the baby chick to break away from the mother hen and sleep on her own roost.

The current sleeping spot is atop an old stump, which seems a little crowded to me.

I know that many of you are still stuck on the ethics of eating meat simply because you can't bear to think that you were personally responsible for the death of a cuddly cow or cute chicken.  If you're going to go that route, you should definitely become a vegan, since being a vegetarian doesn't prevent the death of livestock --- check out my essay about the bloody side of eggs, for example.

But I hope you'll consider the fact that most of the animals that we kill are domesticated livestock that wouldn't be able to survive in the wild if turned loose to fend for themselves.  We've entered into a contract with our cows and pigs, just as we have with our cats and dogs (although the terms are a bit different.)  We feed them, shelter them, and give them a happy life...until the day the guillotine falls.

In nature, omnivores (like humans) eat other animals, and death is part of life.  It just made sense to those first Red Jungle Fowl to hang around human villages, staying where the food was copious and the predators were few.  In effect, the chickens-to-be traded a dangerous life full of wild predators for a safe and easy life with only one predator --- man.

On the other hand, pain and suffering are not part of the contract --- I believe that CAFOs void the terms of our domestication agreement.  On our homestead, chickens are raised on pasture, live a happy life, and are killed quickly, so I consider this a valid way to honor the agreement early humans and Red Jungle Fowl made when the latter started hanging around camps of the former.

When I was in high school, I knee-jerked toward semi-vegetarianism, but since then I've examined the issue in more detail and concluded that eating meat in moderation is better for the planet.  In many ways, I think that being a vegetarian is a lot like washing the birds caught in the oil spill --- both actions make us feel better about living in a dangerous world in which things die, but neither action actually helps that world become a better place.  I'd like to make the world a better place.

The effects of dietary choices on global warming are hard to disentangle, but all we need is a bit of number crunching to look at the amount of calories we can produce per acre when growing different kinds of food.  The numbers below are drawn from a lot of different sources for U.S. agriculture and include dozens of assumptions, but they should give you a rough idea of comparative acreage required to produce a few staple crops.

I remember when I first started considering my dietary options, I was told that we could feed many more people with the same amount of land if we all became vegetarians.  I was swayed...until I realized that we're talking about feeding people only corn and potatoes.  The truth is that creating protein is expensive in terms of land use whether you're growing soybeans or raising cattle, and if we compare apples to apples you'll notice that pigs actually win over beans.

But the table at the top of this post only considers conventional agriculture (aka CAFOs for meat.)  What about if we instead raise our livestock on pasture and feed them food waste where appropriate?  For cows, you won't see much difference, but pigs and chickens really begin to shine once you return to a more traditional feeding system.  Both of these animals are well adapted to foraging on scraps --- the Vermont Compost Company raises chickens on compost alone while Sugar Mountain Farm cuts their feed bills drastically by raising their pigs on pasture with the addition of waste dairy products.

In societies that don't depend on huge agricultural corporations to feed the masses, a family is likely to have a pig and a flock of chickens that they feed mostly or solely on waste from the farm and kitchen.  Remember that adding some livestock to your diversified homestead also equates to manure to fertilize your veggies, and it's suddenly hard for me to merit the idea of planting a field of soybeans instead.

I didn't want you all to think we had a bad taste in our mouth about Dark Cornish chickens.  Sure, they're inefficient at converting feed to meat and can't forage to save their lives, but the flavor is phenomenal!  We roasted up one of our cockerels, and it turned out as juicy and tender as those rotisserie chickens in the grocery store.

The last couple of times we've killed and eaten our own chickens, we thought we'd get the best flavor by eating the meat as fresh as possible.  Since then, I've read that it's best to let the chicken sit in the refrigerator for a couple of days so that rigor mortis can relax, tenderizing the meat.  I suspect the two day wait was part of the reason our latest home grown chicken was the best I've ever tasted.

I hope you all didn't miss us too much.  Our power's been out for the last day or so, but an intrepid worker just came and cut the tree off our line, restoring juice.  Stay tuned for your regularly scheduled farm updates returning tomorrow.

If you need your homesteading fix (Walden Effect Junkie, this is for you), you might enjoy reading all of the details of our forest pasture experiment which I've spared you all by posting on our chicken blog instead.

Things got a bit more crowded for the mother hen and her cute chick today when I installed a west wing door to the coop.

This allows us to cut off the previous pasture so we can give it a rest and plant something more edible than the weed buffet they started off with.

We dispatched the first third of our cockerels Tuesday morning.  They were quite small at 12 weeks old, dressing out to only 2.25 pounds apiece (not counting the necks and giblets), and they clearly don't compete with grocery store prices at $5.64 per bird.  Of course, we didn't set out to save money with these broilers or we would have stuck to the traditional Cornish Cross.  The real test will be flavor --- can we tell a difference between our pastured chickens and storebought?

We're going to kill another third of the cockerels in a month, and then the last third at 16 weeks old, testing to see how the price per pound and the flavor of the meat changes over time.  Although everyone is in agreement that Cornish Crosses should be killed at around eight weeks, the internet lists widely varying maturity dates for the Dark Cornish, and I like experimentation.

On the other hand, despite enjoying the experiment, I don't think we'll be raising Dark Cornish again.  They didn't live up to the hype of being good foragers --- they mostly sat around and waited for their feed, even going so far as to run away when I tossed grubs into their pasture.  Instead, I'm torn between several alternatives:

• Cornish Cross --- This is the traditional way to go, but raising these grain-only-eating broilers at home is little better for the environment and our bodies than buying grocery store meat.  Also, since they're hybrids, we would have to buy chicks every year, which doesn't pass the sustainability test.
  
• Freedom Rangers --- Many small growers swear by this breed, reporting that Freedom Rangers are good foragers (although they said that about Dark Cornish too.)  The major downside is that we couldn't create our own breeding flock since Freedom Rangers are a cross of carefully bred parental lines owned by European corporations.
• Create our own Cornish cross --- We could save back the biggest cockerel and cross him with our Plymouth Rocks to create our own Cornish Cross.  We might get hybrid vigor, but I can't quite see where the foraging ability would come from, and I'm bound and determined to grow chickens without such large inputs of grain.
  
• Eat the roosters from our layer flock --- Traditionally, farmers used to just raise dual purpose breeds and eat the roosters from their flock along with the old hens.  We've been well trained to think we want big breasts and tender meat, so I'm not sure if we could stomach this option.  But it would definitely be the most sustainable, and probably the best for our health if we stuck to a good forager like Rhode Island Red.
  

What do you think?  Have you given some of the above options a shot and think they've got merit (or should be avoided at all cost?)  We won't be raising another batch of broilers until next year, but we need to make a decision soon about whether to save back one of the Cornishes from the chopping block.

These new dark cornish chickens we've been pasturing are said to be more predator resistant than most birds.

We've yet to see any signs of predator trouble thanks to Lucy and the new K9 electric fence strand.

What predator resistant really means for this operation is a substantial increase in the challenge to catch your bird when it's time to process.

It gets easier with practice, but I think we'll experiment with a different breed next time.

The current small subset of the forest pasture has finally been mostly denuded.  In preparation for switching the cockerels over to the larger paddock (where the weeds are now waist-high), I opened the dividing gate and let the mother hen and her chick mingle with the flock.

I was a bit concerned that the lone chick would be no match for 25 mostly grown cockerels, but I needn't have worried.  When I went in to feed the combined flock Friday morning, the cockerels stampeded me and even rushed out the door.  Were they starving?  Nope.  They were just terrified of Mama Hen, who was walking behind them.

All the mother hen has to do is glare in their general direction and 25 teenage males scatter in terror.  How's that for a matriarch?

On a semi-related note, next week we'll be slaughtering our first round of cockerels.  If you're not ready to see that part of the life cycle, you have now been forewarned.

The flock block is wearing down to more of a bowl shape.

It seems to be a good value compared to the 50 pound bags of feed due to what I think is an increase in protein.

Hopefully you're sold by now and can think of at least one use for comfrey on your homestead.  So how do you grow it?

Choose a good location.  Comfrey isn't picky about soil quality, but it requires deep soil with no hardpan, rock layer, or high water table to prevent the roots from reaching deep.  Heavy clay is no problem, and is in fact preferred.  Although comfrey is moderately shade tolerant, it will be less productive when planted out of the sun.

Propagate your plants.  Comfrey is only grown from cuttings, so unless your pockets are deep you will want to buy a few plants and then divide them up.  The good news is that one good-sized comfrey plant can be divided into dozens of small plants, many of which can be harvested starting the first year.  First dig up the large plant and cut off sections near the top containing leaves --- each leaf crown area can become its own plant.  Then take all of the small roots that are left, cut them into one inch sections, and plant them in a nursery bed one inch deep and two inches apart.  These youngsters can be transplanted into permanent locations the next spring.

Prepare your ground.  Comfrey will outcompete almost anything once it gets a foothold, but you could lose your crop to weeds while it's getting established.  So take a bit of time to root out any perennial weeds.

Plant your comfrey.  Comfrey needs a permanent location, much like an orchard, since it's very difficult to eradicate once comfrey has gained a foothold on a plot of ground.  Space plants three feet apart in good soil, or half that in poor soil.  Plant in the fall (September to November) or spring (March to May.)

Weed and fertilize.  One tantilizing system consists of planting comfrey in the chicken run.  Since chickens don't like unwilted comfrey leaves, the birds will weed between the comfrey and fertilize it in the process, only requiring you to add wood ashes or another form of potassium every few years to balance the fertility.  You can cut a plant or two every day while feeding your chickens, and the poultry will eat up the cuttings the next day once they're wilted.  If you're not using chickens, dig out any perennial weeds by hand and fertilize annually.

Harvest.  You can begin cutting leaves as early as the first year, but the plants produce the maximum yield starting in the third year.  After several more years, productivity will begin to decline as the centers of the huge comfrey plants die out.  This is the point at which you'll want to dig up the plants and divide them, or just turn in pigs to root out the comfrey and start a new comfrey patch elsewhere.

Having a mother hen cooped up with a baby chick presents a small adjustment issue for the Avian Aqua Miser that is easily resolved with a booster step.

I prefer the look of something natural like this piece of firewood that Lucy has long since carried away and gnawed.

The traditional farm use for comfrey has been as livestock food.  Once dried, comfrey contains up to 26% crude protein, along with an assortment of minerals sucked from the subsoil by eight foot deep roots.  In addition, comfrey contains less fiber than grass does (10.9% of dry weight), which makes it a good feed for non-ruminants like pigs and chickens that have a hard time digesting fiber.  Anecdotal evidence exists for feeding comfrey to horses, cows, donkeys, sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs, and at the time Lawrence Hills wrote his book (the early 1950s), race horses were being fed comfrey as a way of keeping the animals in top condition.

The question is --- how much of these animals' traditional diets can be replaced by comfrey?  Little data existed at the time Hills' book was written, but he suggested several hypotheses based on information about various animals' known nutritional needs and a few on-the-ground trials.  One farmer noted that providing pigs unlimited comfrey allows you to lower their storebought feed by 50%, and another farmer used the exact same figures with his two horses.  Comfrey can be used to replace up to 10% of chickens' feed without lowering egg yield (though chickens are the most sensitive to excess roughage of all the livestock mentioned, so you might not want to go much higher than that.)  Lawrence suggests slowly increasing the proportion of comfrey included in an animal's diet until signs of negative effects are noted.

When I first heard that chickens eat comfrey, I got excited and tossed some in the tractor...and my girls looked at me like I was crazy.  Hills says that most livestock will learn to like comfrey, but not in the fresh form.  The prickly hairs that make me use gloves when harvesting can't be pleasant in an animal's mouth, but luckily the prickles are merely a thin layer of silica stiffened with water.  If you cut the leaves and wilt them for a day or so, animals can eat the comfrey with no ill effects --- I'll have to give that a shot!  Other farmers cut comfrey to make hay for the winter, or even turn goats and sheep (who don't mind the prickles) onto a pasture of comfrey in the spring and fall when grass pasture quality is at its worst.

If you're considering comfrey as animal feed, you should cut your comfrey often so that it never sends up flower stalks (like those shown in the second image.)  The percentages listed in this post are all for comfrey in the leafy stage, while flower stalks have nearly double the fiber and less than half the protein.

Have you tried feeding comfrey to your animals?  What did you think?

I made the mistake of storing the flock block in a place where it could get wet, and about 1/5 of the top portion started to mold.

It seems to be a hit with the boys once they figured out what it was.

If you had chickens 100 years ago in America you would've most likely used a hand cranked corn sheller every day to keep your flock fed.

Thanks to Global Cycle Solutions now you can give your hand a rest and get all your corn shelling done with pedal power.

The device can be unattatched so you can operate the bike for transportation or hook up another clever gadget to charge your mobile phone or flashlight or whatever else you can imagine that needs a little power.

The cost is 60 dollars plus shipping which seems like a bargain.

I think we've finally found a product that will help Lucy figure out that she's not allowed to steal food scraps from the chicken pasture.

Just minutes after the new chick made it back to mamma Lucy went sniffing around the fresh chick trail. It didn't take her long to follow it to the chicken pasture. I just happen to be watching when she got too close to the Zereba K9 lawn and garden electric fence controller. The backward leap she made seemed to break a few laws of doggie physics.
 

It's easy to set up. Just wrap each end of the perimeter wire onto the wing nut at the bottom. It uses something called direct discharge technology which eliminates the need for a grounding rod. With a maximum range of 1500 feet the K9 electric charger makes an excellent solution to keeping unwanted pets out of sensitive areas. Expect to pay about 25 bucks for the unit and maybe another 20 to 200 depending on how long of a perimeter you're protecting and the quality and quantity of the fence posts used.

"Soooo...." I said.  "I think the best way to move the hen and her chick to their new home is for one of us to grab the hen and the other the chick.  What do you think?"

Mark had finished building a protected nook in the fenced off portion of the chicken pasture, and we were dying to get the chick to its new home.  The brood coop was damp and stinky, both from accumulated poop and from the ten eggs that didn't hatch (ticking time bombs, just waiting for a wrong move to send waves of rotten egg scent through the farm.)  But the mother hen is pretty intimidating and I was, frankly, a bit afraid to grab her.

"I'll get the hen," said my brave husband, donning his gloves.  And he did --- one minute later, the squawking bundle of white feathers was being deposited into the chicken pasture.

The trouble was, I couldn't catch the chick.  It was just too fast for me, slipping in and out of the brood coop, then fleeing in fright into our barn.  I went in after it, trying to tease it out of a stall full of old boards, until Mark called a halt to the proceedings.

"Just wait a minute and see where it is," he admonished me.  We waited, and seconds later, the fuzzball reappeared.

"Mom!  Mom!  Where are you?!" it cheeped desperately.

"Cluck, cluck, over here," she replied from across the yard.

We stepped back, and the chick sprang forward.  "Mom!  Mom!" it exclaimed as it scaled the plum's raised bed.  "Mom!  Mom!" as it trotted through the blackberries.  "Mom!  Mom!" as it crossed the driveway, its mother now in sight.

"Well, get in here," the mother clucked soothingly, and her adoptee slipped through the chicken wire to be reunited at last.

We both feel a lot better now that the new chick and her mom have the whole 2nd half of the chicken pasture all to themselves.

The day's lesson in foraging started as soon as they got over the shock of the short move to their new zipcode.

The farm is brimming with life this week.  The strawberry crop has reached the point that we made strawberry shortcake, and we finally ate our first snow pea.  Coming attractions include broccoli and cabbage heading up (above) while black and red raspberry fruits begin to swell (below.)

Of course, I haven't forgotten the peaches!  How could I when our biggest tree is directly outside the kitchen window?  Daddy was right that the tree would self-thin --- it wasn't quite happy with the job I did and dropped another couple dozen fruits the next week.  But the remaining fruits are bigger every day and are still so numerous I can hardly wrap my mind around the bounty.

Speaking of bigger every day, our growing flock is...growing.

And our forest garden continues to attract wildlife and fill our lives with beauty.

The drink dispenser I salvaged the spigot from for the garden cart worm bin is now doing duty as a waterproof enclosure for the new K9 electric fence charger.

These units somehow get their grounding from the electric line, which is a change from other chargers.

The new flock steadily grew more interested in what I was doing to their pasture as the day went on.

Now we have it split in two sections with a gate connecting each area.

I decided to use an old piece of tin to shore up the chicken pasture gate.

Putting a strand of electric wire across the gate bottom would make getting in and out of the pasture a small hassle.

After several days of basking in the sun the solar fence box seems to have a weak battery, which means our next step will be to spring for the 40 dollar electric fence charger.

When we were in South Carolina last month, Daddy gave me eleven fertilized Rhode Island Red eggs to try to hatch out.  I brought them home and started preheating the incubator, only to discover that the cheap brand we'd gotten at the feed store only works if you keep your room temperature very constant.  So I made a spur of the moment decision and popped the eggs in the brood coop with our White Cochin instead.

Regular readers may remember that we tried a similar experiment last fall, with the result that our hen killed the only chick that hatched.  But I wanted to give our hen another chance before putting her on the dinner table, figuring she may have killed her first batch of chicks because their color made it obvious that they weren't her own.  Rhode Island Red chicks are pale, so color wouldn't be an issue this time around.

I added a lip to her culvert nest so that none of the eggs would roll out, then I threw the hen in the coop.  I'd heard her make a broody moan the week before, but she wasn't really broody yet and it took her most of the week to decide the eggs were worth sitting on.  By then, I figured our chances of getting a hatch were close to nill, so I didn't even post about it, but I left the hen to sit on the nest since I figured I might as well get the broodiness out of her system.

Saturday morning, I dropped by to toss in a bit of feed...and saw a fluffy chick running in and out of the Cochin's feathers!  I moved the automatic chicken waterer into the culvert nest at chick eye level and tossed in some chick feed, and the peep immediately followed the mother's lead, eating and drinking.  It seems quite healthy, and the Cochin has clearly accepted it, so the only question now is...will it be a new layer or a broiler?  And have I finally learned enough that next time we'll get a good hatch rate?

We've had issues with using a broody hen to hatch eggs in the past, and our current experiment (which I'll outline in detail at lunch) was only minimally successful.  But the idea has so much merit from a homesteading perspective that we'll keep plugging away until we make it work.

For example, look at this --- a mother hen teaching her chick to forage on day two!  They spent the first day hunkered down in the nest, but by midafternoon Sunday, the Cochin had led the way to the ground and was scratching up worms.  She picked up each wriggler, clucked over it enthusiastically, then dropped it at the chick's feet.  Granted, the chick was less than sure what to do with this largesse, but I still think such early exposure will turn it into an awesome forager.

If that's not enough to convince you of the utility of the natural approach to chick-rearing, consider how much electricity we'll be saving by not having to run an incubator for three weeks and then a heat lamp for another month.  After following its mother around the brood coop for ten minutes, the chick decided it was chilly, so it poked at its mother's feathers, then tunneled underneath the hen and disappeared. 

Best yet, I've discovered that I can delegate most of the worrying to the mother hen.  Yes, we will definitely be trying the broody hen approach again, and I have high hopes the third time will be the charm.

I'm afraid our chicken pasture contest is a bit of a wash.  As the weeds grow taller and taller and our pudgy chickens become slower and slower, it's becoming clear that there will be no scratching the earth bare at this rate.  Our Dark Cornish chickens don't seem to be as avid foragers as I'd hoped they'd be, although they do like picking through the huge mound of weeds I keep wheelbarrowing into their pasture.

What you all probably care about the most is --- who wins?!  I've decided to name Bethany our grand prize winner since she picked the furthest away date which is closest to infinity.  Bethany, drop me an email with your address and your onions and flowers will be in the mail next week.

The more scientific among you may be asking --- what now?  I still want to have the chickens scratch up some of the earth to expedite grain planting, so we're going to subdivide their current pasture in hopes that a smaller enclosure will actually get scratched bare.  Given the proximity of butchering day, we may wait to build more pastures until next year, and will be rethinking our broiler experiment --- maybe we'd be better off having the slow, fat broilers in tractors and our perky layers achieving self sufficiency on pasture?  Stay tuned for future experimentation!

This nose high strand of electric fence wire will help to keep Lucy out and any other stray critters that might be a potential threat when she takes her random naps.

Westmacott explained that gardening practices of slaves in the American South were almost as diverse as those in Africa.  Slaves unlucky enough to live in upland regions tended to be worked from sunup to sundown under the heavy thumb of an overseer --- they usually had no time to tend their own garden, and were seldom allowed to keep livestock for their own consumption.  The "luckier" slaves on large plantations along the coast were often given a daily quota of chores to pursue at their own speed, and if they were fast and hard-working, they could make time to grow their own vegetables and keep a hog and chickens.  The families craved this bit of self-sufficiency, which could mean the difference between malnutrition and relative health.

A focus on pigs and chickens as a path to meat self-sufficiency carries through to the modern day in the African-American families Westmacott interviewed.  Many of the families had either hogs, chickens, or both, and hog butchering stations in nearly all of the yards showed that the families not currently keeping pigs used to.  Despite the daunting size of a full-grown pig, about half of the families still slaughtered their own hogs, explaining that butchers won't return ears and chitterlings, which the families like to cook with.

Pigs and chickens (and mules, nearly all of which have been replaced by tractors and rototillers) made the traditional Southern, African-American family very self-sufficient.  Families used to feed their food scraps and excess produce to the animals and get meat and manure in return.  This homesteading feature is quickly disappearing, with purchased fertilizers and grocery store meat now cheap enough that families see little need to keep their own livestock.

This is the 4th breach of security for the chicken pasture perimeter thanks to Lucy and her naughty behavior.

Since the spring mowing and future fence building is starting to crunch our time I think I'm leaning more towards that nose high stretch of electric fence wire as a new method of keeping her out.

With any luck Lucy will get the message right away and reclaim her title as best dog in the galaxy.

I just noticed this back door to the chicken pasture Lucy installed recently and growled at her while I stitched it back together.

We could double down on securing the bottom edge with some additional fastening, or hook up the electric fence charger and run a strand at nose height all along the perimeter.

Another option would be to stop giving the pastured chickens any scraps and divert that nutrition to the chicken tractors or worm bin.

None of these choices work for me because they avoid the root problem of Lucy's failure to recognize that all food scraps belong to us and she needs special permission to access even a banana peel.

It may seem like a tall order to train a dog to fight the urge to eat something yummy, but I've seen it happen before and feel that Lucy is serious about doing her part in being a team player.

We just need to discover where the communication is breaking down and put some extra effort in explaining this critical lesson.

A solid 25 pound brick of chicken yummyness was acquired in the big city today for about 13 bucks.

Stay tuned for a full report on how the new chicks respond to the Purina Flock Block.

So you lost your bet on the Kentucky Derby?  Don't despair --- we're holding a betting contest you're much more likely to win!  And this one is chicken related --- aren't chickens better than horses?

If you're interested, you can read about our plans for creating several rotational pastures for our broilers, complete with food-bearing perennials.  We'll be rotating our chickens through future pastures every couple of weeks so that they don't demolish the vegetation, but we want them to scratch this first pasture up pretty good so that we can sow it with grains for their winter diet.  When will the ground become bare enough to plant in?

Post your guestimate date in the comments, and whoever is closest will win bee balm and Egyptian onions.  Both plants are hardy perennials that need next to no care and either attract bees and hummingbirds (the bee balm) or feed you for ten months out of the year (the Egyptian onion.)

For the scientific minded among you, here's some more data to help you choose the very best date.  Our chicken pasture is about 800 square feet and holds 25 birds who will be six weeks old on Monday, May 3.  They've been eating at the pasture since April 23, and have already started to scratch their most traveled spots bare.  On the other hand, they have been concentrating their attention on less than half of the area so far and haven't really found the far corner yet.  I've been adding wheelbarrow loads of weeds every few days, and am feeding them about a gallon of food a day.  (They're hungry little birds!)  All of the photos in this entry were taken Friday and are relatively representative of the pasture at this moment.  It's built around a big wild cherry that is starting to leaf out, so the vegetation is weeds that do well in partial shade, not grass.

The fine print: The ground will be considered bare enough when I randomly decide it's bare enough.  Only one guess per person, please!

The downside to using this 5 foot tall chicken wire on the new forest pasture fence is how flimsy it gets towards the top.

I've found that a semi tight stretch of electric fence wire helps to firm it up.

It took me a few times to figure out, but it's a lot easier to measure out the distance first and cut the wire to size and then weave it through.

My brother and I sat by the chicken pasture for an hour on Saturday, watching the game.  "Look!" I exclaimed.  "Cock fight!"  Two chicks faced off, their ruff feathers standing on end.  After several seconds of staring, one cockerel leapt into the air, and the other fled all the way back to the coop.

Then, more drama.  25 pairs of eyes peered upwards, and then 25 pairs of feet hit the ground as every chick ran for shelter.  "Hawk!  Hawk!  Hawk!" they were clearly thinking, although the dark shape swooping down from above was just a butterfly.

For our continued amusement, I went inside and brought out the bucket of chicken scraps --- the first time our chicks had been fed human food.  But the cockerels were confused by the odd shapes and instead preferred to run after aerial insects, capturing them in flight.

All chicken amusement aside, I'm excited that our chicken pasture experiment is underway.  If any of you have had experience raising foraging chickens, I'd appreciate it if you'd fill out our poll.  Once I come up with an appropriate prize, we'll be starting an exciting chicken pasture contest shortly --- stay tuned!

It seems like old chimney bricks have hundreds of uses.

I wedged these together between the 2 gate posts of the chicken pasture in an effort to discourage Lucy from trying to dig her way under in order to help herself to any future scraps that might get tossed that way.

Luckily she fully understands that chickens themselves are off limits. It's just the delicious food scraps that bring out the bad girl in her.

The new flock finally got their first taste of freedom today.

Next up will be to build them a large Avian Aqua Miser bucket waterer so we don't have to keep topping the little ones off everyday.

The most vulnerable spots for the new chicken pasture fence will likely be near the ground.

Since we've got plenty of logs laying around I decided to line them up along the bottom edges to provide a solid wooden surface to staple the fence material to.

I should get the gate installed tomorrow, which will make everything ready for the new flock to get out and roam for the first time.

The new chicken pasture is one step closer to completion with the final stretch of fence going up today.

Next up is to fabricate a light gate for easy access to the pasture and coop.

Driving home from our whirlwind visit to my father in South Carolina, we seemed to be travelling back in time.  The tree leaves shrank back into their buds until they were a mere haze and black locust flowers gave way to redbuds.  As we crossed the border of our home county, we passed a large strawberry field coated with row cover fabric --- a good reminder to check the weather and notice a frost warning in effect.  I followed the strawberry farmer's lead and covered as many of my strawberry and broccoli beds as I could, even though the light frost didn't seem to harm the plants left unprotected.

Lucy had broken into one of the chicken tractors while we were gone, not to eat the chickens but to eat their scraps.  So I chased down three hens as they happily scratched through my garlic's mulch (then chased them down again half an hour later when I realized where the hole in their cage was.)  Across the yard, the chicks seem to have eaten the majority of the grass clippings I gave them, along with a gallon of feed, and were begging for more.  We were only gone for 36 hours!  Could everything really have grown so much in a day and a half?

I raised the automatic chick waterer height yet again due to the rapid growth rate of the new flock.

If everything goes as planned they should be running free in their new pasture sometime around the middle of next week.

Homesteading teaches flexibility.  I was absolutely certain that I would have time to finish weeding the beds of garlic and spring seedlings this week and that Mark would have time to fence in our first chicken pasture.  In reality, we each got about halfway to our goal.  It just seemed more important to visit Mark's mom and my dad, to get the irrigation system back up and running, and to cut the weeds before they were too high for the mower.

I felt a bit bad about leaving the chicks in their coop over another weekend, so I tossed in a bag of weedy grass clippings.  The shady side of the yard came up in a dense stand of chickweed and bittercress this winter, and I didn't get the mower over there before these weeds went to seed.  I figured it was a better idea to let the chicks pick through the weedy clippings than to put them straight on a garden bed, and the chicks agreed.  "These are tasty!" they exclaimed, then proceeded to play king of the hill.

I installed a small roost training limb in the chicken pasture coop today.

Folks around here speak of a mysterious benefit from using cedar in chicken coops.

Someday I'll try to figure out the logic behind that Appalachianism. In the meantime I'll keep using cedar in future chicken tractors and coops just because it looks so good and feels very natural.

We've had this portable wall of willow branches since the winter(Thanks Mom), and today was the day I found its first use.

I put it up by the door to give the chicks some room to scurry off to while I installed the new Reflectix chick warmer.

Soon we'll have a proper area for the boys to run and scratch during the day.

We had to switch to the smaller back up bulb due to the larger heat lamp exploding yesterday.

I used a piece of scrap Reflectix and an old wooden box to form a cozy insulated corner that can hold in enough heat to keep the chicks comfortable.

Stay tuned for more details on the up and coming heat pad chick warmer, which might not make it off the drawing board till the next generation of chicks.

The heat lamp we had in the new brood coop somehow got damp during this afternoon's rain storm which resulted in a small explosion.

Luckily there were no casualties. I guess I should hurry up and build that heat pad chick warmer that Anna dreamed up a few weeks ago.

Monday morning, I opened the door to the building where we're keeping our chicks and something skittered away to hide in the corner.  Was it a mouse drawn to the open bag of chick feed?  Nope, it was a chick who had hopped all the way out of the brood box and then flown or fallen to the floor.

Even though I put a lid on the end of the brooder where our homemade chicken waterer's mount provided chicks with a handy stopping stool, our little cockerels were clearly ready for a bigger home.   I caught one perched on the top of the box, then on Tuesday had to chase down two chicks who had flown out and were busily exploring the seed starting area on the floor.

As a result, I was thrilled when Mark pushed through the heat on Tuesday to finish up the chicken coop and expand our chicks' home by a factor of ten.  It took the cockerels about a minute to get their bearings, but then they started to peck and scratch like mad.  I'm not sure what, if anything, they were actually finding to eat --- I suspect the chicks were just practicing their foraging, testing out sticks and stones and leaves to see which ones tasted like food.

Two weeks is very early to move chicks outside, but the weather has been unseasonably warm and I've given them a heat lamp to take the chill off the spring nights.  Next week, we'll let them out of the coop and into the as-yet-unbuilt pasture, the true start to our forest pasture experiment.

I can already feel an increase of happiness within the new flock after today's move. Now with a bigger space and some real ground to scratch they should start to settle down and feel at home.

A couple of the more brave chicks managed to jump out of the table top brood box the last few days, which probably means they needed more room a week ago.

We'll still keep a close eye on their well being, but the care taking should be a lot easier now that they have some elbow room.

One obvious omission to the do it yourself table top brood coop is the lack of a front or back door.

The chicks have a moving day planned for tomorrow as soon as I fence in a small segment of the new chicken pasture coop building. That's when I'll remove one of the brood coop panels and cut out a door opening so they can be free to come and go during the day as their nap schedule permits.

Photo credit goes to the intriguing heyburton blog, who has an interesting article on chicks doing some low level math.

One detail to note is the placement of an Avian Aqua Miser in respect to new chicks.

I started off with one in each corner on the starboard side of the box. The height turned out to be a problem when all 24 chicks decided to crowd into that corner during a brief fire episode. The chicks who were bunched up close to the nipple were activating the valve and dumping water on themselves and their immediate neighbors. I'm no expert, but wet chicks on a cold night sounds a bit too close to a country western song for my comfort level.

The lesson is to avoid corner placements of your automatic chicken waterer for the first couple of weeks. After that you should be able to raise the waterer to avoid any such issues in the future.

Estimated cost of the chicken pasture coop so far is somewhere between 1 to 2 dollars for a handful of sheet rock screws.

The salvaged brackets continue to prove themselves as a flexible fastener, especially when you have a good size hammer to help preach your philosophy of bracket transformation.

Step 2: Decide on location, choose and trim suitable cedar posts, and install.

Step 3: Catch your breath and have a glass of ice tea.

In addition to our grains for human consumption, I plan to incorporate some grains into the non-forested part of our new chicken forest pasture.  I'll let the chickens scratch up one of the flat areas well, then turn the birds into another paddock while I broadcast buckwheat, millet, and perhaps corn seeds into the distressed ground.  After three months, I'll be able to rotate the chickens which we plan to keep for the winter into the grain paddock so that they can supplement their winter foraging with grains.

I've already outlined the method for growing buckwheat and everyone knows how to grow corn.  But how do you grow millet?  Unfortunately, several different species (each in their own genus, so only vaguely related) are called by the name "millet" and each has its own growing requirements.  Pearl millet has the largest seeds and the advantage of threshing free from its hulls naturally, but pearl millet also requires warm temperatures and may not set seed in cold climates.  Proso millet can be grown in cooler areas since it requires only 60 to 90 days to mature, and Titus emailed me that her chickens adore the seeds so I suspect the hull doesn't bother them.  Have you grown millet in your garden?  If so, what kind, and how did it do?

Step 1: Cut up downed Magnolia tree for frame work of the new chicken pasture coop building.

The permaculture way is to mix your own compost out of homegrown goodies and waste products from nearby, but our garden has grown faster than our capacity to come up with free compostables.  Last year, I top-dressed each of our vegetable garden beds with about 2.5 gallons of composted horse manure (equivalent to about 0.2 inches of compost, for a total of about 3 cubic yards), and I felt like the garden didn't grow as much as in previous years despite additional mulch.  Feeding the soil is a necessity, so we've broken down and bought storebought compost to allow us to double the application rate for this year.

As always, I have lots of crazy plans for creating as much compost as we need within the next year or two.  Here's a rundown of the top contenders:

• Horse manure.  We've got a steady annual supply of around two to three cubic yards of horse manure from the neighbors.  In the past, we've been guilty of applying some manure which was only semi-composted because we needed more organic matter immediately.  This year, I'm hoping the storebought compost will tide us over so that we can run fresh manure through a worm bin for use next year.
• Black soldier flies are on the horizon for this year, primarily because we want the free, high protein food to supplement the bugs our chickens will peck up naturally in the soon-to-be-built forest pasture.  If we find a source of free food scraps (difficult since we live so far from town and only make the trip once a week, on average), we could potentially create quite a lot of compost in the black soldier fly bins.
• Compost tea from the worm bin and the black soldier fly bins.  In the past, our summer worm bin has been on the ground, which means all of the high quality tea leaches out into the surrounding soil.  Mark's going to build new bins for this summer that collect the tea --- now I'll have enough to use on plants other than the potted citrus!
• Compost piles.  In the past, I've never had a compost pile, because I just threw the weeds and food scraps to the chickens or used them to build new raised beds.  This year, I hope to build some compost piles in the forest pasture to serve double duty as an insect reservoir for the chickens and a way to supplement my other sources of compost.  Potential components in these piles include leaves raked out of the woods, weeds pulled from the garden, wood chips and/or sawdust if we can find a free source, urine, manure from the chickens (naturally added as they scratch), duckweed, and comfrey leaves from my expanded patch.

I've got a whole 'nother set of goals for the mulch that goes on top of the compost, but this post is already too long!  By the way, the careful reader will have noticed that I included a photo of the year's first dandelion --- I guess this spring isn't a solid week behind last year's spring, at least according to the dandelions.

I'm astonished by the changes I see in our chicks after a mere five days.  When they arrived a few of them had their first wing feathers poking through, but most were pure fuzz balls.  Now they all have wing feathers, and are even starting to realize that they are birds.  Mark moved our homemade chicken waterer to hang on the wall so that he could raise it up a bit, and our chicks decided the empty mounting ledges are perfect for practicing vertical hops.  As a short person, I can understand the urge to be taller than everyone else.

Meanwhile, their food consumption has been doubling every day.  I realized near the end of day two that the chicks weren't actually eating all of that food.  The palest chick has learned to scratch --- he'll hop up into the food dish as soon as I fill it and send chick feed hurtling throughout the brood box.  Kind bird that he is, he taught his friends how too.  Although I'm thrilled that our little foragers are scratching already, the time has come to develop a better feeding system.

We had a close call today. The electricity went off, which prompted Anna to make some adjustments to the do it yourself table top brood box to keep the heat in. Once the juice came back on I went out to set the light back up, not knowing the new upgraded light can not be closer than 18 inches from anything flammable.

Fast forward about 20 minutes and I'm smelling smoke. Luckily I got there in time to remove the smoldering wood chips and adjust the lamp accordingly.

The chicks are fine, and I learned a valuable lesson about heat lamp safety.

What's it like to order 25 chicks from a hatchery?  Well, first you wait, and wait, and wait for the day when the postmistress finally calls you up and announces that your flock has arrived.  Then your honey carries the cheeping box 'o chicks home, and you dump them into their brood box.

If your experience is like ours, they will be a bit chilled, but spunky, ready to crowd under the heat lamp, pushing against their neighbors to be the first to warm up.  Our box came with a "bonus" chick which was half the size and had a tenth the vigor of his boxmates, and he kicked the bucket in the first five minutes.  On the other hand, the rest of the chicks soon forgot their traumatic journey and settled in to do what chicks do best --- eat, drink, poop, and be merry.

Then, in the midst of his play, a chick's head will suddenly nod, and before you know it he's lying prostrate on the ground.  His siblings will jump on his noggin, but he's so sound asleep that he doesn't even stir.  If you're a worrywart like me, you'll be terrified the chick has joined his puny boxmate in the happy hunting grounds, but when you poke him, he'll hop up and go back to the daily grind of pecking, peeping, and scampering.


I have nothing to compare these chicks to, so I don't know if all varieties are as quick to peck and poke and search for food as our Dark Cornishes.  I tossed in three worms to give them a taste of the wild side, and the wrigglers quickly disappeared down chick gullets.  I hope that's a sign of good foraging habits to come.

It seemed to take these new chicks about an hour to warm up and settle down from their long journey. Tapping on the Avian Aqua Miser nipple with a finger for a couple of minutes was all it took to train the first chick to drink, and they all caught on like a chain reaction after that.

 

In researching designs for our future chicken pasture coop I came across a great collection of photos detailing the construction of what might be the sturdiest chicken coop ever built.

I really like it when a project can be broken down into a series of pictures, and Suburban Chicken.org did a great job documenting their new chicken palace.

They use that same level of detail to describe their varied flock of beautiful hens of which I seem to be partial to Mabel...the one in the bottom right hand corner. It's a good collection of data on various breeds, but I wonder how brutal the pecking order is in such a diverse crowd? The more experience I get with chickens the more I'm inclined to believe the old cliche "birds of a feather flock together" which is why we've decided to go with just one breed for the pasture experiment.

Is it cruel to segregate chickens is such a way? I guess I don't know the answer to that question, but when I see one chicken being a bully to another it tells me that the stress level is going up for that one bird which means its health and egg production might decline in direct relation.

 

I recently discovered that 1 in every 10,000 chickens turns out to be gynandromorphous, half hen, half rooster, thanks to a recent BBC article.

Dr Michael Clinton of the Roslin Institute has just published some of the latest research on the subject in the scientific journal Nature.

They came up with a surprising conclusion. The system is different from mammals in that there is no mutation and the birds are full male on one side and full female on the other.

Of course the hope is to find a way to increase production in the poultry business by making female birds with the same growth characteristics as the male to "increase productivity and food security".

 

We decided to make the new home made brood coop big enough to handle the little styrofoam incubator for future chick operations.


The trick will be to monitor the temperature over the weekend to see if any adjustments need to be made.

I used a few scrap pieces of 2x4 to secure up each corner, which worked nicely as a support for both Avian Aqua Misers.

Next week, the cuteness quotient of the Walden Effect will be rising considerably.  We ordered 16 chicks as the first step in solving our chicken reproduction problem.  The goal is to start a self-sustaining flock in a forest pasture --- which I'll be explaining in much greater depth next week on our chicken blog.

After a great deal of research, we settled on the Dark Cornish as this year's experimental chicken breed.  Unlike the white, waddly Cornish Cross chickens that share their name (and a bit of their genetics), Dark Cornish chickens are wiley and nearly feral in their ability to sustain themselves on pasture.  They are also very good at avoiding predators, and one blog even suggested that Dark Cornishes can kill a marauding fox!

The only disadvantage of the Dark Cornish is that the chickens take about twenty weeks to reach cooking size, far longer than most other broilers.  But I've read that their flavor more than makes up for the wait.  If our forest pasture experiment works out, feed costs won't be an issue, so we're excited to give the new system a shot.

Painters make conscious choices about their pictures' edges because the edges play a large role in the painting's impact.  Ecologists know that edges promote a diversity of species, more than can be found in either habitat which the edge joins.

I've been pondering edges as I whack back encroaching Japanese honeysuckle, sassafras saplings, and brambles along the boundary of our garden.  I've noticed that my vegetables are sensitive to even the slightest bit of shade, and that the boundary beds closest to the thicket produce about half as many vegetables as do plants in more interior beds.  These brushy edges also delight the deer, who feel safer encroaching if they can retreat back out of sight in just a few bounds.

Over the last few years, we've been beating back the edges, first clipping the woody plants, then running the chicken tractors across them, and finally beginning to mow them into a semblance of a lawn.  I don't believe in lawns for prettiness sake, but I do find them very useful as a way to keep the forest edges from encroaching on our garden, and the mixed herb pasture keeps our chickens happy.

I amused myself Sunday morning with a sudoku puzzle --- figuring out which beds each crop will grow in this year.  The process is actually quite fun, with three axes to consider --- soil depth, amount of sun, and plant family over the last three years.  As an example, I wanted carrots to grow in an area with deep soil, where carrots and parsley hadn't grown lately, with any kind of sun exposure.  In contrast, my peas don't mind thinner soil, but I want them in one of the sunniest spots since I plant them so early, and of course the bed can't have hosted peas, beans, or peanuts lately.

The puzzle was engrossing and fun, but I quickly realized that we don't have enough beds in rotation to plant all of the veggies I hope to grow this year.  Two years ago, I was working for a non-profit, trying to keep the garden going between writing grants and attending meetings.  I was so stressed out, that when I planned last year's garden, I cut out nearly a quarter of the growing area.  In farmer speak, I let those areas go fallow; in Anna speak, the weeds grew up.

The downside of last year's smaller garden is that we didn't grow quite enough vegetables to make it through this winter.  We'll probably have to buy some veggies in March and April, which is an unpleasant surprise since we we haven't bought vegetables (beyond onions and potatoes) in years.  On the upside, I managed to keep the beds that were in rotation last year well weeded and mulched and started to cut down on the awful weed population that grew up during my stressed out, non-profit year.  Overall, a year of gardening smaller made sense and was an asset to the farm (and my sanity.)

Even though I advocate no-till farming, I never manage to put down a sheet mulch a year in advance to start new  beds (or re-start fallow ones.)  So, I'm back to a bit of digging to delete the weeds from last year's fallow beds.  I like to plant potatoes in these spots, since the tubers necessitate a second round of digging in the fall, ensuring that few deep-rooted weeds survive the renovation year.

On Sunday, I dug up a few of the beds, just spading the soil enough that the chickens could get a foothold, then watched as our feathered friends went to town scratching up the soil.  After a few days of chicken scratching (and fertilizing), I'll rake the beds to pull out any big root masses, mound the soil back up, and cover the renovated beds with a heavy leaf mulch.  This method has worked very well in the past, as long as I plant the potatoes on raised mounds --- last year I flubbed by putting the seed potatoes below the original ground level and watched them rot in our wet soil.  Hopefully this fall, I'll have delicious potatoes and some newly weed-free beds.

Tradition dictates that we plant our first peas on Valentine's Day, but the weather thought otherwise --- it snowed on Valentine's Day, and on the four days thereafter.   We finally got lucky on Friday, with a stunning day that sent us scurrying in five directions to take advantage of the warmth.

I had soaked my snow pea seeds the night before, so they were plump and ready to hit the ground running.  Without fungicidal coatings (that pink stuff on some storebought seeds), the earliest spring peas are in a footrace, trying to sprout and grow before bad fungi in the cold, wet soil causes them to rot.  Since it's supposed to be a stunning weekend (temperature in the fifties!!!), I've got high hopes for my peas.

As always, I soaked a few peas too many, so I tossed them to our four year old hens.  These girls are still laying, probably because I give them treats now and then like these plump peas or last week's chickweed.  They gobbled down my excess seeds in seconds and then stood and stared up at me --- more please?

 

A perfect complement to yesterday's solar powered automatic chicken coop opener would be this portable hyrdogen generator.

Kristie Lu Stout has an interesting post about this exciting new product that will allow everybody to generate their own hydrogen from water and store it in a safe, low pressure battery-like container. No word yet on how much it might cost, but plans are to have a tabletop model available by the end of 2010.

Getting off the grid with solar or wind has always come back to battery storage. If this technology improves, it could replace most of those expensive and toxic chemical batteries and bring alternative energy within the reach of the common homesteader.

What do you do if you want to install an automatic chicken coop door but you don't have electricity running to your coop?

Chicken coop door.com has recently come out with a new solar powered option that will save you the chore of letting your girls out in the morning and remembering to lock them back up at night.

The price is 324 dollars and maybe worth it if you don't have the skill and time to build an automatic chicken coop door yourself.

  

Plumjam.com has an interesting automatic chicken waterer that caught my eye while I was enjoying their poultry project pictures.

It's a huge improvement over the regular gravity fed waterers, but still needs to be cleaned out, and it cost more than an Avian Aqua Miser.
 
I'm not sure I would trust the float not to get stuck, and would most likely be checking on it often to see if it were flowing. I never have this concern with the Avain Aqua Miser.

I would be willing to bet a box of doughnuts that if the chickens were given a choice side by side with this waterer and an Avian Aqua Miser they would forget all about those two big scary holes to peek into and start geting all their hydration from a source that will always provide clean drinkable water without nearly as much fuss.

Little house in the suburbs dot com is hands down the coldest automatic chicken waterer I've seen so far.

I can't prove it, but I feel like all chickens can appreciate the simple comfort of a cool drink on a hot summer day.

We've got side by side Avian Aqua Misers and one day last summer I put a handfull of ice in one of them and noticed how our Plymouth Rock hens favored the colder water.

I know it's not a scientific test, but maybe I can expand the parameters next summer to see if there's any truth to this crazy hypothesis?

If the process of threshing, winnowing, and dehulling your grains for human consumption seems a bit daunting, you might choose to start growing grains for your livestock instead.  Your animals are likely to be less picky than you are, so you won't have to go to quite so much trouble when adding homegrown grains to the menu.  I'm hopeful that as we start growing our own chicken feed, we'll begin saving money and end up with healthier chickens due to a more well-rounded diet.

Currently, we're starting a new series over on our chicken blog with all of the nitty gritty info on formulating your own chicken feeds.  If you're interested, you might want to subscribe to that blog to read all about recipes, protein content of grains, and non-grain alternatives over the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, here's a brief summary of the tips in Gene Logsdon's book about growing grains specifically for livestock.


Tips for the lazy farmer

If you're a lazy farmer, like me, you're probably interested in ways that you can feed your animals with the least work possible.  One option is to plant winter wheat (or barley or rye) at the end of the summer, around September 15.  About a month after the grains go in the ground, they will be established enough that you can graze your animals on them during the winter and spring.  With careful rotation so that the plants aren't overgrazed, you will be able to harvest nearly as much grain from these plants as you would have without grazing them.

Pigs are a great tool for the lazy farmer.  Logsdon notes that you can turn pigs into a cornfield in the fall and they'll harvest the grain themselves, fattening up just when they should.  I envision planting a small corn paddock as part of my forest garden grazing rotation and moving the pigs in at just the right time of year.


What grains should I grow for my animals?

If you're going to go the traditional route of harvesting grain for your livestock, you will probably want to grow some combination of corn, oats, barley, grain, sorghum, and soybeans.  The bulk of commerical feeds are made up of two components --- corn and soybeans --- but your animals will probably be healthier if you give them a bit more variety.

Although we tend to think of grain as being aseasonal, you can in fact plan your garden so that your animals (and you) eat nearly fresh grains throughout the year.  Rye and barley are the first grains to ripen in early summer, then wheat, oats, buckwheat, and sorghum are ripe in the fall.  In the winter and spring, you can feed the easily stored corn and soybeans.


How much grain should I grow for my animals?

Logdson estimates that a single chicken needs about a bushel of grain per year.  A hog needs 12 bushels of corn to be fattened to butchering weight and a cow needs five to six bushels.  A ewe and lamb need just one bushel of grain per year between them if they are on pasture, and goats may not need much at all except when they're being milked.


How do I prepare grain for my livestock?

Some grains can be fed whole, but nearly all grains are more digestible if they are ground.  If you're grinding grain into flour for yourself, you can use the same hand-cranked mill to grind a bit of grain for your chickens.  On the other hand, if we really get into growing our own feed we'll probably find a way to make or buy a better mill.

Old timey farmers knew that sprouting was even better than grinding.  If you're willing to put in a little extra time, you can sprout all of the grains you feed your animals, a process that makes them even more nutritious.

We're in the very early stages of our homegrown grain experimentation, but we'll be sure to update you as we test all of these methods of growing grain for both ourselves and our animals.  Stay tuned!

 

These hens seem to be getting along better since I installed the additional 2 roosting posts.

My sister has been doing a lot of thinking and writing about the impact of routine in her life, and that got me thinking about my own routines.  The first half hour of my "work day" is always the same --- walking Lucy and then taking care of the chickens.

Although I rarely write about it here, the morning chores are a very important part of the Walden Effect.  They clear my head and give me time to think through any thorny issues that need my attention.

Saturday, I brought the new camcorder along to document my journey.  I hope you enjoy seeing a glimpse of my daily life rather than finding it boring --- if the latter, take heart that the video is less than two minutes long.

A few quick book-keeping notes for the new year....

First of all, thank you to everyone who posted comments this month to enter our daffodil giveaway!  I've really enjoyed hearing all of your feedback and getting to know you better.  The grand prize winner is my father --- I swear it was random! :-)  We had a really good month selling automatic chicken waterers, so there were only about 20 daffodil bulbs left to give away.  I'm tossing in some poppy seeds to round his flower bed out.  Stay tuned for another giveaway soon!

On another vaguely chicken-related topic, I'm posting a long series about chicken tractors on our chicken blog this month.  Some of the posts you've already seen over here while others are totally new.  My goal is to really think through all of the chicken tractor designs we've used in the past so that our next tractor will be awesome.  I hope my musings will also help other folks design a cheap and effective tractor and get those hens out of the mud.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed of that blog just like this one --- I look forward to seeing some of you over there!

Finally, I was going to post a review of the best non-fiction books I'd read in 2009 over here, but instead decided to finally set myself up a Goodreads account.  If I stick to it, I plan to post all of my fiction and non-fiction book ratings over there (although I'll keep posting lunchtime series over here.)  Feel free to friend me and share your own books!

And have a great 2010!

Our first full day without power brought us back to basics: animals, water, food, and shelter.  The animals, luckily, weren't too hard.  Huckleberry and Strider came bounding up to the trailer through snow over their heads (nearly a foot deep now, but finally slacking off) and Lucy pranced and played in the drifts.

The chicken tractors were completely covered, and one had half-collapsed under the weight of the snow.  I brushed the tops clear and saw hungry hens eager for their breakfast...once I'd shoveled out the tractor so they wouldn't get their feet wet.

Without electricity, the fan on our exterior wood furnace doesn't run, which means that most of that heat dissipates into the great outdoors.  Mark first rigged an ingenious setup using a DC fan and the golf cart's battery banks, but the plastic fan quickly melted out of whack and stopped running.  At this point, I gave up and curled myself under a sleeping bag on the sofa with Huckleberry and a book.  But Mark wasn't deterred.  He dusted off the generator, and soon we were back in business!  Lights, power, action!  Heat!  Even electricity to top off the cold level in our fridge and freezer and keep our food safe.

Luckily, we had drinking water stored up, but food was going to be difficult since we cook on an electric stove.  It took most of the next day for me to figure out how to cook in and on the wood stove, ending up with food that wasn't charred at one end and cold at the other.  But at least we had the basics we need to keep the farm rolling along.

Stay tuned for part III soon.  Meanwhile, feel free to check out our ebook about starting your own business and quitting your job.

This chicken tractor is slated for upgrade in early 2010. I got a bit carried away with the construction and ended up making it too heavy, which creates a problem when dragging it to a new location.

The other problem is an issue of access. It really needs another door close to the ground. That way if they escape you can coax them back in easily with a bribe of chicken feed.