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pasture rotation, how many chickens are involved and what size are the
pastures?"--- Keith Alexander
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A chicken waterer at the far end of a pasture
is a fun way to get your flock to spend more time away from the coop.
![]() I summed up ways
to tell what has been eating your chickens in a previous post, but many of you have asked
for the followup --- how to keep those predators at bay. Even
though we live in the middle of the woods, we've only lost a handful of
chickens, so I figure we're doing a pretty good job of predator control
(without shooting anything). Here are our top tips: Get a good dog. I'm
pretty sure Lucy does 95% of the predator control on our farm.
Whenever she hears a sound, she tears off looking for the source.
Nearly all of our chicken losses have occured recently since her old
bones have kept our faithful dog closer to home. (You'll first
have to train
your dog that chickens are to be protected, not eaten, of course.)Locate the coop close to your house. Speaking of close to home, you can go a long way toward scaring off predators by keeping your chickens in an area that you walk through many times a day. After some experimentation, we've started locating our chick brooder right outside our back door, after which relocation we haven't lost a single chick to predators. Include a rooster in your flock.
If you don't have neighbors who will complain about the crowing, a
rooster will really pull his weight in chasing away predators.
One winter while our flock was free ranging, a hawk swooped down and
started tearing at the neck of one of our hens. The rooster made
such a show and the flock yelled so loudly that I knew something was
going on and had time to chase the hawk away before the hen was injured.Close the chickens in at night. To be honest, I only do this with our chicks, although I could probably have prevented our raccoon incursion by following suit with the adult hens. To make this technique effective, you'll have to combine it with a campaign to turn your coop into a predator-proof establishment once the door is closed. No, chicken-wire doesn't cut it, but hardware cloth might if it's screwed down tightly. Include trees and bushes in the pasture. During the day, hawks are our biggest danger, and these birds of prey usually hunt by circling over open areas. Tree cover makes it much tougher for a hawk to notice your poultry, and bushes give your chickens a spot to hide if they are in danger.
Our chicken waterer is spill-proof, so it won't
wet down your coop if the flock mills around for a few hours inside
while you sleep in Sunday morning.
![]() When's the best time to
start silkworm eggs? Probably about
two weeks ago, although I only pulled mine out of the fridge on May 8. ![]() The trick is to time
your hatch for a period when there are plenty of young mulberry leaves
around, and for the sake of safety, you probably should also work
around the frost-free
date. It would
be a shame to get baby silkworms going, only to have a frost nip back
the leaves so you end up without a food source. ![]() What I forgot to factor
into my calculations is that it takes about two weeks for silkworm eggs
to hatch after you take them out of cold storage and put them in a dish
at room temperature. So we'll be getting a slightly late start
this year, but it shouldn't be a big deal. I'll report more once
we have little white caterpillars crawling around. Our chicken waterer keeps hens healthy with
POOP-free water while they wait for their caterpillar treats.
![]() First of all, I
apologize for the low quality of these photos. You can't talk
chickens into posing unless they feel like it, and when they did, my camera
was broken and I had
to borrow Mark's. Plus, the day was dark and damp, which makes
for bad photos. All of those caveats aside, I did want to show
you how our broilers are enjoying their forest
pasture. ![]() I usually like to rotate
chickens out of a pasture after a week or less, but our flock had
barely explored beyond the lower fenceline during that time, so I opted
to leave them in this pasture longer. I could tell they were
really getting a kick out of the complexity of the environment, and the
mulch
boxes were a
definite favorite. ![]() One of the most
intriguing things I noticed as I watched the flock was that the
chickens walked right up the terraced pathways just like people do,
ignoring the steeper slopes wherever possible. Maybe that means I
don't have to worry about erosion on the near-vertical slopes from
chicken scratching. ![]() The only downside of the
glee with which our chickens explored their forest pasture is that I'm
likely to lose their favorite species since I can't talk myself out of
leaving the flock in this spot until they explore to the furthest
extreme. The solution to that problem is to break the pasture
apart into smaller sections and rotate through them faster, but I'll
have to put some thought into how to divide the space without losing
the pathway aspect of the terraces. In the meantime, I'm enjoying
watching the chickens graze. The Avian Aqua Miser is Mark's innovative
solution to the thorny problem of keeping clean water in your chicken
coop.
![]()
![]() This spring, we have
most of the back garden in a rye cover crop to grow organic matter, so
the lower end of the back garden seemed like the perfect spot for late
spring chick habitat. Tall plants like rye (or raspberries) make
chicks feel very safe, so they spend more time pecking and less time
running away. ![]() Here's a shot of the
brooder from the other direction so you get an idea of what our chicks'
current habitat looks like. The window side of the brooder faces
east so the chicks warm up quickly on chilly mornings, but then they
get shade during warm afternoons. In contrast, the early
spring chicks had
their brooder window facing due south. Since the door opens in a
different direction now than it did then, we were able to move the
brooder only about 15 feet down the slope and still give this set of
chicks plenty of space to graze where the last set seldom wandered. ![]() And this picture sums up
the true theme of this post --- gratuitous chick photos. They
won't be this cute for long, though, so don't worry --- I'll post
something more substantial soon. ![]() While I'm profiling
individual pastures,
I thought it would be worth taking a look at chicken pasture 5.
If I had the space to put chickens elsewhere, I would have seeded
grasses and clovers here last fall and left
the ground fallow just like I'm doing for chicken pasture 6. This spot ended up
pretty bare at the end of 2011 due to moderate shade combined with
overgrazing, and the seeds I planted in 2012 mostly seem to have
perished since I continued grazing while the seedlings sprouted and
tried to grow. ![]()
![]() About a fifth of chicken
pasture 5 is much more sad-looking since our birds passed through this
area all winter on their way to grazing in the woods. The photo
above shows the overgrazed area (on the right) along with chicken
pasture 3 (on the left), depicted on moving day. I just open the
door to a new paddock and the flock is bright enough to run through the
coop and onto greener pastures. When they start regretting
leaving the chickweed behind, I've already closed up the relevant
pophole. No more of your favorite pasture for two weeks, guys ---
it needs time to regrow. A chicken waterer at the far end of a pasture
is a tried-and-true way to tempt your flock not to hang out on the
coop's doorstep all day.
![]() Forest pasture seven
(the one I've spent the most time experimenting on over the last year)
is brimming with potential this spring. We have high hopes we'll
taste our first homegrown Nanking
cherries from there
this year --- the fruits are already about half size and are swelling
fast. ![]() The fenceline
planting is also
doing well. This area is actually right outside the pasture,
which makes it easy to establish new perennials without worrying about
trouble from chicken feet. My hope is that the red curants,
comfrey, and sunchokes I planted there will reach into the pasture and
become chicken fodder over the years to come. ![]() Of course, the biggest
change in pasture 7 over the winter was the addition of a couple of terraces. It seems like my
worries about the
rotting timbers we used to hold the vertical faces up were unfounded --- nothing
has moved over the winter and plants are already beginning to grow back
to hold the soil in place. ![]() The comfrey roots I hacked out of the
forest garden and slipped into subsoil on the lower banks of the
terraces are also doing well. That's the great thing about
comfrey --- it thrives pretty much no matter what. The logs
I hauled out of the forest to add to that bank are also beginning
to work their way into the soil. ![]() The only real failure so
far is the oat seeds that I scattered onto bare ground in early
spring. Despite a smattering of straw to help the seeds
germinate, the pasture instead turned into a bird buffet, attracting
cardinals and sparrows to the feeder. Luckily, there seems to be
enough wild growth present to keep our broilers happy as they explore
this pasture for the first time. I like this simple
automatic coop closer configuration from Nu Trac. ![]() The
good news is: our second hatch turned out 16 happy, healthy
chicks. The bad news is: my hatch
rate was a rather
abysmal
73%. What happened? ![]() How about mother of the
eggs? Two-thirds of the dead-in-the-shell
chicks were laid by our Rhode Island Reds...but half of all the eggs
that went into the incubator were from Rhode Island Red mothers.
While it's possible the mother was the problem, it seemed much less
likely once I cracked the dud eggs open and discovered that all except
one were fully formed but hadn't pipped. ![]() The other thing I
noticed was that all of the dead chicks were in the
top half of the tray, and eggs in that area also hatched later.
(Average hatch order for the bottom half of the tray was 4.5, with a
100% hatch rate; average hatch order for the top half of the tray was
7.8 with a 45% hatch rate.) Combining the elongated hatch with
the irregularities within the incubator, my analysis is that the
temperature in the top half of the incubator was cool or irregular. Our chicken waterer keeps chicks healthy as soon
as they're out of the shell with unlimited clean water that never
presents a drowning hazard.
![]() With the
flock back in the pastures, I was curious to see how my
mulch
boxes would
work. The idea is that raised walls would allow chickens to
scratch through the mulch at the feet of our fruit trees without
flinging the leaves out into the pasture and baring roots. So
far, mulch boxes seem to be a success! ![]()
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Get a good dog
Include a rooster in your flock



























HI,
I just purchased your chicken nipples and bit, but I have a question since I'm new in the chicken world. Do chickens need direct sun almost all day to lay eggs or are they happy with a few hours in the morning and streams of sun through the trees. They are out in there pen from 8am until dusk.
thanks
Especially in the summer, chickens will actually gravitate toward the shade. They do like to have some sunny spots for dust-bathing, and like more sun in the winter.
The longer the day length, the better your chickens will lay. But that doesn't mean they need to be in direct sunlight during that time, just that there needs to be enough light to keep them awake and active.
My chickens go out of there way to try and find sources of the stuff, I have Styrofoam (polystyrene actually) insulating the outside of my package heat pump. They finally figured it out and have peck/eaten a large chuck out of one section, maybe 1 ft in diameter. They have found the stuff before, and they didn't seem to have any adverse affects, I try to keep them out of harms way. I assume they will be fine this time, and I have blocked them off from the area. but my question is, Should I eat the eggs? I have 2 buff orpingtons and a white silkie(the bad influence).They are known as betty white and the golden girls. the buffs had just started laying a few days ago. Any ideas?