A growing forest pasture

May 6, 2013 Posts No Comments
Developing Nanking cherry

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.


Fenceline planting

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.


Terraces

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.


Comfrey

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.


Fleeing chickens

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.


Our chicken waterer refreshes the flock with
clean water after a hard day’s work hunting for bugs.

Deciphering a troubled hatch

May 1, 2013 Posts No Comments
Week old chicks

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?



With a troubled hatch, I
like to rule out the obvious factors
first.  I gathered the eggs for this hatch during a wet week, so
about half of them had minor dirt smears.  Could dirt be the
problem?  It definitely didn’t help, but since only half of the
non-hatching eggs were dirty, versus 45% of all eggs that went into the
incubator, dirt doesn’t seem to have been the deciding factor.


Dud eggs

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.



Two symptoms caught my
eye as being more likely to be tied to the root
cause of my low hatch rate.  First, this hatch was long and strung
out — the first chick came out of its shell on Sunday morning, with
the last one popping out nearly four days later on Wednesday
night.  A good hatch will have nearly all chicks unzipping within
24 hours, so this elongated hatch was definitely a warning sign.


Dusty incubator

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.



I’ve noticed minor
temperature irregularities within the incubator
before, but they seemed more problematic this time around.  I did
notice a bit of fuzz up in the part of the incubator you’re not really
able to clean, and I could see how dirt up there might mess with the
unit’s operation.  Maybe I’ll store up some bravery and take the
unit apart before our next incubation run and do a wholesale
cleaning.  At the least, I’ll do a test run with thermometers in
different parts of the incubator to make sure that temperature really
is the problem.



All of that said, a
hatch rate of 73% is still pretty good, so for now I’m rest on my
laurels and enjoy the antics of our miniature flock.


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.