Your first night with new chickens

June 13, 2012 Posts No Comments

Chicks climbing rampWhen you bring a new set of
chickens home, or move a flock to a new coop, it’s important to take a
little extra time to watch them going to bed.  The move was
probably a bit traumatic for both you and your flock, and chances are
you’d like to turn in early, but it’s a lot easier to get chickens into
the habit of roosting in their coop if they don’t spend their first
night perching in a bush.



Later, having chickens
in the coop at night will keep them warm, dry, and safe from
predators.  If they’ve accepted the coop as home base, your hens
will be more likely to lay eggs where you can find them, and it’ll make
everyone less likely to fly over fences and wander away.  Night is
also the best time to snag chickens who are going in the pot, and if
you can grab
them right off a perch in the coop, that duty will go much more
smoothly too.



Chicks perchingSo we took the time to herd
our month old chicks into their coop the first night, then watched them
the next evening to ensure the youngsters went inside on their
own.  A few chicks thought it might be more fun to perch outside,
but once a critical mass accumulated inside the coop, even those
mavericks went in.



Mark suspects that the
issue we’ve had with getting chicks to go in the coop during their
first few nights is due to the fact that it gets dark inside early and
chickens don’t like walking inside if they can’t see.  A carefully
placed window or two might make next year’s night training sessions
easier.


Our chicken waterer keeps our youngsters
hydrated with plenty of pristine water.

Honeybees in the chicken pasture

June 11, 2012 Posts No Comments
Chickens with bees

I’ve posted before about
stacking
chickens and mushrooms
(in the permaculture sense, not literally).  Another way to save
space on the small homestead is to put honeybees in your chicken
pasture.



I’ve read that a few
chickens learn to nab bees out of the air as the insects come in for a
landing, but most people seem to have no problem putting a bee hive in
the chicken pasture.  The only small problem we ran into is that
our chickens wanted to scratch all of the straw off the kill mulch
around the base of our Warre hive.


Bees in a Warre hive

Bees like living in an
area without too much activity, so if you have too many chickens in
your pasture, adding bees might not work.  Of course, if you have
too many chickens in your pasture, you’ll have other problems to
contend with as well.  In our rotational
pastures, chickens
are only pecking around the hive for one week each month and the bees
don’t seem to care.



Bees at the hive entranceAfter compost worms, I think
chickens and bees are the first livestock beginning homesteaders should
consider.  Bees take less time, but are also less intuitive, so
you’ll need to study a few books or take a class before starting your
apiary.  Chickens require just a little more caretaking (although
not much more if you install our chicken waterer), but they have the benefit
of acting enough like a pet cat or dog that you don’t have to learn a
whole new skill set before adding them to your farm.



Either way, I highly
recommend never adding more than one type of livestock to your farm per
year.  I’ve learned the hard way that it’s awfully easy to go
overboard with animals!

Low tech chicken plucking assistants

June 8, 2012 Posts No Comments

Homemade chicken pluckerAs we get better and better
at processing chickens, it becomes more and more apparent that plucking
takes more time than all of the other stages in the butchering process
put together.  Last year, Mark built me the very simple, washboard-style
plucker shown here,
and the contraption sped us up so much that I was able to squeeze two
or three more birds into each three hour butchering episode.  But
was there an even better (but still low tech and cheap) solution?



While brainstorming with
Mark’s mom over the winter, we came up with the idea of repurposing a
cat grooming glove to expedite plucking even more.  The
washboard-style plucker did an awesome job when the bird came in
contact with the plucker, but birds have all kinds of nooks and
crannies that the plucking fingers seldom reached.  Could human
fingers, aided by a bit of technology, do it better?



Chicken plucker gloveThe first couple of grooming
gloves we tried weren’t very helpful, but the one shown here did indeed
speed matters up.  By the end of the experimental butchering
session, Mark and I had settled on pulling out the big wing and tail
feathers by hand (they’re easy and fast, and our technological plucking
assistants couldn’t get them), running the chicken through the
washboard (since the device is fastest at removing feathers), then
going back over the bird with the plucking glove, before finally
pulling out the last few ornery feathers by hand.



The plucking glove
worked much better when we turned the hose on the bird to wash away
loosened feathers.  I also quickly learned to run my hand over the
feathers in the reverse direction (roughing them up rather than laying
them flat), and to pull wings and legs this way and that to reach into
crevices.



We still have seven more
broilers to process in this round, so we’ll use those birds to figure
out how long it takes me to pluck a bird by hand vs. with our two
contraptions.  Stay tuned for more details.


Our chicken waterer is always POOP-free, perfect
for keeping healthy chickens of all ages.