Writing
about mangels as chicken feed seems to be a popular sport.  I wish
I could find more reports on whether the birds actually eat
these huge fodder beets.



My experience with
feeding tough, raw vegetables to chickens is a bit spotty.  If I
cut a winter squash in half and make sure it lands flesh side up, the
chickens do peck away at it, and they eventually seem to find thickly
sliced sweet potatoes as well.  I’ve yet to see them eat carrots I
toss in the coop, though.



One option for making root
crops more enticing would be to cut up mangels, potatoes, and other
homegrown fodder vegetables, then toss them in a pot of water on top of
the wood stove when I damp it down for the night.  Possibly they
would cook (rather than burn), and I’m positive our chickens would eat
any of these foods when softened by heat.



Another recommendation I
read involves grating mangels before feeding them to chickens. 
Maybe if you have some kind of grain mill or large food processor, that
technique would work, but I know for a fact I wouldn’t manage to feed
many mangels if I grated them by hand.  (I’m not so sure I’d even
get around to cooking them.)



A third option I ran across
consists of mounting a spike on the side of the chicken coop and
impaling tough vegetables on it.  The sweet potato (or mangel) is
held off the ground, so it catches the flock’s eye and doesn’t roll
away as they peck at it.  This method sounds right up my alley, so
I’m experimenting now with a sweet potato.  I’ll let you know
whether the tasty root goes down my chickens’ gullets in a timely
manner.

Last
year, we had to buy
hatching eggs, so I
wasn’t able to be choosy.
But now that I’m saving my own, it’s much easier to select the
best eggs to go in the incubator.

You should have already
thought about the parent birds before you start gathering eggs.
Remember, eggs from hens more than two years old don’t hatch well, nor
do eggs from pullets who are just starting to lay.  Of course, you
have to keep one rooster for every twelve hens, and both parents should
be in prime health, having been allowed to eat fresh greenery and
invertebrates for at least a couple of weeks.  The graph below
shows how hatch rate varies due to time of year, but keep in mind that
you can get much better hatch rates than this.

I collect eggs at least twice
a day when saving them for hatching, and refresh nest box straw before
I start so that eggs are less likely to get dirty.  After
collecting eggs, I set them pointed side down in a tilted egg carton,
and swap the egg carton’s orientation twice a day so that the yolks
don’t stick to the shell.  Each time I add an egg, I pencil a
number on the blunt side of the shell and note down the date on my
incubation spreadsheet.

Once I’ve saved up
enough eggs to fill my incubator plus some, it’s time to discard eggs
that are less likely to hatch.  First step is to look at the size
and remove abnormally large or small eggs.  Some chicken breeds
naturally lay larger or smaller eggs, which is fine — you’re trying
to take out eggs that are bigger or littler than that breed normally
lays.

Next I discard porous
eggs.  Once you get an eye for it, you can tell that the shell of
an egg is a bit thin by noticing very slight grey blotches scattered
across its surface.  If in doubt, hold an egg up to a bright light
— good eggs will be a solid color while porous eggs will be blotchy.

Finally, it’s time to
remove dirty eggs.  If you’re gathering eggs during mud season the
way I was, a lot of the shells may have small smears of dirt.  In
a perfect world, you’d only incubate pristine eggs, but a bit of mud
isn’t nearly as problematic as manure.  (Do remove any
manure-tainted eggs from the incubator.)  You can gently sand off
mud, wash the eggs with a special egg wash solution, or ignore the
problem.  Whatever you do, don’t wash eggs in plain water since
you’ll remove the protective bloom from the surface and make the embryo
inside less likely to survive.

I gathered 23 eggs over the
course of seven days, but ended up deciding that seven were too small,
too porous, or too dirty to add to the incubator.  Even though the
discard eggs have been sitting out for a week, they’re still fine to
eat — mine went into a butternut
squash pie.  I
figure another day or two will fill my incubator tray and get me ready
for an early March hatch.