Everything you wanted to know about BSF s

March 31, 2010 Posts No Comments
black soldier fly facts

If
you’ve been meaning to learn more about Black
Soldier Flies as a
possible feed supplement for your chicken flock, then you should
consider checking out an excellent
interview Frank Aragona produced
earlier this year.



It’s free to download like
all his past shows, and he really goes into some
depth with black soldier fly expert Jerry from blacksoldierflyblog.com.
  



We’ve already made plans for
a homemade bio pod container to be installed in the new pasture
chicken coop later this spring.



Black Soldier Flies are
noteworthy for being easy to propagate. The
long term goal with this project is to provide enough supplemental
sources of food for our egg production hens, which means we could stop
paying over 11 dollars a bag for laying pellets.



Photo credit goes to microponics.net, a great place to go for more
information on BSF’s.

Looking
for another way to simplify your chicken-keeping life?  Check out
our homemade
chicken waterer.

Cultivating duckweed for chickens

March 30, 2010 Posts No Comments

Raising duckweed in a kiddie poolEver
since I stumbled across it on the internet, I’ve been intrigued by the
idea of feeding
duckweed to our chickens.  We don’t want to
build any fancy infrastructure until we know whether duckweed will
work, so I just got a start of duckweed from my mother’s pond and put
it in a kiddie pool full of water.  I know from experience that
duckweed reproduces very quickly, so I hope to be harvesting some of
the leaves within a month or two.



DuckweedMeanwhile,
I dropped a bit of duckweed in one of the chicken tractors. 
Disappointingly, our hens seemed quite uninterested…probably because
I’d just fed them laying pellets then a bunch of grubs I dug out of the
garden.  I’ll have to try again when they’re actually
hungry.  I may also try drying the duckweed to make it more
palatable.


Looking for a healthy treat
for your chickens?  Fresh water is always in style.  Make a homemade chicken
waterer and give
your girls clean water all the time.

How to teach chicks to drink

March 29, 2010 Posts No Comments

Several of our customers had
told me that the Avian Aqua Miser works great
even with day old chicks, so when our chicks arrived from the hatchery
last week, I was curious to see how they would do.  We learned
that teaching chicks to drink from a nipple-based chicken waterer is a
bit different from teaching adults, though it is just as easy.



First of all, when you
unpack your chicks from their shipping box,
they’re likely to be chilled and uninterested in anything except
warming up.  We recommend giving them half an hour to get situated
before introducing them to the chicken waterer.



Of course, you probably
realized that your waterer needs to be hung
much lower to the ground to be accessible to chicks compared to adult
birds.  Leave just enough space so that a chick can walk
underneath with the nipple at eye level.


Chick drinking out of an Avian Aqua Miser

Poke the nipple with
your finger a few times, and the chicks will
probably start drinking the water that drips on the floor of the
brooder.  That gets their attention.  Next, try tapping the
nipple just enough that water pools around the outside but doesn’t drip
off.  Soon, a chick will peck at that water and realize where the
liquid is coming from.  Then it’s only a matter of time until a
chick pecks at the nipple hard enough to get it to release more water,
and soon everybody’s doing it.  Mark trained our chicks to drink
in five minutes flat, then they went to town sucking down clean water
to rehydrate from their long journey.