I first installed this double
nest box on top of the single unit.
It may have been too high or
something because I couldn’t get any hens to try it.
Now that it’s at the same
height as the first box we’ve got a few trying it and hopefully the two
who are laying on the floor will catch on and join the 4 foot high club.
Combining our two layer
flocks meant that I had too many chickens for the pastures to
handle. By the end of the first week, they’d eaten through
all of the available grass and would have started tearing up the
sod, so I let them all out into the woods a little earlier than in
previous years.
I always like to keep
my eyes open when chickens move to new territory to see what they
eat, and this time was no different. The first thing the
hens did after leaving their pasture was to hop up to pull vines
out of the wingstem patch. A closer inspection showed why
— plump hog-peanut (Amphicarpaea bracteata) pods full of
protein-rich beans were dangling just out of reach.
As the name suggestions,
hog-peanuts are quite edible, especially to livestock, and the
plant produces both underground pods (like peanuts) and
aboveground pods. The beans are currently eaten by people in
the Sierra Norte de Puebla in Mexico, were used medicinally by the
Cherokee and Iroquois, and were grown in Scotland in the
nineteenth century. So, even though they’re mainly
considered a weed today, hog-peanuts definitely have a pretty
strong potential as food.
Hog-peanuts like to
grow up our fences in the more shady pastures (replacing the
unruly Japanese honeysuckle and slightly-more-manageable Virgin’s
bower, which both prefer full sun). I’ve been ripping
hog-peanut vines down, but if they’re a chicken favorite, maybe I
should let them grow, at least until the pods ripen up.
Have you run across
any wild foods lately that your flock particularly enjoys?
If you’re putting your chicken waterer in a
coop, it’s pretty simply to hang most bucket waterers from a
rafter or to set
them on the edge of a shelf. But mounting gets more dicey in a pasture
setting, unless you bring in a plant
hanger.
One of our goals with
the EZ Miser
was to make it even simpler to mount outdoors. The very
easiest mounting method is to set
the EZ Miser on top of a cinder block or two, but Mark has already
started experimenting with other alternatives. The option
shown above and to the left uses a Christmas-tree stand, along
with a bit of lumber and a four scrap pieces of PVC pipe.
The most-appropriate support post for this stand would have been a
four-by-four, but Mark only had two-by-fours on hand, so he put
two together to fit into the Christmas-tree base. The shelf
is a scrap of one-by-four, with holes drilled in the corners with
a hole saw, then little pieces of
PVC pipe slipped in the indentations to keep the EZ Miser from
moving around.
Mark’s second mounting method took advantage
of a stump left over from clearing the pasture. He could
have simply leveled the top of the stump and put the EZ Miser
there, but that seemed to require more skill than just adding a
couple of scrap boards to level the surface. Mark used the
same pipe bumpers on the sides, a method that seems to have been
sufficient to keep the waterer from tipping even when the rooster
hopped on top.
Mark has some other
mounting ideas up his sleeve, so I’ll keep you posted as they show
up in the pastures. In the meantime, I’d love to see your EZ
Misers in action, especially if the photo shows how they’re
mounted. Email info@avianaquamiser.com
and I’ll add your photos to the blog!