Author: Anna & Mark

Grit for chickens

July 22, 2011 Posts No Comments

Chicken digestionChickens can’t chew, but
their food does get ground up before being digested.  Those of you
who have killed and gutted chickens for the table have probably
discovered the gizzard — a round object about half the size of your
fist that, when cut open, is often full of hard objects like stones and
sand.  The gizzard is a muscle that expands and contracts, working
your chickens’ dinner up against these objects (known as grit) to break
the food into smaller pieces and aid in digestion.



People who keep their
flocks in artificial environments have to provide grit for their birds
or the chickens will be like a lot of old geezers who’ve lost their
teeth and can only eat Chickens with gritapplesauce.  Chickens with
no access to any kind of grit can do okay on commercial chicken feed
since it’s pre-ground, but they won’t be able to digest whole grains
and will have a tough time with most wild foods.



Pastured chickens
usually pick up enough natural grit to do the job — bones, rocks, and
shells all act as grit in the wild.  But after reading that
chickens will be less prone to forage if they don’t have enough grit to
grind up the tougher food, I decided to introduce some grit and see
what happened.  You can buy grit in the feed store if money is
burning a hole in your pocket, but I figured our flock would be fine
with some creek gravel.  Our girls didn’t seem very interested
once they realized there was no food in the pile, which I figure is a
good sign and indicates that our chickens are getting plenty of natural
grit after all.


Unlimited clean water from our chicken waterer is the other
component in a healthy chicken diet.

Chickens in the ragweed forest

July 20, 2011 Posts 2 Comments
Looking up through ragweed



The photos above and
below show what chicken pasture 2 currently looks like — a nearly
impenetrable thicket of five to eight foot tall ragweed.  This is
what you get when chickens eat the pasture bare over a long, cold
winter, and none of your spring
plantings take.


Ragweed pasture



Honeybees
love ragweed pollen,
but can chickens get anything out of the weeds?  Our six week old
golden comet cross and cuckoo marans have just about eaten the ground
bare underneath the towering ragweed.  Here’s what the pasture
looked like at the beginning of June:


Chicks in ragweed forest



…and here’s the same
patch of earth a month later:


Bare ground under ragweed



The whole pasture isn’t
this barren — this is the area right outside the coop door where the
flock hangs out the most.  But the flaws of the ragweed forest are
all too apparent.  The woody ragweed stems are useless for
chickens, and the flock can’t reach the leaves more than a foot off the
ground.  Meanwhile, ragweed’s shade keeps most other plants from
growing, but doesn’t produce the leaf litter full of bugs that makes
the real forest so appealing to chickens.



The only really
definitive way of telling the quality of the ragweed pasture compared
to our other pastures is to look at how much feed it takes to keep the
flock growing.  Unfortunately, this is our only flock of cuckoo
marans, and these heavier birds are likely to just eat more than our
australorps in general, so it would be an apples to oranges
comparison.  Still, my gut says the ragweed isn’t really helping,
so I’ll probably let some of it bloom and then cut it all down before
the ragweed goes to seed.


Our chicken waterer makes this flock so low
maintenance that they hardly know who I am.

Automatic chicken door

July 18, 2011 Posts 2 Comments

Automatic chicken doorMark has been an armchair
automatic chicken coop door explorer for
years now, reading every website he can find about the topic.  His
inventive side loves the various options available for making your own
automatic door, including:

I’ve listed the options
he stumbled across from cheapest to most
expensive, but you should keep in mind that the list is also from least to most likely to work over the long
haul.  I don’t think I’d depend on anything much below the power
antenna level ($35 plus timer, wood, and hardware) if I cared about my
flock and had predators around.



Mark also spent time
looking at all of the pre-made door options out
there.  Nearly all of them are based on a drapery motor, and he
finally concluded that it would actually cost just as much to make our
own
drapery motor-based chicken door opener/closer than to buy one of the
pre-made options once you factor in the associate wood and hardware.



When we moved the
chickens to a coop and pasture arrangement, Mark was finally able to
scratch that automatic chicken door itch.  Our broilers were
sliding under the gate and foraging in the woods every day, and we
wanted to let them keep free ranging after they got too big for that
trick.  But I was concerned that it would just be too tempting for
predators if we opened a door from the coop directly into the wild —
our dog patrols there now and then, but she usually stays on the other
side of the coop in the garden area.  Time for an automatic
chicken coop door!



Premade chicken doorJeremy Smith’s automatic chicken
coop door is on the
high end ($206.94 for the pre-made version once you factor in
shipping), but his door is the easiest to install and is clearly high
quality.  The whole thing is already boxed in, so all you have to
do is tack the door module between two studs 16 inches apart and plug
it in.  The hardest part will probably be figuring out how to work
the enclosed timer.  (Don’t worry, it comes with instructions.)



A friend recently lost
his entire flock to a fox attack and my father lost all but one of his
birds for the same reason.  A really good dog is the best solution
to predators, but if your chickens range past the dog’s home turf,
you’d probably be better off trying out one of the automatic chicken
coop door options.