Author: Anna & Mark

Feeding sunflower seeds to chickens

August 23, 2010 Posts No Comments
Sunflower seeds

A chicken pecking at a head of sunflower seedsAfter
harvesting
the sunflowers and
hanging them up to dry for a couple of weeks, I decided to split the
crop with our chickens.  I brushed the seeds out of the biggest
sunflowers by hand while the heads were still malleable, and set the
seeds aside to dry for next year’s planting and to make oil.  The
smaller heads were earmarked for our flock.



I took Bethany’s advice
and hung
one sunflower plant upside down in our oldest hens’ tractor.  When I came back to
check on them an hour later, the seed heads were nearly bare, but one
hen kindly went back to work and posed for the camera.  Clearly,
the sunflowers in their natural state are no problem for keen chicken
beaks.

Chicken beside dried sunflower heads
Looking for a way to keep
your chickens healthy?  Our homemade chicken
waterer never fills
with fecal matter.  Clean water means healthy birds.

I can t believe how simple it is

August 20, 2010 Posts 2 Comments

Cordless drillWe
got a note from Julie in Colorado last week.  She emailed to say:


I
can’t believe how simple installing the nipples were!  The hardest
part was finding the chuck to open the end of my husband’s drill! 
I received the drill bit with my order and now I want my own drill for
my tool box!



I hope that others have
found our homemade chicken
waterer kit
inspiringly simple.  I remember the feeling of power I got the
first time I used a drill.  Maybe we’ve turned Julie into a
life-long DIYer?

Forest pasture carrying capacity

August 18, 2010 Posts No Comments

Hybrid cockerelOur
forest pasture is abnormally quiet at the
moment.  Mama hen is brooding four eggs that I’m 99% sure are
unfertilized, and her chick likes to hang out in the coop with her even
though he’s mostly grown. 



Our kitchen scraps are
quite voluminous at this time of year, as I cut up garden veggies to go
in the freezer and discard tops and bug-bitten areas.  I toss all
of the scraps into the pasture every morning, then bring in a
wheelbarrow load of garden weeds in the afternoon, feeding our two
pastured chickens no storebought food.  They certainly don’t seem
hungry — half of the kitchen scraps are still lying around, and our
cockerel rarely even comes out to greet me when I bring him treats.

Compost piles in the forest pasture

My goal is to have our
flock eventually whittled down to a level where we’re feeding them only
our scraps and homegrown
grains/worms/black
soldier flies. 
It looks like at this time of year, we could probably raise about four
chickens on our scraps alone (as long as they had enough room to catch
bugs and add protein to their diet.)  Once we get a spare moment,
we’ll add some nest boxes to the coop and transfer two or three of our
laying hens into the pasture to clean up the tomato and peach bits
currently going to waste on the compost
pile.


Our homemade chicken
waterer makes the
forest pasture entirely work-free.  We fill up the five gallon
bucket waterer and forget about it for weeks at a time.