Author: Anna & Mark

Week chick behavior

Two or three day old chickI thought you might enjoy a photo journey of
our chicks’ growth over the first week of their lives.  This photo
is a chick fresh out of the hatchery box (probably day two or three of
its life).  At this point, they were pure fuzzballs who spent most
of their time sleeping under the light.  Heat was critical, and
they got easily chilled by even slight changes in temperature.

Five or six day old chicksBy day two, one of the chicks had learned to
scratch in their feed dish.  On day three, I noticed the first one
hopping up onto our homemade
chicken waterer
‘s mount to roost above the crowd.

In the second half of the first week, chicks began to show a bit of
dominance behavior, run-flying at each other to see who would back
down.  They became more active and spent less time sleeping under
the light (and seemed to need the heat less.)  I stopped worrying
about them dying, and they all grew in wing feathers.

I wonder what week two will bring?

Everything you wanted to know about BSF s

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

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.