Author: Anna & Mark

Trapping invertebrates for chickens

December 16, 2013 Posts No Comments

Miles Olson eating bugsCongratulations to Daphne, winner of our silkworm-egg giveaway!  Daphne, drop me an email at info@avianaquamiser.com with your mailing address and I’ll put your eggs in the mail to you ASAP.



And while I’m on the
topic of insects for chickens, I thought I’d regale you with some
information on eating insects (and other small creepy-crawlies) from
Miles Olson’s fascinating book Unlearn, Rewild.  While Olson’s text is really about invertebrates that humans can eat, if they’re good enough for us, surely they’re good enough for our chickens, right?



Olson considers the following to be the low-hanging fruit of the invertebrate world:

  • ants (and their larvae)
  • termites
  • slugs and snails (but be sure to feed them a bland starch for a
    week to clear out their digestive system, or gut them, then cook the
    mollusks)
  • crickets
  • grasshoppers
  • earthworms (purge their digestive systems by soaking in water for 3 to 24 hours, then mellow their flavor by drying)
  • maggots
  • aphids
  • termites
  • sowbugs
  • earwigs

Uganda grasshopper trapI
was most interested in the invertebrates that seem easy to trap in
bulk.  Grasshoppers might be top of that list since Ugandans have
developed a way to capture large quantities of these insects using a
barrel, out of which juts a piece of roofing metal set vertically, plus a
light shining onto the tin.  After dark, the light attracts
grasshoppers, the insects fly in and hit the metal, then they slide down
to be trapped in the barrel.



Other insects that are
both edible and trappable include crickets and earwigs, both of which
can be captured with cans or jars sunken into the ground.  Olson
uses low cans filled with half an inch of vegetable oil or stale beer to
capture earwigs, and he uses apple, oats, or bread to bait a jar for
crickets.

All of this information makes me wonder if we should be trapping insects for our chickens, not trying to raise them?

Trapping crayfish for chickens

December 13, 2013 Posts No Comments
how to make a do it yourself crayfish trap

Do you have a creek or river
within walking distance from your chicken coop?



I just found out one of our chickens
likes to eat mature crayfish. My next thought was to get
curious about how easy it might be to harvest them from our creek?



The traps are easy to make,
and some people even use plastic soda or juice bottles. Dead fish seem
to make good bait and it helps if it’s attached near the top.



My experiment will be to see
how much time and effort it takes to harvest this new source of protien
for our flock. Image credit goes to Fridley
Farmer.

Mulberry rooting and other forest pasture experiments

December 11, 2013 Posts 1 Comment

Comfrey giftFirst, a bit of book-keeping.  I never heard back from Julie Keith, our Bocking 4 comfrey winner. 
Julie, if you’re still out there, please drop me an email with your
mailing address.  And, just in case Julie doesn’t come through in
the next couple of days, I chose a runner-up.  Daniel, please email
info@avianaquamiser.com with your contact information, and if Julie remains MIA, I’ll mail you the comfrey starts instead.



As a second book-keeping
note, a huge thank you to a second Julie, who sent me the Bocking 14
start shown to the left.  This comfrey will go in my fence-line bed
next-door to the Bocking 4, and in a year I’ll put some in the pasture
for a chicken taste-test (and will give some away).  The plant may
look scruffy now, but I’m confident it will take off like all of our
other comfreys once warm weather hits.


Failed hardwood cuttings

Grafting mulberriesOkay,
book-keeping aside, I figured this would be a good opportunity to take a
look at some of my forest-pasture-perennial experiments from last
year.  The first was a total dud.  I stuck dozens of Illinois everbearing mulberry hardwood cuttings in the ground in a nursery bed (and a few in a pot on the porch), hoping that at least one or two would
root.  Some did seem to be taking hold during our wet summer, but
by the time fall rolled around, all had perished.  I dug the last
sticks out of the ground last week and none had developed roots, so it
looks like Illinois everbearing mulberries aren’t going to be added to
my list of easy-to-root plants.



On the other hand, I sent some scionwood to a reader last winter, and he had great luck grafting onto wild red mulberries. 
I don’t have quite as easy of a source of red mulberry seedlings, so I
might try starting some mulberry rootstock from seeds from our Illinois
everbearing tree this coming summer.  My conclusion is — if you
want to propagate mulberries, it’s best to go the grafting route.


American persimmon seedling

Next stop is our seedling persimmons,
now a year and a half old.  These seem to be growing slowly but
surely in the pasture, perhaps because they don’t tend to get any care
during the year, but also possibly because American persimmon is just a
slow grower.  The trees are now about two feet tall, and I’m
hopeful they’ll double in size over the next year so I can graft some
Asian persimmons onto the rootstock in late winter 2015.

What’s next in forest-pasture experimentation for the coming year?  We’ll mostly be focusing on our newest pasture, where I recently set out the first pear tree and planted comfrey along the fences. 
Another experiment will involve a taste test between the Bocking 4
comfrey that will be added to the pasture this year and the common
comfrey that’s already there to discover which is more palatable to our
flock.  Stay tuned to learn the answer!