Author: Anna & Mark

Comfrey and currants along the pasture fence

June 7, 2013 Posts No Comments
Bocking 4 comfrey

What a nice surprise —
Bocking 4 comfrey has beautiful purple flowers!  Now I’m wondering
if my unnamed
(family hand-me-down) comfrey with whitish flowers is
actually Russian
comfrey after all,
or if it might be Common comfrey.  It will be interesting Red currant leafto compare and contrast the
two species, both in the garden and in our chickens’ bellies.



No news on the edibility
front yet, though, since this comfrey is planted
on the non-chicken side of one of the pasture fences.  This spring, I also
added a red currant to that mulched strip, which will arch into the
pasture once it’s big enough, just like the comfrey will. 
I really like this planting alternative better than the other option
(protecting perennials inside the pasture from chicken damage for the
first year or two so they can get established).


Leghorn pullet

The chickens tell me
they’re waiting with baited breath for the additions to their diet.


A chicken waterer at the far end of this large
pasture helps spread out our flocks’ grazing over the entire area.

Hungry hungry silkworms

June 5, 2013 Posts No Comments
Third-instar silkworm

Silkworms grow so much during their
short lifetimes that they have to pop out of their skins four times
before even considering turning into moths.  You can tell your
caterpillars are about to molt when they stop eating for about a day
and sit with their heads in the air.  That’s your warning that by
tomorrow you’ll need a lot more leaves.


Grazing silkworms

The silkworms pictured
above have just molted for the second time.  At eight days old,
they seem to be eating twice as quickly as they were just two days
earlier (pictured below), when the insects were mere second-instar
(instead of third-instar) caterpillars.


Second-instar silkworms

The table below sums up
what’s to come in the days ahead:


Intar 1 Instar 2 Instar 3 Instar 4 Instar 5
Age 0-3.5 days 3.5-7 days 7-11.5 days 11.5-17.5 days 17.5-25.5 days
Appearance black and hairy grayish-white with black head grayish-white with black head all white
Maximum size 0.25 inches 0.5 inches 1 inch 1.5 inches 2.75 inches



If I think my 8-day-old
silkworms are hungry, what am I going to do with caterpillars five
times as big?  Easy — I will have given
at least some of our miniature herd to the chickens by then, so
there won’t be as many mouths to feed.


Our chicken waterer lets your flock wash down
their dinner with clean water.

Successful hatch from a broody hen

June 3, 2013 Posts No Comments
Broody hen

One of our cuckoo marans turned into quite a
troublemaker when we moved the flock from the woods to the pasture this
spring.  She kept flying over the fence and showing up in the
garden, even after we clipped
her wings.  I
knew she wanted to go broody, but after I discovered her spot in the
straw and made it more conducive to laying (adding a chicken waterer and a dish of food so she
wouldn’t have to leave), she figured that spot was tainted and left
it.  So when the hen stopped showing up entirely a week or so
later, I wasn’t sure whether she’d gone into some predator’s belly due
to wandering the woods without her rooster, or whether she’d finally
found a spot to sit on a clutch of eggs.


Setting hen

“Peep, peep, peep!”
greeted me when I entered the barn on May 23.  The sound helped me
track down our broody hen in a terrible location on slanted, bare soil
up against a hole in the barn wall.  Despite the less-than-perfect
conditions, our cuckoo marans had managed to hatch eight perfect chicks
out of nine eggs.  The dud had rolled away at some point and
gotten too cold to survive.


Hen and chicks eating

Rather than trying to
catch her right away, I moved the dish of food and the waterer to the
hen’s corner.  Unlike our cochin hen, the marans did moan at me
when I got close the first time, but she quickly realized I was a help,
not a hindrance, and let me approach without attacking.


Hen and chick

Unfortunately, the
marans’ lower aggressive instinct worked against one of the
chicks.  As I was weeding a few days later, I heard squawking from
the barn and ran in to discover we were down to seven chicks.  I
guess it’s necessary to move chicks to a secure location even if they
have a mother hen to watch out for them.