Chicken Fencing

It's happened.  We finally have decided to build a fence to contain the chickens.  

They have developed a nasty habit of hanging out around the house, pooping all over the walks, coming through the dog door into the garage to eat dog food (and pooping in the garage!), dig up my flower beds, and with a whole world of beautiful green grass and clover to munch on they decide they'd rather eat the newly sprouting hostas and daylilies.

We decided that the cost of fencing in the chickens is much less than the cost of fencing in all of the gardens.  I find that chickens are very destructive to a garden!

We're planning a very large enclosed area so they can scratch and peck and do their chicken things and we'll bring them all the weeds from the gardens for fresh greens.  

The end result is that I can actually have nice landscaping, I don't have to fence around every single garden (that's a lot of fencing), and the kids will be able play outside with bare feet!

... one other bonus is that the chickens will be more protected from predators.  Red-tailed hawks are a big  problem for my chickens (that's what killed our beloved rooster, Pants On The Ground) and I plan to run strands of fish line across the top of the enclosure to discourage the hawks.

Organic Egg Fraud

Organic produce seems the best way to go.  But has the word "organic" been overused by industry to get you to buy those more expensive foods?  Are those organic eggs really all that organic or free-range? 

Watch this.

Look around.  Ask around.  Find someone that's raising chickens and selling eggs.  Maybe go to that place and watch those chickens forage (I had a friend tell me that watching chickens forage was like watching fish swim around a fish tank.  It's so restful).  Know from where your eggs come.  It's more work - but the payoff is really, really worth it!

  

Uncle Sam Wants You to Raise Chickens

Mother Earth News via The Happy Homesteader had an online article about raising chickens in municipalities and suburbs.  

The story discusses how people who want to raise chickens sometimes have to fight for the right.  But, in 1918, everyone was encouraged to raise their own chickens!  It kind of points out how our culture has changed, doesn't it?  

I loved this 1918 poster so much I couldn't help passing the story along.  You can read the entire article here.

Steelers Rooster

I ordered 5 Golden Lakenvelder Pullets in March and ended up with 4 pullets and, we suspected, one rooster.  As he grew we suspected he was a rooster.  One evening I caught him testing out his rusty, raspy crow.  Yup, he's a rooster!

We're going to see if he stays gentle... if not, he goes in the pot.  It's frightening to own a rooster that might injure people - especially children.  

If he is a good boy, he gets to stay.... and we've already picked out his name.  He's black and gold, the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers, our favorite football team.  He has a beautiful head of deep black feathers.  So we've decided to name him after the Steeler's Safety, Troy Polamalu!

Chicken Power

I'm putting the outside gardens to sleep with a nice layer of compost and then a covering of dried leaves.  In our little town, the borough picks up any leaves that have been raked to the curb and if you call they'll be happy to drop them off for your garden.  

I worked all day hauling, dumping, and spreading compost and then hauling dumping and spreading leaves.  My back did not thank me for it!  When I was finished, the garden right outside the high tunnel looked like this.

Then I got to work on the corn and squash gardens.  I hauled and dumped and hauled and dumped and then I got ready to spread the leaves and compost out and had a "a ha!" moment.  I'm going to put my chickens to work!  They're not laying any eggs but the little buggers can still work to earn their feed.  

I took some scratch feed and sprinkled a bit over each of the piles.  The chickens quickly went to work.  Digging, scratching, spreading - and incidentally fertilizing, the leaf piles.  In two days the gardens looked like this and my back gave a big sigh of relief.

“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.”

 ~Arnold H. Glasgow

Chicken Musing

My youngest chickens have been roosting on the nesting boxes and pooping in them.  I decided enough is enough and yesterday I spent a few hours winterizing and cleaning the coop really well and I devised a drop down cloth that keeps the chickens out of the nesting boxes.  I'll lift it in the morning and drop it in the afternoon after egg laying has finished.

I usually use straw on the floor, but after reading through a number of blogs I'm going to try to use pine shavings and I bought a manure fork that will sift out the chicken poop.  Hopefully I won't have the traditional spring yuck to clean up next year.

Last night the chickens were all on their roosts and I finally got a count on the number of layers I have... 47 laying chickens.  Am I getting eggs?  No.  Well o.k., about one egg every other day.  Pitiful, isn't it?  I can tell that a lot of them are molting and a number of them are just too young.  I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.  But heads will roll if I ever have to buy eggs... literally!

Bleechh! Snow!

The East Coast is getting hit with snow this week.  We had our first blast on Thursday, which just happened to be the day that I chose to finally finish up butchering the last of the meat chickens.  I wanted it cold so there wouldn't be flies, but not as cold as it got!  

You know it's probably too cold to butcher chickens when you find yourself looking forward to sticking your hand inside to gut them because it's warm in there!

With freezing hands and toes we did get the job done and it's a relief to have that batch of chickens safely put away in the freezer for a winter of delicious dinners.  It's interesting to note that the egg-laying chickens seem so much calmer and happier with the meat chickens gone.   

Butchering Chickens

I butchered six chickens yesterday.  I still have 13 more to do.  I didn't take pictures because I didn't want to get nastiness on my camera!

I've butchered chickens before, but it's been awhile and here are some of the things I noticed.  Warning:  You may find some of it to be gory.

#1  Chickens STINK.  It doesn't matter how fluffy and white the feathers look, when you put them in a pot of hot water it's going to smell awful when you pull them out AND you can see the nasty bits of stuff stuck in their feathers.  

#2  It takes forever for a pot of hot water to get hot to about 170-degrees.  I use our propane turkey fryer outside to boil the water.  Why don't I do it inside?  See # 1  (smile).

#3  Be prepared to jump back when you cut the chickens throat.  They will flap their wings and spray blood everywhere.  I hang my chickens by the feet and it's supposed to lull them.  I don't have a killing cone, so they flap.  It's pretty gruesome.  

#4 It might freak you out when their toes move when you cut the tendons to remove the feet.  It's just the tendon releasing.  

#5  Having the chickens go without food for at least a day makes the process much cleaner.  It's nice to have an empty crop instead of a crop full of seeds.  I don't even need to mention the back end... much nicer.  

#6  Do not have a bag of grass seed within two feet of where you have the chickens caged.  They will get to it, rip a hole in it, and start eating it.  

#7 The videos and books make it look easier than it is.  There's membranes that hold everything inside the chicken in place that you'll have to cut or pull apart.  The membranes are not that strong and they're easy to pull apart, but they are there.    

#8  The guts come out fairly easily, but the lungs are a little harder to get out.  You have to kind of get your finger up under them and then they'll come out in one piece.  

#9 I see a Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker in my future.  

and 

#10 Butchering chickens is not that difficult.  Once you work your way through the internal workings of the first chicken the process becomes easier and easier with each chicken you do.  

On butchering:  It's messy, it's time consuming, but it's a good feeling to provide good, wholesome food for your family.  I know that my chickens lived the type of very, very good life that a chicken should live.

______________________

In an interview with Joel Salatin, chemical-free farming pioneer,

by Gaby Wood, in "The Observer":

 I ask him if I were from Mars how he would explain why I should eat his meat. Salatin offers five reasons.

"The first thing is," he says, "it's safer from a bio-security standpoint. If you eat our stuff, it's gonna be only sold real close right here. There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is – the fresher, the more transparent that system is – the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage. You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food.

"Number two is what I would call your own personal immune system." The more antibiotics are given to the animals we eat, he explains, the less responsive we become to antibiotics when we need them for medical reasons. "You've been drugging yourself at dinner every day."

Thirdly, he goes on, they've had their meats checked, and they are unequalled in their nutritional density and power, however you want to measure it – "Omega 3, omega 6 ratios, riboflavin, polyunsaturated fats, vitamin A…"

Four: it tastes better.

"And the fifth reason," he concludes, "is: it's better for the environment. It's a very landscape-therapeutic production model."

Chicken Butchering Day

The meat chickens have gone a day with water and no food to "cleanse their systems" and make the butchering process cleaner.  Wish me luck!  

The Chickens Get One More Day

I had planned to butcher a bunch of chickens today, but the forecast calls for scattered thundershowers and looking outside I can see it keeps getting darker and darker.  I think I'll wait until tomorrow when the forecast is better! 

It's a good day for harvesting and processing vegetables.

 

Chickens Are Fenced

If finally came... I had to break down and fence in the chickens.  The other day Heather was walking out by the back forest and said, "There's and egg here!"  I've been having a diminishing egg count lately, so Heather and I looked around and found a big pile of eggs!  The chickens weren't laying in the nest boxes anymore.  

We had no idea how old these eggs were - and I would never think of giving them to my customers - so they ended up being fed to the very happy pigs.    

I put a fence around the chickens and boom!  The egg count went right back up.   

There are a few miscreant chickens who have been flying over the fence, but I caught some of them the next morning and clipped one of their wings... no more flying.  

To clip their wings, I grab a chicken, extend it's wing out, and use heavy duty scissors to clip the feather tips as close to the body part of the wing as I can.  The feather shaft is like fingernails and it doesn't hurt the chicken.  

I've lost quite a few chickens to predators over the years and I hope them not being able to go back into the edge of the forest to hang out will cut down on their losses.  

There are a few other reasons why I decided to fence in the chickens....

.. shredded hostas.  I can't begin to say how many times I have planted landscaping around my house to have the chickens come up and dig it up or crush it.

... holes for their dust baths everywhere.  This particular picture is an area where John and I had spent the day planting pole beans and the chickens came in and dug everything up while making dust baths for themselves.  

... and chicken pooh everywhere.  This batch is on the walk behind my house.  They pooh all over the yard and I've even had them pooh when they come into the garage to eat dog food!

  

The chickens will be let out of their fence in the evening for an hour or two of eating green stuff and catching bugs before they go to roost at night.   That way they'll still give good healthy eggs but will hopefully not have time to get into trouble!

Survival Skills with Russ: How to Butcher a Chicken

Cuteness In A Box

I received this e-mail today:

Just a Reminder!

Ship Date: 6/1/2011 Ship To: SHARON FITZGERALD 144 SNOWMAN RD COUDERSPORT, PA 16915

Your poultry order has been shipped today. You should expect delivery within 72 hours. If you have any problems, please report them within 4 days of arrival. We appreciate your business and are looking forward to providing you with "Ideal Poultry". Ideal Poultry Breeding Farms Inc. PO Box 591 Cameron, TX 76520 254-697-6677

To see what I ordered, go to my previous post:  2011 Chicken Order

Cuteness in a box is heading my way!



P.S.  We had a frost advisory here last night.  I'm glad I don't have anything outside quite yet!

GREAT Repurposing Idea For A Plastic Playhouse

A large part of living sustainably is learning how to reduce, reuse, and recycle things you may have around your house (or that you see someone else getting rid of!).  A few weeks ago I came across the most interesting blog post about how a woman, Chandra, repurposed a Little Tykes plastic playhouse.

Can you begin to guess what it was used for?

You'll never guess....

She used it .....

To create....

...................

.....................

A chicken coop!

Chickens may be the easiest of all farm animals to keep and nowadays, as the post reads, many suburban neighborhoods are allowing people to keep a few chickens in their backyards.  Reusing this Little Tykes playhouse makes an inexpensive and very sustainable way to keep chickens in your backyard - and best of all it blends in beautifully to the neighborhood.

Go to Front Porches - Sweet Tea and Old Aprons, to read more about how Chandra created this really cute chicken coop    

And don't forget to Barn Hop over to Homestead Revival!

Clean Coop

I was finally able to get the tractor close enough to the chicken coop to clean out a winter's worth of chicken manure.

Wow!  I wear a paper mask for the smell (and bacteria), but I sure wouldn't have minded putting on the full up head covering mask of the old chemical warfare suit I had when I was in the military!

The reason the coop got SO nasty was that for the first part of the year I couldn't clean out the coop because the manure was frozen solid to the floor, then, for the past month, with all the rain, everything has been soaking wet and the tractor would have been stuck in mud up to it's roof!

To say the coop was "humming" would be an understatement.  I think my eyeballs wanted to melt!  I've always kept the nesting boxes clean, but after 10 bucket loads of manure the floor is finally clean and smells... o.k.

P.S.  You know what you get when you mix manure, a day or two of warm weather, and flies... purely disgusting!

Snow's Last Gasp?

I had planned to do a blog on the mud and mess we're having, but this morning I woke up to "school cancelled" and this!

Maybe/hopefully this is Mother Nature's last gasp of winter before spring comes?  

We're having a roller coaster of a maple season.  One day there's perfect maple weather, the next day it's too warm - then the following day it's too cold.  We're in a balancing act between good maple weather (days above freezing and nights below freezing) and fearing that the trees will bud - which signals the end of the season!    

This weekend is the Potter/Tioga Maple Weekend, so hopefully the weather will cooperate!    

Something is killing my chickens.  I put out a live trap and last weekend we caught an opossum in it.  Then, we went away on a mini vacation this weekend (before the truly hard work sets in!) and came home to another dead chicken.  I was very angry about this because I could see the beautiful green eggs that it was going to lay inside it.  I set out the live trap again and caught a skunk.  What a stench that created!  

My Cup Runneth Over...

Well, my Cup may not be running over, but my 

Maple Sap Tanks sure were!

Before I got the hose on it, the sap was POURING onto the ground!

I didn't collect sap for two days because the weather was cool and there just wasn't that much.  I felt it just wasn't worth the time and gas expenditure.  Today, I substitute taught at the high school, and as I drove home I swung by to check the sap collection tank close to my home.  As I drove up, what did I see?  Precious liquid gold - maple sap - was pouring out the top of the tank onto the ground!  

I ran home as fast as I could, changed into my outside work clothes, jumped into the truck and rushed down to pump that precious sap!

An almost full to the top tank.

I had to make two trips to get all of the sap.  Along the way I had a few mishaps  - like overflowing the tank in the back of the truck and spilling some sap!  

When I got to the unloading point this is what I ended up with.

Yup, that sticker says 550 gallons!  That tank was tilted, but I figured I had about 525 gallons of sap at 2.1 percent sugar content!

The chickens love the longer days and have been coming on laying.  I've been collecting about a dozen eggs, more or less, each day.  I'll be putting my "eggs for sale" sign out!

A happy Pants On The Ground surrounded by his hens.

2011 Chicken Order

Yesterday I ordered my chickens for June delivery.  We've always had them sent earlier, but then it would be too cold to put them under the lights out in the chicken coop.  They would have to be put down in the basement until the weather eased up a bit and let me tell you, chickens are dirty.  They generate a ton of dust and it gets into every single nook and cranny!

When I get my chicks, I put them in two plastic round kiddy pools with some nice straw in the bottom (thick enough to discourage spraddled legs) and wire fencing around it so they can't fly out.  There's no corners for them to get piled up and crush one another.

When you order chickens, you can get pullets, which are females (egg layers), males, or straight run (which is a mix of male and female chicks).  I have two good-natured male roosters (trust me a good-natured rooster is hard to find!) and I'm not raising chicks, so other than my cornish rocks (who are for meat), I get all pullets.

Here was my order from Ideal Poultry (the pictures are borrowed from their website).  I just hope the pictures stay and I don't end up with the question mark thing:

5 - Americauna pullets (Easter eggers - green or blue tinted eggs)



5 - Speckled Sussex pullets (so darn pretty, and lay a speckled egg)



5- Rhode Island Red pullets (good layers, brown eggs)



25 - Cornish Rock straight run (meat birds)



10 - Buff Orpington pullets (a really nice temperament, good laying chicken, brown eggs)



5 - Golden Lakenvelder pullets (white eggs, hardy, rare, and they're Pittsburgh Steeler colors!)



5 - Welsummer pullets (fairly rare, hardy, lay a dark, terra-cotta brown egg)



The Welsummers are back ordered and, if they're not available in June, I'll get 10 of the Golden Lakenvelders instead.

This seems like a large order, but you generally lose a few of the chicks due to the stress of shipping, and because my chickens free-range, I have some loss to predators.  I have a number of old chickens in the coop this year who are not laying and a couple of meat chickens from last year that are about the size of small ostriches who will all be culled.  It's time to move in some fresh layers!

Araucanas

My araucana chickens (also know as the "Easter eggers) are getting pretty old and at the end of their laying lives.  But the other day they surprised me....

I had put fresh hay in the laying boxes and I guess in the process of getting the hay fluffed they way they wanted it they pushed an egg down to the bottom.

I was so excited to finally see a green-blue egg...

But then I turned it over and found it had been out too long in the well below freezing temperatures and it had frozen solid and the shell had split.  It went into the compost.

Happily, the next day they treated me to another!

We have been hit by the big storm that's rolling through the Northeast.  I spent the night listening to ice click against the windows.  Luckily, we've kept our power so far!  The ice is thick enough that the little dogs can walk right on top of it and it makes the best sled riding surface.  The kids are outside playing as I write.  This morning, as I tended to the chickens, the ice started to fall again and now we have more snow coming down.  

Eggs: Free Range? Cage Free? Organic? Which is Best? You Decide.

Although it's much better to buy organic eggs or cage free eggs, etc. than conventional eggs (those egg factories are terrible), you're often not getting what you think you're paying for!

Here's a chart that let's you know what those different certifications mean.



Some chickens are "required" to have 6 inches of space per bird?  The USDA Organic certification does not require any minimum amount of space but at least the chickens are required to get some sunlight- though I'm not sure if that means five minutes or five hours!

If it's at all possible, your best bet is to find a farm where you can talk to the people about how they raise their chickens and sometimes even see how they're raised.

My chickens live a life of running loose around the yard, eating bugs, and dust bathing when they want. They go into a comfortable coop with roosts every night.  They are never de-beaked (why?) and they have all the daylight exposure they could want!

And they lay the BEST eggs ever!