Eggs!

The hens have started laying eggs consistently. It is neat seeing the different sizes and shapes that come out when the hens are new to laying. The eggs started out really small but have steadily grown in size. We got a big, lumpy egg the other morning when we had friends over for a home-grown-eggs-and-home-fries breakfast. It had THREE YOLKS! We also got a really long narrow egg with 2 yolks. One egg had no shell, just a membrane, and another apparently came out with no membrane or shell, and was just a puddle in the nest. There was one egg the other day that was the size and shape of a yolk, and its own yolk was just a yellow speck with unclear margins, kind of fuzzy looking. Judging by the amount of chicken-sex we witness, the eggs are probably all fertile. One hen did try to sit on an egg the other day, but winter is coming too soon to let them hatch any out this year. It is nice to see the broodiness trait, though, so next spring hopefully we will have a whole new batch of babies!

Sorry I am so lame about blogging!

My friend Jaime came over yesterday and helped me do my first chicken harvesting. He caught Juni up by the leg (this is the chicken we could never catch because he would hurt us!) and then we took it over to a fallen tree and he crossed the wings behind its back, put the neck on the tree while I held the head, and gave it a couple whacks with an axe. He then held it neck down for a minute or two while the blood drained out. I was surprised how the head was so still and yet the body kept crowing! As I hoped, I was not sad or upset about the death part of it. Then we dunked it in almost-boiling water until the feathers came out easily and put it up on a cardboard surface on top of the same dog cage Juni spent his last days in (because we couldn't let him roam with the others since he was uncatchable). I really liked pulling out the feathers. Jaime also showed me how you pull the outer layer of scale-like skin off the legs, including an outer layer on each claw and on the beak. I was also surprised how the young feathers look just like fine hairs. He then sliced near the base of the underside and reached in to separate the guts from the body cavity. This seemed to be fairly hard to do, and it is also a little tricky to make sure you don't rupture the intestines and contaminate the meat. I meant to keep him without food in his cage for the last 12 hours to eliminate any solids from his intestines, but he escaped while I was cleaning out the straw (so he couldn't eat the seed-heads) and ended up in the tractor with all the other birds and lots of straw to eat from). He showed me how to locate the part of the knee-joints to cut through, and also how to butcher the chicken up into pieces.

The dark meat was a bit tough, probably because he was past the 8-week prime age for harvesting, but also possibly from overcooking. The breast was nice and tender. Now the carcass and the head and feet are boiling in the crock pot where they will cook for a couple days untill all the good minerals and gelatin are cooked out of the bones and cartilage.

It definitely feels more peaceful and balanced with one male and the rest females. We did lose one hen a few weeks ago, probably to a coyote. They seem to live very close to the house based on the noises we hear, and one morning around 8:30 I saw one right in the yard with the chickens, as bold as can be. I was freaking out so I couldn't get the door unlocked, but once I did Clarra chased it away.

We have also gotten 6 eggs so far! The first one was several days before the second, but now they seem fairly steady. They are tiny! I will try to post pictures soon.

We moved the tractor to a spot under our only tree because it was so hot for a while. Our new plan is to keep them there and remove the litter periodically to make garden beds. We just let them out in the morning and they go back in on their own at night. They ate a green tomato off the plant today. We may need a fence if they keep that up. I still feel like we are making this up as we go along, and I just keep reminding myself that we are new to this and doing a pretty good job with very little experience. They are so soft to pet, and so cute when they run! I definitely see them as food-producers, but they have a nice role as companion animals as well.

Here is a link to a really cool chicken operation at a monastery. I plan to see if they accept visitors. http://www.littleportion.org/about-our-process.html

Roosters are loud!

Sorry it's been a while since I wrote...

We have two roosters and we really don't like getting woken up at 4:30 every morning so we are thinking about having our first foray into slaughter. We have to learn eventually and it might be best to start with a batch of 2 before doing a whole group of 8 or more.

We are in the process of making the third deep mulch bed. I will post pictures later today. It gets a bit stinky and fly-infested, but since this tractor is too hard to move every day, we are stuck with this system for now. It is good to be making the beds as well. We plan to convert the whole area inside the chain-link fence into vegetable and herb gardens, and creating them with straw and manure is much less labor intensive than removing sod. The next bed we do we are going to put down a layer of cardboard after they eat the grass for a couple days, just before putting in the first layer of straw. We add a thin layer of straw each day. We also need to put a door in the bottom of the tractor because it is too hard to get them in and out to free range with the current design. We were using hay, but we switched to straw because it has fewer seeds and less irritating dust.

We plan to build another tractor soon with a much lighter, more portable and more highly-featured design.

More improvements

In these pictures you can see the upstairs which is enclosed on 5 sides, and the new ladder going up, and the new longer roost, as well as the temporary quarters we put the chickens in during the terrible storm. It is the dog-crate-brooder pushed up against the house, under the porch overhang, with the brooder light in it. I also included one picture of our GROW BIOINTENSIVE double-dug garden bed, in the process of being double-dug. We are doing something between sheet-mulch and deep mulch now with the tractor inside the backyard "dog" fence, and we plan to use those beds for herbs and salad greens inside the fence, and for perennial fruits like berries and grapes further out in the yard. 

We don't let the chickens free range anymore because it is too hard to catch them, and they seem to only want to poop on the porch and eat the clematis. We bring the greens to them now. We bought a bale of hay and we add fresh hay on top of the old stuff every day. Today I will experiment with giving them grass clippings, and we may try using that as bedding as well in order to reduce the external inputs and try to create as closed a system as currently possible. We don't have a hay baler (it would be impractical on this amoubnt of land anyway), and with the amount of rain we are having, I was lucky to get half the lawn mowed yesterday. I hope to rake it all up for bedding, food and compost before it gets rained on again. 

If it looks like their feeder is out of reach, that is because it is attached to a crosspiece of the lid, so when the lid is open the food and water go up with it. The food and water are both hung on carabiners now for easy removal for washing and filling. We are trying to get both placed where they can't be pooped in from the roost. I think I got the food moved far enough away today - we'll see. Washing the feeder and waterer takes a lot more time than just filling them. We do that at a utility sink in the garage. 

We plan to build a lighter tractor soon that can be moved more easily and get meat birds to live in there. 

Improved tractor

Deep Mulch

We are starting a new method with the chicken tractor called the Deep Mulch Method. Instead of moving the chickens to new forage daily, we will leave them in place for a couple weeks, adding fresh hay every day. This creates a deep layer of manure and hay which rapidly decomposes and creates beautifully fertile soil, conveniently in a rectangular raised bed. We will throw in greens from around the yard so they still have "forage" as well. 

Over the last week we have had very cool weather and severe storms so Peter made their upstairs much more secure and added a ramp and a longer better roost.  We started putting hay up there for them as well. We are studying various tractor designs at http://home.centurytel.net/thecitychicken/tractors.html in order to get ideas for improvements, nesting boxes, etc.  We also moved them back to the dog crate with the light out on the back patio for a couple nights so they could be warm and dry during the horizontal rain and thunder and lightning. We will post pictures soon. 

News!

Two of the chicks are probably boys - Juni and Rhoda, the ones we thought were underdeveloped and wierd. They are looking and sounding like boys, and the slower feather development is a boy trait. Here is the resource we used: http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/sexingchicks.html

I am going to go let them out and watch them walk around the yard and read ACRES magazine. http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/magazine.htm