Springtime fun

With the weather getting warm, Irene wants nothing more than to be outside with the other kids. She will stand at the door and beat on it until we let her out. The other day, I had put out the remains of a bucket of barley seed for the chickens to snack on and Irene took advantage of it to spend some time socializing with the chickens.

Fodder for Chickens

Anyone who raises chickens for either meat or eggs will tell you that your biggest expense is feed. Good quality, organic, soy-free feed runs around here for about 60 cents per pound. It may not sound like much, but when our 4 chickens eat 10 pounds a week, that makes just feeding them each week cost $6.00. in one year, it costs us $313 to feed 4 chickens. In one year, we get about 200 eggs per chicken, so 800 eggs per year. Doing the math (($313/800) x 12) bring us to $4.70 per dozen eggs. Kinda expensive, though not unreasonable for "pastured, organic" eggs. Still, not cost effective when I can buy 2 dozen organic eggs at Costco for $8.58 ($4.29/doz). In an effort to bring our costs down, I've been researching alternative feeds and found that growing fodder, specifically wheat or barley, is a very cost-effective method.

After seeing a few setups, including some high-cost professional systems, I figured out that I could set it up for only a few dollars. I bought cheap, shoebox-sized tubs at Lowe's for about $1 each and used my soldering iron to burn small holes in the bottom of one end for drainage. I used the wire shelving I had gotten from a friend when he moved. I got a 2x2 piece of pine and cut it into 3 pieces to use as a shim to set the tubs on an angle. All told, I think I invested about $15 in this arrangement.

My first attempts were using barley, which is generally considered to be higher in nutrition than most other fodders. I got it from Reedy Fork Farm. It costs roughly the same as the layer feed, though the idea behind fodder is that you can turn one pound of seed into 6 pounds of food. So rather than feeding them 10 pounds of seeds a week, I can feed them 1.6 pounds of seeds grown into 10 pounds of fodder, thus reducing my costs from $6/week to about $1/week. The daily routine involves soaking 6 ounces of barley for 12 hours and then pouring it into an empty tub, which then gets watered 2 to 3 times a day. The theory is that it will sprout and should reach an optimum height of 6 inches and a weight nearing 36 ounces in about 7 days.

How can growing barley make it better than just giving them the seeds? Well, just search for "sprouting grains" and you'll find a plethora of pages about the benefits and the changes involved in the growing process. Do chickens really eat what is essentially grass? Yup! Chickens are omnivores, which  means they eat anything. Grasses are a big part of their diet. Ours love foraging for clover and fescue. Heaven forbid they are let loose in the garden! They'll eat every sprout and every leaf showing on the plants. But anyway, back to the plans...

Unfortunately, as I discovered, barley is very picky about temperature. It has to be above 70 degrees for it to even think about sprouting and the room where I'm doing this is... well... less than ideal in the winter. The room never got above 65, so my barley was a dud. It hardly sprouted, let alone grew into a cost-reducing feed system. I was going from 6 ounces to about 10 ounces over 12 days, with almost all the gain in the initial 12-hour soak. After trying different things like a space heater and a grow light (no, not particularly a decent one), I gave up and got a bag of wheat.

Wheat is considerably cheaper ($22.50 for 50lbs vs $29 for barley) and, thankfully, much easier to grow. It's less finicky about the temperature and sprouts very easily.

The bottom tub in the picture is 12-day barley. Almost no growth. The top tub is 7-day wheat. 12 ounces of wheat seed became 53 ounces of wheat grass. And yes, you can juice this and drink it if you really want to. Rebecca asked if we could grow sod for our lawn this way. I told her it wasn't exactly efficient to replant 6000 square feet of grass one square foot at a time....

You may notice that there's no dirt in the tubs. That's because it will grow all on its own. The roots all grow together and form a tightly woven mat that retains the water it needs to live. Obviously, I couldn't grow a wheat crop in the little tubs, but for this purpose, it works wonderfully.

After doing this for a couple of weeks, I'm now turning 6.6 ounces of seeds into about 26 ounces of food for the chickens per day, which is more than the average 23 ounces of feed they were eating. This is costing me 18.5 cents per day instead of the 86.25 cents we were paying for the prepared feed. If this works long-term, it will reduce our yearly cost to $67.75 or $1.02 per dozen eggs. Not too shabby...

The real question is: are they eating it? Uh.... yeah.

They freak out when I bring it to them each morning. They first fight over the loose seeds in the bottom, but then they start pulling apart the root mat and go to town. They'll usually eat about half of it right away and then go scratch in the yard for bugs for a while. They'll sort of graze on it for the rest of the day and then I'm left with a little bit of dried out wheat in the tub at the end of the day. Rough guess? 3 to 4 ounces left over, which is less than an ounce of seed. I could probably fine tune the amount I'm growing so that there's no waste at all, but I think I'd rather waste a little than there not be enough and we start to lose egg production.

We'll be adding 2 more layers to our flock in about 6 weeks, so we'll see how that affects the balance. Once the weather warms up for good, I'll also be adding a black soldier fly larvae system that will hopefully provide a significant amount of feed through the summer months. If you're squeamish, don't look up the videos on youtube about them. :)

Mmmm... Gonna taste like...

Well.... Chicken, I hope. 

10 Jersey Giants are starting the fattening process. Last year's Delawares we a bit of a bust with the heaviest topping out at 2.5lbs dressed weight. This year, we're hoping for 4 to 5 lbs per bird at 12 weeks. I put a couple on the scale and they're right around 1.4 ounces at this point, which is 4 days old. Ok chickens: you have 80 days to gain at least 63 ounces. Get eating.

Chicken Update

Our adventure with the chickens continues to make our lives interesting. We've had some recent problems with pests. We've lost 2 laying hens last month and so I bought a trap and a pellet gun to try to "take care of" the culprit. Sure enough, the first night I caught a raccoon. I thought our troubles were done... The next night, we were out and didn't get home until 10pm. I walked back to set up the trap and found one broiler dead and noticed another one missing. I set up the trap and was going about cleaning up the dead chicken when out of the tree next to me falls a gnawed chicken leg. Seeing as how the one in my hand still had both legs, I quickly figured out that the raccoon had taken the other one up the tree with it and was still up there. I could just see his eyes shining when I shone the flashlight up in the branches. Rebecca kindly stood guard at the tree while I got the pellet gun and, shortly thereafter, the second raccoon was removed from the equation. Surprisingly, the next morning, there was yet another coon in the trap!

All was quiet for a couple of days until one morning we found this fella in there. Opossums are just as deadly to chickens as raccoons, so we were glad to get rid of him, too. It's been another 2 weeks and we haven't had another visitor in the trap. Hopefully, we won't ever.

The Delaware broilers are growing quickly now. These pictures were taken at about 7 1/2 weeks. We'll harvest them at 12 weeks (the week before Thanksgiving), so I need to start getting together the stuff I need to do it. It's obvious now that we have 2 hens and 2 roosters, so we're thinking to pardon one hen, maybe 2 since we lost 2 layers. The roosters, however, get no mercy. Sorry fellas.

Our Reds are very tame now. They chase me around as I walk in the yard and will squat down to be scratched or picked up when I get close. They'll do it for the kids, too, which is exciting for them.

 Getting a scratch.

It's funny to see them fluff their feathers after getting some attention. 

As the season changes and things get cooler and darker, we expect our girls to slow down or stop laying altogether. We could put artificial lights in the coop, but we feel like they need a rest, just like we do, so we'll just have to buy our eggs elsewhere over the winter. 

Chicken Update

It's been a while since we posted about the chickens, so I figured I'd catch everyone up. 

Last time I mentioned them, I revealed that we had a rooster. Unfortunately, it's against city ordinance to have a rooster, so it was either give him away or eat him. I tried, albeit not too hard, to find someone to swap a hen for him, but no luck. In the end, he became dinner. It was my first experience slaughtering a chicken, and it wasn't really too tough. I learned that I need make the cut deep enough to bleed him out quickly and that I need a bigger scalding pot for plucking. Everything else went like clockwork.

We wound up roasting him for a Shabbat dinner with friends. We decided to compare our home-grown, free-range rooster to a Costco organic chicken. Ours was a Rhode Island Red, Costco's was a Cornish Cross. Ours was 16 weeks old, The Costco bird was 7 to 8 weeks old. Ours was left loose in the yard to eat bugs, grass, and whatever else it found along with having organic feed available to it. Costco's was likely (since it's not designated "free-range") raised in a mass chicken house on high-protein organic feed. The difference is glaring. Ours is the scrawny looking bird. See that bit of yellow peeking out on our bird? That's a bit of fat. The bright yellow comes from the carotene in the grass, a sure sign of a free-ranged/pastured chicken.

In truth, he didn't have much breast meat at all to him. His legs were longer and bigger, tho. Once cooked, there was a clear difference in the color of the meat. The Costco bird was very pale while ours was darker through the breast, almost the same color as the dark meat on the Costco bird. There was also a distinctly more "chickeny" flavor to ours. The Costco bird was almost bland by comparison. Now, because of our rooster's age, his meat was a bit tougher and reheating the leftovers made it nearly inedibly tough. So now what we need is a faster growing heritage breed chicken. Something we can harvest at 10-12 weeks...

In the meantime, we waited for our hens to start producing. The age varies greatly, anywhere from 18-30 weeks of age. Our chickens were 16 weeks when we took the rooster, so maybe we'd only have to wait 2 weeks...or not.

It was almost exactly at the 26-week mark that we got our first egg. It started with one, then two, then 4. At about the 29-week point, we had our first 5-egg day. They lay at all different times, not just in the morning. And some days we get 3, some 4 and occasionally 5. We're averaging 30 eggs a week, which is just enough for our family right now.

So now Olivia gets to harvest the eggs every day. She loves going to check.

The boys like to check with her sometimes.

During our long wait for eggs, I did some research and decided on Delaware chickens for meat birds. It's what the industry used before the introduction of the Cornish Cross. The biggest difference between the two is that you can raise Delawares and they'll breed. Cornish Crosses are dead at 10 weeks because they grow so fast their legs break and they die of thirst, so no true breeding. 

Ordering chicks requires a minimum of 25 from most hatcheries and that's just not doable in the city, so when our good friend, Drew, mentioned he was ordering 25, I asked him to tack 6 Delawares on. 

And here they are. We got them at about 2 weeks old on/about 8/22, so they're now about 5 weeks old; theoretically, halfway there... They are growing fast.

Meanwhile, the hens have gotten big a beautiful. They're very gentle and 3 of them will actually squat down when I come close and let me pet them or pick them up. They often follow me or Olivia when we're out in the yard. They even run alongside the lawnmower, pecking at the freshly cut grass and getting at the bugs that are suddenly exposed. It's really been a great experience having the chickens. Can't wait to see how the Delawares turn out.

One of These Things...

...is not like the others. 

Olivia and I were feeding the chickens this morning and we noticed that one is slightly different than the rest.

They all like the grain, so that's not it...

Hmm... those tail feathers in the back are different than the rest...

That one's a little bigger than the rest of the hens...

And its comb and wattles are bigger, too... I wonder if you can guess what's different about this one...

Yup. No question. He's different... Kinda struts when he walks... like a... rooster in the henhouse!

Olivia's excited about fattening him up. "He'll be tasty!" 

Baby Chicks No Longer

Our chicks are growing so fast! They are 7 weeks old in these pictures and are really filling out into full-blown chickens. While I usually keep them in a chicken tractor, they seem to like roaming the yard, hiding under the woodshed or the persimmon tree or in the fig tree, occasionally coming out to scratch in the garden or yard.

 

Interesting discovery: chickens have terrible night vision. I accidentally left them out in their chicken tractor until dark one evening, so I went to let them out and let them run back to the coop, but they all just stood there. I tried to shoo them out, but they didn't even flinch. It wasn't until I reached in and picked one up that they reacted to my presence at all. I wound up carrying them one by one back to the coop for the night.

 

It's funny to see them run, but they certainly can run fast!

They tend to stay in a tight group. If one gets separated, she will squawk loudly until she finds the rest of the group.

Chickens: Growing Up and Getting Feisty!

They started by hopping up on the edges of their corral. And then sometimes hopping out.

Then we left the house for about a half a day and came home late one night to THIS... Looks like our chickens had a little hen fest while we were out. They are growing like teens and throwing parties while the parentals are out. :)

The are really funny creatures as they seemed to want the confinement of their corral back and tended to huddle together and look for it. At the same time they want their freedom, too. If you look close, these guys still have some down on their heads and it is on their bellies, too, so they need to stay in a while longer.

Here is the reinforced chicken coop that Jeremy built at almost midnight the night of their partying. It is taller and a bit sturdier so we hoped it would hold them (and their mess) a bit longer.

Here they are starting to roost on the edges of the corral. They started sleeping like this. The byproduct is that they pooped on the floor so we had to add plastic on the floor all around. They then didn't seem to need the heat lamp anymore so we started leaving it off. Turns out they had to adjust to the lack of light all night. Seemed like they were scared of the dark as they would screech/complain very loudly for a bit. But they adjusted after a few nights.

They seem to have all their feathers in now. And they started to hop on top of the kitchen bar/counter and look at us while we were doing kitchen chores. They also could hop/fly in and out of the corral easily. The funny thing is that most of them still cheep like young chickens but one of them squawks like a grown chicken already. We call her our "real chicken". So we decided it was time for them to head on outside. We put them out during the day for a few days and then finally put them out all night and they have been out there for a full 4 days now.

Here is is their home for now.  We will paint the coop when the weather warms up a little more.

 And we are working on building a chicken tractor that we can move them around the yard during the day. We are going to put them to work tilling up the garden.

Chickens!

The other new addition to our household are our chickens! About 3 weeks ago, we picked up 6 little red chicks from Tractor Supply in Oak Ridge. We decided we wanted Reds (preferably Rhode Island Reds) for their great temperament and large, brown egg production. What Tractor supply sells are "mixed reds" which means they could be RI Reds, New Hampshire Reds, or Red Sex-Links. We picked the 6 that most closely matched and were the darkest color, hoping to at least get 6 of the same breed. So far, it looks like we were successful. We don't know which ones we've got, but they all look very similar as their feathers have come in.

6 cute, fuzzy, peeping chicks huddling under the heat lamp. It's amazing how tiny they were... The best guess the guy at the store had was that they were 2 to 3 days old.

Here they are just 6 days later. Already, their wing feathers are coming in. 

It's amazing to watch how they change every day. This is one day after the picture above (one week after we got them and about 10 days old) and the tail feathers are already coming in.

A bird in the hand...

We encourage the kids to pick up the chicks often (if they can catch them!) so that both they and the chickens get used to the handling.

King of the roost...this one got brave and hopped up on the feeder. only seconds after I took this picture, the rest came and pecked her feet until she jumped down.

At 18 days old, they're too big and feisty for the kids to hold in their hands, so they have to let them perch like falcons. The chicks are skittish and are too hard for the kids to catch. They run and  flutter around and when you pick them up, they cheep loudly and flap their wings until they get settled. They have lots of feathers now and can fly for very short distances. I've had them leap out of my hand to coast back into their corral. 

Our plan for these chicks is for them to be purely egg layers. Greensboro City ordinances allow us to have 6 chickens over 6 months old and four more under 6 months, so maybe this summer, we'll get a few more to grow for meat. We're looking forward to the eggs these ladies will produce this fall!