Spring is here, and it is a great time to start a garden. If nothing else, you have to at least put in some tomato plants because nothing beats a fresh-picked tomato on a warm summer day. But I digress… Manure as Fertilizer Good soil yields great crops, so if you want to have the…
People often ask us if we need a rooster in order for our chickens to lay eggs. The short answer is no. A rooster is needed if you want fertile eggs, but chickens will lay eggs whether there is a rooster present or not. Why Keep a Rooster? About half of the chicks who hatch…
One of the first structures we built for the farm was a hoop house. Our reasoning was simple: We needed a place to house our chickens, and our budget was limited. Since we also had a goal to make our shelters portable, the hoop house was the perfect solution for our needs. Hoop House Construction…
I recently posted that we are in the process of butchering stew hens around here. Filling the freezer is useless unless we have a purpose for the hens. A regular chicken you would eat for meat was raised–depending on where you bought it–for about 6-12 weeks. If you bought a bird from the grocery store,…
Today is the first day in October, and despite the fact that it hit nearly 100 degrees today, I am determined to celebrate fall. And, like all celebrations, this one involves food. Over the next month, we’re going to be butchering older hens to use as stew hens. We got a great start on Saturday…
Brian and I have often talked about incubating eggs here at home in order to hatch our own poultry. Funny thing, though, with two off-farm jobs, six kids at home, and the farm itself to run, we haven’t managed to find the time to add egg incubation to the mix. So we get our little…
Yesterday I posted about our efforts to provide more of what the chickens want so they would stay where we want them. On Day 1 of the experiment, I can say that we had a lot of success on all fronts. First, the chickens stayed in, for the most part. I put a few in…
We’ve done it. We spent the last couple days trying to think like the chickens. I guess that makes us birdbrains. You see, the past few weeks, we’ve had increasing trouble with chickens getting out of their pasture. There are a few reasons for this. Some of those reasons are our fault, some are just…
Thanks to a local brewery, we have a great source of nutrition for our animals. We call it beer grain, it also goes by the name brewer’s grains and spent grain as well as other similar terms. The beer grain we get is the end result of the brew process. Once the brewer is finished brewing, he has…
I think the first time I heard the term “bucket list” was when a movie came out with that name. I don’t know if the writers of that movie came out with the term to connote a list of things a person wants to do before dying (kicking the bucket). Maybe it was an old…
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