What do you do with a Pecking Chicken?

Last week, I found out one of my chickens, Katie, is a pecker.  She bullies my other little chicks, and in one case stripped off the back feathers of Isabella (another little chick).  Can chickens be evil?  This one is probably borderline.

She’s had a rough life.  I tried introducing her and another chick to the flock too early – they seemed fine for the week where I’d let them mingle in the yard together, but when I tried that trick about sneaking them into the coop during the evening so the chickens wake up and go “Look, another chicken!  Must have always been here.” what I ended up with was one dead chicken and Katie cowering in the corner the next morning.

I took her back out and tried it again a month later and she took to the flock, but now I’m finding her continually pecking at the other chickens in the yard, driving them away from the food, and in general being a big bully.

I’ve scoured the Internet about how to treat psychologically damaged chickens…Do I take her to chicken therapy?  Maybe she needs an intervention with her other chicken friends.  I wonder if the feed store has drugs to keep my chicken from being a pecker?  It seems like there is a lot of work involved with helping a chicken with a pecking problem become less evil.

So it could be that I’m just lazy, or due to my already high body count as I’ve worked out the care and feeding of chickens in my backyard that I’m desensitized to further chicken death, but it seems that Katie is doomed for the stew pot.  I just have to figure out a way to get it past my daughter that we’re going to eat her little Katie.

Maybe we’ll have a special dinner on Sunday… “Evil Chicken Surprise”.

 

The Swarm (of Bees)

Last week my wife came home to literally hundreds of bees on our front door.  They were swarming!  Over the next couple of days we had more afternoon visitors, but in fewer numbers until eventually they went away.

The first day was a bit of a sticky situation, and the following days we had to peek out the peep hole to check for bees before opening the front door.  Luckily my wife could get into the house through the garage, but it got me to thinking about why these bees would choose to hang out at our door for the afternoon when they should be out making honey.

 

Our front yard is very butterfly and hummingbird friendly, which means it’s pretty bee friendly as well.  During the summer months we usually have half a dozen butterflies and a pair of hummingbirds flitting about the various California native flowers.  There’s probably a dozen or so bees doing the pollination rounds as well.

I found a great web site here by the California State Bee Keeper Association that talks about what a swarm is and what to do about it.  In  a nutshell, swarming is how a bee colony reproduces, with about half the bees and the old queen out looking for a new nest.  A scout bee decided that our front door would be a good place to set up a home (and why not with all the flowers right there for them) and landed there and secreted the nasanov pheromone to call the swarm.  Yes, that’s right, bees were having sex with my front door.

If they had set up a nest, we could have called a either a bee keeper or an exterminator to come get the swarm.  The bee keepers would collect the swarm in a box and take them back to an empty hive to make honey.  An exterminator would have sprayed them with either soapy water to drown them, or toxic chemicals to outright kill them.

Bees can be dangerous, especially as the Africanized Killer Bees make their way up the coast.  You can read about attacks like this one on the web.  So my advice is of course to stay far away from them.  But at the same time, we need bees due to their pollination services especially in California where we have so many citrus and almond groves.  And with the current bee population suffering from colony collapse disorder, I’m glad we were able to let them live in peace and move away from the front door to a hopefully safer location for all involved.

 

Solar Powered Chicken Coop – Update

Just a quick update on my project to take my chickens into the sustainable future of solar power.  The basic premise of solar energy is that you can take energy from the sun, store it and use if for later.

 

I’ve been wanting to experiment with solar for a while and I was at Fry’s Electronics the other day and they had just what I was looking for to get started.  A completely weatherproof, 12 volt, 5amp battery trickle charger, which just screamed “Put me on the chicken coop roof!”.

 

 

When I have my weekend free (hah!), I’ll be mounting this to a couple of 2×4’s on the coop roof.  What I like about it is that besides the compact nature, it also has a built in blocking diode to keep it from discharging the batter at night and, although it doesn’t really say, I assume a build in voltage regulator as it’s meant to charge a car battery.

The solar charger has 10 feet of wire and a pair of battery clamps, so it should be easy to run the wire down into a weatherproof box and clamp the leads to a car battery inside.

The car battery is in turn hooked into a small 140 watt power inverter inside the battery enclosure and a pair of 12 volt computer power supply fans.  Between the battery and these components I have two light switches so I can turn on either the AC power outlet or the DC fans.

 

The light switches are encased in weatherproof switches, and I have an old extension cord plug plugged into the inverter with the other end wired into a weatherproof outlet box.

Assuming this goes well, I’ll be adding a floodlight on top of the coop as well to be powered by the inverter so that I can have lights running in my side garden at night.  No more weeding by moonlight!

I’m hoping to have everything assembled and installed in the chicken coop by August.  Based on a 5 amp power supply from the solar panel, I figure I can run my .16 amp fans all day long and keep my chickens cool while I also charge up the battery.

It’s a fun experiment with solar power, I’ve got most of the components assembled and now it’s just a matter of putting all the pieces together and keeping my fingers crossed.  Assuming it all goes well, I’ll probably move my automatic watering timer onto the 12 volt circuit as well.

And while my daughter may only be four, I think this would be a great way to introduce her to the basics of solar power and DC current theory.  I also found a great web site at opamp-electronics.com with a section on various tutorials and experiments, absolutely great for the the beginning hobbyist who wants to do a little experimentation

 

The Economies of Keeping Chickens

When I first decided to build a chicken coop, there were 2 reasons.  The first was that my daughter wanted chickens.   The second was that the idea of fresh eggs was appealing and I thought it would be economical.

A recent article at the Washington Post talks about the price of eggs going up 30% since last year.  It got me to thinking how much does it cost me to keep my hens?

Now, I originally spent about $300 to put together my chicken coop, not including labor and I’ve probably spent another $30 on the roofing material and the safety hinges for the nesting box roof (don’t want that lid slamming down on any kiddie fingers), and figure around $10 per hen to get them and raise them to the point they are laying eggs.  That means my first egg cost me a whopping $370.  Figuring that they each eat about 1/4 lb of feed and free range (There is a great web page here about grass fed chickens), that’s about 30lbs of feed a month, so I spend about $6 on feed for the month.  I estimated that I get around 5 eggs per week from each hen (Although in reality they’ve been laying every day like clockwork!), and there are 4 weeks in a month.  So I should get around 80 eggs a month.  That means if I had stopped after the first month, each dozen would have averaged about $56 (now that’s some expensive eggs!)

Breaking out the Excel spreadsheet, I can see that if the national average is $2.17 per dozen, it only takes me about 41 months before I reach the break even point of buying vs. raising my own.  However, these eggs are much better than store bought.  I’ve seen some of the specialty eggs from farms that boast free range and humane treatment going for around $6 a dozen.  If I were to buy my eggs at that price, I reach the break even point a little after 10 months.

So what’s the message here?  Prices will only keep going up.  Granted, my feed bill might go up as well, but it’s costing me about 90 cents per dozen eggs in feed.

(  (30 lbs of feed / 80 eggs) x ( $12 / 60 lbs of feed) ) = $.075 per egg

Even at double the feed price, it’s still less than buying a dozen factory raised eggs from the store.

Plus, they make great pets, my daughter loves to play with them, and they all get plenty of exercise running around the yard.  It’s a win-win situation!

 

Virtual Gardening Video Games

I’m a big fantasy and sci-fi geek.  Slowly but surely my four year old daughter is becoming one too.  We have a Star Wars piggy bank, she asked for a dragon sword for Christmas last year, and she loves dressing up as a princess.  She’s also becoming very good with the computer.  She plays games like Elmo’s keyboard-o-rama, watches online movies from netflicks, and enjoys crawling into my lap while I’m working on the computer.

We’re also setting up home-schooling lessons for her as she expresses an interest in various things.  This has involved building a chicken coop, getting an ant farm (more about that later – let’s just say it didn’t turn out well), and our most recent purchase was a butterfly farm with 10 baby caterpillars that will hopefully become beautiful butterflies.

So, I recently started my garden seeds for the spring.  I was really excited about going to the store with her and picking out seeds and getting them started in a little seedling greenhouse.  She was excited about getting the seeds – and I also picked up a 72 disk seed starting kit greenhouse for around $7.

The concept is pretty simple – you have bunch of compressed disks of peat in a plastic container.  You pour water in, plant the seeds and put the cover on.  Seeds sprout in a couple of weeks and you put it in sunlight until they are big enough to plant outside.

Unfortunately, her interest in planting seedlings got about as far as opening the seed packets and discovering that the seeds inside looked nothing like the picture on the outside of the packet.

She loves the garden – loves to pick tomatoes straight off the vine in the spring and summer and helps pick peas and beans in the fall.  But I think there was just too much disconnect between the seeds and having them grow into plants for a 4 year old.  So I was left at the kitchen table finishing up the planting while she wandered off.

It got me to thinking about how I could teach her about the planting process and gardening and somehow compress the time-to-gratification into something more manageable for a 4 year old.  And as a computer geek, my mind naturally turned to computers.

With all the simulation games out there – maybe there was something I could use to help teach her the fun and exciting world of essentially watching grass grow.  I vaguely recalled a SimFarm game from years ago.  With a little digging, I even found a site where abandoned titles go to have a second life.  You can download the game here.  Unfortunately, it’s probably a bit much for a 4 year old to handle screens like these…

 

 

So – What else is out there?  I have to say that it was a little difficult to find kid friendly games about gardening, composting, and plants.  Guess there’s not that much money in making things you can’t blow up.  However, here’s a short list of games I thought were interesting and kid-friendly:

• Compost 4 Fun : Bravekidgames.com is a great website for kid friendly games.  This particular game is a bit hard to control with the mouse (the screen sort of bounces around) but it’s a great way to start a dialogue about what can be composted.
• Garden Dreams : Well, I wasn’t able to get the online version to work for me because I’m behind a firewall – but it looks like fun.
• Alice Greenfingers: Graphics aren’t great and you only get an hour of free play before you have to purchase it, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in playability.
• Garden War: Ok, it is a war/strategy game – but it’s with garden gnomes.  Doesn’t use timers and teaches strategy so kids can probably get the hang of it pretty quickly.  Don’t know how kid-friendly tanks are though.

I’m going to have to try a couple of these over the weekend with my daughter and see if they’re really as kid friendly and interesting as I think they are.  I liked them and I thought they were fun, but as they say the proof is in the pudding…

 

Chicken Coop Update

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to spend a few moments to update, so I thought I’d spend some time talking about the chicken coop and some of the upgrades it has recently gone through.

It now has a composite roof and the nesting boxes are now finished.  I decided to only cut holes for 2 of the boxes and use the third box for storage.

I was at Lowe’s this weekend trying to find some suitable roofing material in order to protect the plywood roof – most of what I found was either to heavy (clay and cement roofing tiles) or just plain ugly (corrugated steel).

The perfect choice for me was a composite roof – light and fairly easy to install.  However, even the roofing tiles seemed like overkill for a small chicken coop.  It involved the roofing cement, felt paper, nails, and of course special pieces for the roof line, plus all the strips of composite roofing tile ( a small square of these roofing tiles was also around $50 – not what I want to spend on a chicken coop)

Then I hit upon the perfect solution – A roll of selvage mineral roofing material.  This is a big roll (108 sq. feet) of composite roofing material without the tiles pre-formed so it can literally just be laid down kind of like butcher paper on the kitchen table.  Granted, it’s meant for large flat roofs, but at $20 for the roll and knowing I could lay a complete piece down over the roof point so I wouldn’t need the special pre-formed composite tile peaks and hips, it fit the budget.

I took the roof off and cut each piece to size, with a bit of overlap along the roof edges.  I laid down a couple of beads of liquid nails on the plywood to make sure the roof wouldn’t go anywhere and screwed the hinges back on over the roofing material.

I also took the time to paint the coop as the raw plywood was looking a little worse for wear.  That was pretty much a no-cost project as I used the house paint we had left over from when we painted the exterior of our house several years ago and a paint brush I had in the garage (which I think I left in the bathroom sink, sorry hon!).  Some of the excess roofing material was laid down around the base as my drop cloth.

The result is a somewhat better looking coop that should stand up to the weather a lot better in the coming years.  I think the girls are happy about the new addition.

And of course, the reason for this whole thing – my girls are growing up and starting to lay eggs.  So of course they needed a proper nesting box and a good looking coop!

 

Right now, it looks like only the Americana and the Plymouth Barred Rock are laying (green egg is Americana, brown ones are Barred Rock) but I’m expecting the other two black sex-linked to start laying any week now.

 

Organic Jack o’Lantern from the Garden

This Halloween, I carved my first organic pumpkin from my garden. This pumpkin was a ‘volunteer’ from the compost from last year where the seeds didn’t quite cook enough and still had their ability to grow. It started off as a seedling around another tree and we transplanted it to it’s own space.

I have to admit that it was a lot of fun watching it grow from a little plant into a nice 16 pound pumpkin. My daughter and I harvested it the day before Halloween and scooped out the ‘guts’. what was interesting is that as we were scooping out the seeds we noticed several of them had actually sprouted inside the shell. these are definitely some hardy seeds!

Now, we could have done some of the cool designs that I see every year where people spend way too much time creating works that Michael Angelo would be proud of, but as I am lucky to even get around to carving the pumpkin in the first place, I figured simple was better. We didn’t use any fancy tools like you’ll find here:

• Essential Pumpkin Carving Tools
• Pumpkin Carving Design Inspirations

What we did do, was put down newspaper and used a sharp knife. That was easy, quick, and we still had a lot of fun!

 

Giant Organic Pumpkins from Compost

Every year around this time, the great pumpkins come out. I’m not talking about THE Great Pumpkin from the Charlie Brown Halloween Specials, but instead the gargantuan pumpkins that people grow in various vegetable growing competitions.

Pumpkin Contest

HowToCompost.org has a contest every year for the largest pumpkin grown worldwide without the use of chemical fertilizers. Now my little pumpkin won’t win anything this year (especially as I didn’t actually enter the contest and it probably tops out at 20 pounds), but I think I’ll have to see if I have what it takes for 2008. The rules for growing the pumpkin are pretty simple.

1. Use only compost to prepare your soil (no chemical fertilizers/supplements allowed).
2. No force feeding of nutrients through the vines.
3. The pumpkin must be grown outdoors. (Seeds can be germinated inside and transplanted outside in the early spring.

Composting

Composting is an important way to recycle and can be done at home. It is an easy way to reduce the amount of household garbage by about one third. As well, it produces a valuable soil amendment for use in gardening and landscaping.

We have been using a Mantis twin barrel composter for about 2 years. It was a gift from both sets of parents for Christmas (it’s fairly expensive for what it is, but convenient and it actually looks good in the side yard). I absolutely love the idea of having our own compost right there and of the reduced footprint we have on our landfills. Until we got the barrel composter we were using the used tire method of composting. This was a good method, but was fairly labor intensive and we piled everything on from the top, so we had some problems with aeration.

Remember that compost is not just decayed organic matter. Composting is applied microbiology. Literally thousands upon thousands of different species of microorganisms (2 million individuals per gram) in a highly complex ecosystem.

I think one way of maintaining a sustainable lifestyle is that it must be as easy or easier than the more conventional approach. When collecting our kitchen scraps for compost, we keep a bucket under our sink next to the cutting board. Instead of taking scraps to the regular trash, they go there, when it’s full we take it out to the composter. This is just as easy as if we were tossing it into the trash can for pick-up. Yard scraps work just as well since we pile everything in and if it’s full we put the waste under the barrel and in a couple of days the compost has “cooked” down to where we can stuff more in. It is an easy way to reduce the amount of household garbage by about one third.

Now the website says that you should turn the composter every day – in reality we only turn it when we are dumping in our scraps and that works just as well. And of course the advantage of the twin barrel is that we can just keep filling and filling one chamber while the compost spends several weeks cooking in the other.

Producing quality compost is the most important job on the organic farm. A lot of the problems I see on farms I visit could be solved by making better compost.

– Elliott Coleman, The New Organic Grower

How to Compost

Here’s some great tips for what to compost and how to compost in your back yard. You don’t need to go out and buy a big barrel composter like we’ve got, but you should definitely try it out and see if it’s something you enjoy!

What to Include

• From the Garden
  • Leaves (chopped – to speed their breakdown)
  • Grass (not wet)
  • Plants & Weeds (without ripe seeds)
  • Old potting soil
  • Soft plant stems
• From the Kitchen
  • Fruit scraps
  • Vegetable trimmings
  • Egg shells (crushed)
  • Tea bags
  • Coffee grounds with filters
  • Shredded paper

DO NOT include…

• • Meat, fish and bones
  • Plastics
  • Metals
  • Fats and oils
  • Dairy products
  • Pet waste
  • Cheese, meat or other sauces

Clues on Composting

• The composting process works best when the organic pieces are small. Weeds and trimmings should be shredded.
• Don’t add thick layers of any one kind of waste. Grass should not be more than 6 cm deep, leaves up to 15 cm deep (cut or chop or dry and crumble them). If you can, let grass dry first or mix it with dry, coarse material such as leaves to prevent compacting.
• The composter contents should be moist like a wrung-out sponge. If the contents are too dry, it will take overly long to compost; and if too wet, the contents may begin to smell.
• Turn or mix the compost every couple of weeks or each time you add new material. This keeps the compost well aerated.
• Composting can be done in the winter. You can add materials to your composter all winter long. The breakdown process slows down or stops when the pile is frozen, but it will start up again in the spring. Thorough turning in the spring will reactivate the pile. Empty the composter in the fall to make plenty of room.

Troubleshooting

Composting is not difficult but sometimes the process requires a little extra attention. Here are some easy solutions to correct certain situations which might occur.

• If the pile does not decrease in size or generate heat, composting may need a boost. If the pile is dry, add water – mixing thoroughly. If the pile is wet and muddy, spread it in the sun and add dry material. Remember to save “old” compost to mix with incoming material.
• If the center of the pile is damp and warm, but the rest is cold, the pile may be too small. Try to keep your composter as full as possible. Mix new with old, dry with wet, breaking up mats and clumps.
• If the pile is damp and sweet smelling but not heating, it may need nitrogen. Add grass clippings, table scraps or a sprinkling of organic fertilizer from the garden centre.
• If the compost pile develops a foul odour, it may not be getting enough air. Loosen up the pile, break up clumps, unblock vents and perhaps add some wood chips to help the pile “breathe”. Turning the pile always helps aeration.
• Compost in a container with a cover to prevent animals from getting into the composting materials. A wire mesh around the base can help to prevent pests from digging under the pile. Dig in or cover food waste immediately.

Is It Finished Yet?

The composting process can take from 2 months to 2 years, depending on the materials used and the effort involved. To accelerate the process, the pile must be a balance between wet and dry material, turn it frequently and make sure the waste is shredded or in small pieces.
Compost is ready to be used when it is dark in color, crumbly and has an “earthy” smell.

Put Compost to Good Use

Composting can benefit your soil and plants in many ways. It increases the soil’s organic matter content and its moisture-holding capacity. Compost improves soil porosity and helps to control soil erosion. It also enhances plant and flower growth and helps plants develop a sound root structure.
Use it on your lawn, in your garden, around trees or combine it with potting soil for your plants.

 

Gnomes back in the Garden Thanks to J-B Weld

For some time, I’ve always loved gnomes. Growing up I had a book that described gnomes in detail. It wasn’t really a children’s book per say, but I enjoyed it none the less.

Gnomes 30th Anniversary Edition by Wil HuygenRead more about this title…

I thought this was one of the greatest books ever, and so naturally, when I started my own garden, I wanted gnomes as well.

The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus. It is often claimed to descend from the Greek gnosis, “knowledge”, but more likely comes from genomos “earth-dweller”.

In the Harry Potter series, gnomes are considered garden pests and appear to be more akin to animals than intelligent beings, and there is a scene in the movies where they are busy “de-gnoming” the garden.

So, knowing my love of gnomes, and in an effort to head off the invasion of plastic pink flamingo lawn ornaments, my lovely wife bought me some gnomes a while ago. The first one I received was of a gnome sleeping, with his but sticking up in the air.

[Insert picture here]

This particular gnome was named “Lucky Butt” and has wandered throughout my backyard, from the back slope, to my daughter’s Barbie play house (bought used off of eBay), and finally to the garden just below the kitchen window.

Earlier this year for father’s day, he got a friend and some more landscape in the form of a couple of mushroom statues.

All was well with this happy little band until tragedy struck last month. A roof tile fell from about 20 feet, right on top of my happy gnome. Splitting the cast iron gnome from head to toe (and shattering the roof tile of course).

I’m happy to say that last night I was finally able to get out the JB Weld and put my little guy back together and he’ll be installed in his place of honor again tonight.

For those of you not familiar with JB Weld, let’s just say that it is almost as useful as duct tape. The stuff is described on their site as:

Our flagship product, J-B WELD is the world’s finest cold-weld compound. It’s a remarkably easy, convenient, and inexpensive alternative to welding, soldering, and brazing. J-B WELD is the smart way to repair something … and for literally pennies per use. When welding or soldering is out of the question due to cost, down time for repairs, or technical/environmental considerations, J-B WELD is the answer.

Like metal, J-B WELD can be formed, drilled, ground, tapped, machined, filled, sanded, and painted. It stays pliable for about 30 minutes after mixing, sets in 4-6 hours, and cures fully in 15-24 hours. It’s water-proof; petroleum-, chemical-, and acid-resistant; resists shock, vibration, and extreme temperature fluctuations, and withstands temperatures up to 500° F. J-B WELD is super strong, non-toxic, and safe to use. Before it sets, you can clean up with soap and water.

And I have yet to disagree with this statement. I would heartily recommend the use of this product above and beyond any other bonding agent out there.

Lucky Butt is happy to have our newly repaired gnome back in the garden tonight and maybe in the future he’ll have a few more friends as well…

 

Chicken Manure as Fertilizer

Bars represent (from left to right) fresh poultry manure, aged poultry manure, standard poultry compost, ammended poultry compost, fresh dairy manure, aged dairy manure, standard dairy compost, ammended dairy compost, fertilizer.

So the above graph was taken from a study over at NewFarm.org.  Basically, nothing really beats the chemical fertilizer because it makes Nitrogen immediately available for the crop to convert.  However, the study was done only over a period of one year and it looks like the slow release nature of the nitrogen in manure and amendments and the need for the soil microbiota to “get up to speed” in converting that nitrogen into forms available to the crop means that it will take several years to get to be just as good as if you were using the chemical fertilizer.

So, if you’re looking to switch to organic farming methods then initial heavy compost applications will maintain crop yields during the conversion of chemically fertilized fields to organic management.  And of the organic mixtures, it looks like fresh poultry manure and aged poultry manure seems to be the best alternative to the chemical fertilizers.

Just another reason to have a couple of chickens in the back yard to help out with some organic soil amendment if you’re looking to grow some organic vegetables in your backyard.