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.

 

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!

 

Switching to Raw Milk

A couple of  month ago, I was over at a friend’s house and they had a container of “Raw Milk”.  I thought this was an incredible novelty because I’d always thought that it was illegal for unpasteurized milk to be sold in America.

I did a little digging and found out that this is not true.  Here is the law:

FDA law CFR 1240.61 states that it is illegal for anyone to transport raw dairy products across state lines “in final package form for direct human consumption unless that product has been pasteurized.”

It turns out that Organic Pastures up in Fresno, CA produces raw milk and it is available at our local Henry’s market.

Little did I know of the controversy surrounding the drinking of raw milk.  The two sides can probably best be summarized with these two PowerPoint presentations:

• Against drinking it: www.cfsan.fda.gov/~ear/milksafe/milksafe.ppt
• Rebuttal : www.realmilk.com/ppt/08rawmilk.ppt

The main arguments seem to be that because we put our cows in such crappy living conditions, they are sick all the time and pumped full of drugs to keep them “healthy”, so we must pasteurize their products so that the pathogens they are living in don’t get passed on to us. 

I don’t see this argument being much different than last year when we had that big break out of E. Coli in all the bagged spinach, or the recent tainted beef recall, or today’s recall of cantaloupe grown in Honduras.  If you treat your  food sources well and it’s clean from the source – shouldn’t it arrive on your dinner table ready to eat?  Based on the risks involved in eating foods, should we ban spinach and other leafy greens from our diet?  Even pasteurized milk can have problems, such as the outbreak in Massachusetts of listeriosis – which was eventually traced back to the processing plant actually reintroducing the pathogen after the pasteurization process.

In a recent letter to the Colorado Department of Health, Mark McAfee makes a couple of good points:

To study this issue further, Organic Pastures contracted with BSK labs in Fresno to perform multiple challenge and recovery tests on our raw milk and raw colostrum. When 7 logs (10 million counts) of pathogens were added to one-milliliter samples of organic raw milk they would not grow. In fact they died off. The salmonella was so badly out-competed that it could not be found less than 24 hours later. The listeria drop was less dramatic and was similiar to the E. Coli O157:H7 samples that were studied, but they also did not grow and declined substantially over time.

…

What is it that causes raw milk to kill pathogens? Just in the last 24 months, the FDA has approved lactoferrin as an approved method of treatment for pathogen reduction in beef slaughter plants. Raw milk naturally has levels of this enzyme-based pathogen killer. Pasteurization inactivates this and other enzymes that kill pathogens. These enzymes include lactoferrin, xanthine oxidase, lactoperoxidase, lysozyme and nisin. There are other interrelated enzymes and beneficial bacteria that also act on the pathogens to inhibit their growth. All of these systems are destroyed by pasteurization. It is no wonder that dairy plants that pasteurize must be kept absolutely spotless. There are no remaining safety systems in the processed milk.

…

The dairy industry does not understand what I have explained here in detail. What the dairy industry believes is that raw milk contaminates pasteurized milk. This is not the case. Pasteurized milk kills the safety systems that control pathogens in raw milk and therefore permit unlimited growth of dangerous bacteria if present.

It’s a pretty good argument and makes some good sense.  I don’t know if some of the “miracle cures” they ascribe to raw milk are true (cures cataracts, arthritis, asthma, etc.), but it would make sense that healthy cows can produce healthy milk for their offspring.

Being the techno-geek that I am, and locked away in a cubicle, even though I could not go out and visit the free range farm, I did manage to find it on google maps.  And yes, those do look like happy cows on a free range of grass.  It’s also interesting to note that they:

tested our milk cow’s fresh manure and did not find any human pathogens. That’s right. . . no Salmonella. She was able to show that when antibiotics are not ever used on the herd (as stipulated in the organic standards) and when cows are not stressed (grass-fed and kept healthy) they simply do not slough off pathogens in their manure.

Which not only is down right responsible of them, but if other dairies followed their practice of keeping happy, healthy, organic cows, a lot of the other outbreaks to our other food sources may not have ever occurred.  Several cases of E. Coli in spinach have been traced back to fields to close to the manure dumps of large dairy processing farms.

One of the “miracle cures” of raw milk is the reduction of eczema – Something my wife has in a very mild form on her hands and uses Eucerin for.  I’m wondering if switching to raw milk wouldn’t actually save us money in the long run if it means we can stop buying all those tubs of lotion?  I wonder if she’ll consent to trying it out for a month?

 

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.

 

Sad and Moldy Pumpkins

So, it turns out that when you pick an already ripe pumpkin from your garden, carve it up and find seeds already sprouting, don’t expect Mr. Jack O’Lantern to last very long.  Our little guy was literally growing mold out the mouth in 3 days.

A quick google search found a great article about what makes the best preservative at a site called My Science Project.

Summary of Results

• White glue – Preserved pumpkin for 6 days. Profuse mold and rot.
• Acrylic spray – Preserved pumpkin for 9 days. Profuse mold and rot.
• Vaseline – Preserved pumpkin for 9 days. Profuse mold and rot.
• Bleach – Preserved pumpkin for 10 days. Minimal mold, some rot.
• Control – Preserved pumpkin for 14 days. Minimal rot, some mold.
• Pumpkin Fresh – Preserved pumpkin for 14 days. Minimal mold, some rot.

Basically, the best pumpkin is a fresh pumpkin (one that I assume is not sprouting seeds), and that the commercial preservatives only seem to be slightly effective.

One interesting thing to note, is that Pumpkin Fresh does a similar experiment, the results after 14 days being the following:

So the thing to take away from all this is, don’t carve your pumpkin until just before Halloween if you want to put it out on the porch!   Even at 2 weeks, most of the pumpkins are looking sad and a little gross.

Also interesting to note, is that while the bleach seems like a good alternative, it is obviously not environmentally friendly and you can’t really compost your pumpkin when you’re done with it.  It looks like one of the main ingredients in Pumpkin Fresh is Borax.  So maybe next year we’ll try some Borax and water solution and see if we can’t get Mr. Jack to stay a bit more mold free and he’ll still be able to end up on the compost heap when we’re done.

 

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.

 

Why I Buy Sunspire Chocolate

So on my quest for organic chocolate, I found this at Henry’s Market.  I bought a bag of their chocolate sun drops (bottom left side of the picture).  What is great about these products can best be said from their website

Sunspire was founded in 1979 by Janet Jennings, a fourth generation “chocolatier” who used her family’s old-fashioned chocolate making know-how to create all natural chocolate products for baking, snacking and candy making. Fueled by Janet’s vision and our decades of chocolate experience, we stand by our belief that the best way to practice our craft is without any artificial colors, flavors, preservatives or additives, using only the highest quality ingredients.

So they have  a great philosophy on keeping things as natural as possible.  And, they’re really good.  I think I paid 99 cents for a single pack at 1.19oz.  Granted, I can go buy a big pack of M&Ms for less, but I think there is a real difference in taste and in the “mouth feel” of the candy – much smoother and richer so well worth the extra cost for a good quality chocolate.  Even better, they also have an attitude where they take care of their suppliers and their communities.  Again from their website:

We provide hands-on support to our cocoa growers by donating tools and resources to improve their harvests. When you buy Sunspire, you’re directly contributing to the well-being of cocoa farmers and their communities.

They even have a very educational and informative FAQ on their site that I found quite interesting and they discuss the difference between chocolate and carob as well (of which they sell both) which I used to think was an alternative to chocolate (they set me straight on that).

So if you or your kids like M&Ms, I would suggest giving these a try.  Yes they do cost more than the big industry chocolate, but I think you’ll find that the better chocolate experience is worth the cost.  As a Dad on a journey to healthy living, good eating habits, and plenty of exercise I count every calorie.  At 180 calories for a bag it’s worth another 20 minutes on the elliptical machine!

 

Are We Overmedicating our Children?

I’m not a big fan of medications, at least those that treat symptoms rather than the cause.  I can understand taking medications for things like high blood pressure, cholesterol, heart conditions, etc. that you use to get things under control, but when you cover up a symptom, you’re usually not treating the root cause.

For instance, get on cholesterol reducing medication if you need it, but be sure you also watch what you eat.  Take blood pressure lowing medication, but also go out and exercise.  I’m always troubled by the mentality that just by popping a pill things are all better.

In America, I think we live in a highly medicated society.  Growing up I was told I had ADD/HD and I had to take Ritalin.  I still think I was just bored in school.  Feeding a kid a form of speed in order to make things seem more interesting isn’t my idea of treating the root cause, maybe there problem is that school really is boring?

There is an interesting post on a blog over at Vox, it rambles a bit, but definitely gets the point across that we do live is a society that overmedicates.

So it wasn’t really a surprise when I saw an article from the Washington Post,because most people seem to be under the impression if a little medication is good, then a lot of medication must be better.  Some of the text of the article is as follows:

—

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Johnson & Johnson on Thursday voluntarily recalled certain infant cough and cold products, citing “rare” instances of misuse leading to overdoses.

In a statement, J&J’s McNeil-PPC unit cited “rare instances of misuse”, which could lead to overdoses “particularly in infants under two years of age.”

The products being recalled include:

• infants’ Tylenol Drops Plus Cold;
• Concentrated Infants’ Tylenol Drops Plus Cold & Cough;
• Pediacare Infant Drops Decongestant;
• Pediacare Infant Drops Decongestant & Cough;
• Pediacare Infant Dropper Decongestant;
• Pediacare Infant Dropper Long-Acting Cough;
• Pediacare Infant Dropper Decongestant & Cough (PE) products.

—

And when I think about it, when I was sick with a cold or a cough, I usually got tea with a bit of honey to soothe the throat.  But here’s the thing to remember – If you or your child is sick, your body will react in the way it best knows how to fight off the sickness.  Most medications will not “cure” sickness, but just mask them.  Sometimes it’s best to let nature run its course.

Granted, there is a time a place for medications.  But when we’ve gotten to the point where we have “anti-bacterial” everything (including counter-tops, soap, and athletic socks) and we’re at a point where the wonder drugs like penicillin are becoming ineffective against bacterial infections today, I just have to wonder if we’re heading to disaster in the form of a super-bug that’s developed resistance to all of our medical arsenal.