I wrote on our homestead blog about our problems with chickens flying over fences.  It took a while to iron out the issues, but I'm glad to say that the farm is now quiet and chickens are staying where they're meant to be.  In the process, I learned some interesting lessons about rotating chickens through varied terrain.

From now on, I won't try to move chickens away from prime habitat (mulch under trees) and into subprime habitat (open grasssy lawn) if they can still see the prime habitat.  Instead, I'll rotate in the other direction --- starting with subprime and working my way up to prime.

Or I'll move the chickens to a new location entirely after leaving prime habitat.  Once our flock was transferred to a coop on the other side of the yard, they didn't try to fly over fences and return to the forest garden island.  The temporary fencing materials were just as ramshackle and sagging as before, but with chickens, out of sight is out of mind.

Of course, it's also possible the chickens are quite happy in the berry patch.  Not only is there clover-filled lawn between the rows, they can also scratch up the straw mulch to their hearts' content.  I'm just glad I've figured out how to keep giving the broiler flock fresh pasture without overgrazing any one area.

Ever since I learned the traditional way to cook an old chicken, I've been much more enthusiastic when a tough old bird needs to be culled from the flock.  My cooking method produces delicious flesh, but you still need to decide what to do with the meat to turn it into a meal.

Soup is my favorite use for an old hen.  If you take the meat off the carcass once it's tender, stew the bones for a few more hours, then pour off the broth, you have the base for a delicious chicken soup.  Add some onions, garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper to the broth and cook for an hour, then add potatoes, carrots, and the cut up meat and simmer until the vegetables are tender.  Or, in the summer, turn the broth into the base for harvest catch-all soup.

But it's simply not the right time of year for soup.  We ate the last of our fall carrots a few weeks ago and the new ones are only a few inches tall in the garden.  Similarly, last year's parsley is going to seed, and the new herbs aren't big enough to pick.  So I had to find a more creative use for our old rooster.

Coq au vin is the only recipe that's easy to find on the internet and that starts with an old chicken.  I've yet to try it --- I'm sure coq au vin is delicious, but the lengthy prepration looks pretty daunting.  Instead, I opted to turn the flesh from our rooster into a very simple chicken salad by adding a cup of Hollywood Sun-dried Tomatoes and an apple, then serving the concoction over baby lettuce from the garden with a bit of parmesan grated on top.  Add roast asparagus and fresh strawberries on the side (all from the garden) and we had a feast.

What's your favorite way to turn an old hen or rooster into a delicious meal?

In addition to providing a list of plants chickens (probably) won't kill, Free-Range Chicken Gardens offered plenty of excellent advice about protecting more tender plants from chicken feet and beaks.  You can use these tips for the author's intended purpose of planning a garden that can coexist with chickens, or you can keep the information in mind while designing a forest pasture especially for your flock.  Either way, the most important piece of advice Bloom presented was the most general --- give your chickens plenty of extra room so they don't have to scratch any single spot bare!

More specifically, timing is essential if you want to mix chickens with less hardy plants.  Chickens should be fenced out of gardens when you've recently seeded bare soil since the birds love to scratch up soft ground, eating the seed and killing recently sprouted seedlings.  New transplants and seedlings don't mix well with chickens for the same reason, and it's a good idea to keep poultry away from perennial herbs in early spring; once those tasty leaves harden up a trifle, they won't be quite so enticing.  After plants are established, many can handle chickens as neighbors, but you'll want to move the flock out of the garden again when fruits are ripening unless you plant enough strawberries, blueberries, and tomatoes to share.

Speaking of sharing, Bloom recommends refraining from giving your chickens tomatoes and other tasty garden goodies as treats if you don't want them to learn to pick the same goodies off the vine.  I'm not sure I buy this logic since chickens are attracted to the color red, but it's worth a shot if you really want your chickens to roam in your strawberry patch.

In addition to pecking, you have to consider chickens' tendency to scratch.  Let a chicken loose in a no-till garden, and mulch will end up in the aisles, on top of the plants, or in the next county over.  Adding aboveground edging to the sides of beds can help the mulch stay (roughly) where it was put.  Bloom also comes along behind her chickens and sweeps mulch back into place.  (This would drive me nuts.  As if there's not enough work on the farm without cleaning up after chickens?  But your mileage may vary.)

As I've discovered in my chicken pastures, hillsides can be a problem.  Plants tend to be less strongly rooted there, so chickens scratch them up in short order and then the soil starts washing downhill.  Bloom recommends either fencing your chickens away from the hillside, or using a dense groundcover to keep the hillside in place.  She also uses tough, scratchy groundcovers under shallow-rooted shrubs to prevent chicken scratching, with variegated Japanese sedge, pachysandra, ground raspberry, and cotoneaster being her top choices.

If you want chickens to be able to free range, you'll need to block off the more troublesome area, which is where Bloom's list of chicken barriers comes in.  Temporary fencing is the obvious solution around small trees while they're getting established or around constantly rotating gardens.  Bird netting can keep chickens from eating your blueberries and strawberries and you can use stones (or the groundcovers listed in the last paragraph) to protect the bases of perennials.  Sticks like the ones I use to deter pets from freshly planted beds will do the same with chickens, as will cloches or remesh (as in the photo to the right).

Another option is to simply raise the plants up out of reach.  Tall containers can work, and vining plants (tomatoes, squash, etc) grow up trellises away from chicken beaks.  (You may still need to protect the roots and trunks of the plants when they're young.)

Bloom's final word of chicken deterring advice is to install motion-activated sprinklers around your favorite plants.  This might be especially satisfying if your neighbor is the one with the naughty free-ranging birds....

I've always chosen to toss my chickens' daily allotment on the ground for a number of reasons.  Primarily, I want to give them a measured amount, but I really got in the habit when our chickens lived in tractors.  I thought having to hunt through the grass to find bits of feed could give our hens something constructive to do all day.

However, my brother let me know that his new chickens started eating less when he put the feed in a container.  He still gave them a daily allotment, but realized that he was actually feeding them a bit too much since they left food behind.  Since we'd recently upgraded to gourmet chicken feed, we thought the higher quality feed might mean our chickens needed less.  So I asked Mark to build me a simple trough to go in the coop, then watched to see what happened.

At first, I wasn't even sure if the hens had figured out where their grub was now being served.  They barely seemed to touch the food and I got worried they were starving.  So I started giving them their food scraps next to the trough, and snuck in early one morning to see that yes, the hens were eating from their new container.  (Also, egg production stayed high, which was a real tipoff that the chickens were still well nourished.)

Our girls were clearly eating much less out of the trough.  (Or, rather, the sparrows were probably getting less leftover feed.)  I already feed our chickens less than the recommended daily allowance due to our pastures, but I think I've been overfeeding anyway.  I'll be slowly cutting back on my feeding amount until there's no grain left in the trough at the end of the day and will report back once I know how much our hens actually need to eat on pasture.

How much will a power outage affect your incubator?  Is it worth keeping the eggs going after the juice comes back on, or should you pull the plug and start over?

We had a two to three hour loss of power during the second week our incubator was running, and we did see a slightly lower hatch rate, but not enough that I feel we should have just started over.  During our first hatch of the season (same incubator, same parents), we had 90% viable eggs, 95% hatch rate of those viable eggs, and a 94% survival rate to four weeks.  In contrast, the set of eggs that lived through the outage had 95% viability, 80% hatch rate, and 94% survival (to one week).  (See my 99 cent ebook, Permaculture Chicken: Incubation Handbook for more information on calculating these rates and improving your hatch.)

How long eggs can survive in the incubator without power depends on a variety of factors.  Length of time the power is out is an obvious one, and so is air temperature in the room --- shorter outages and warmer rooms cause less of an impact.  If you're around during the outage (we weren't), you can close all the vents, add a hot water bottle if you have one, and wrap the incubator up in a blanket to conserve heat, which will mitigate the outage to some extent.

Another factor to consider is age of the eggs.  The further along your chicks are in their development, the less likely they will be negatively affected by a power outage.  As embryos develop, they begin to produce a bit of heat by themselves, which warms the inside of the incubator slightly.

Have you left the incubator running after a power outage?  I'd be curious to hear how long your power was out and what percent of the eggs survived to hatch.

Glenn Ingram didn't only make his coop waterer self-filling, he added the same innovation (plus some) to his chicken tractor.  I'll let him tell you about his tractor watering system in his own words:

Here is the overall chicken tractor. It has wheels that go up and down as needed. I like my tractor because I almost never have to go inside. I can pour feed in from the outside, collect eggs from a door to the outside, and water from the outside. Better yet, have the tractor collect rain water for the chickens to drink.

Here is a close-up of the buckets. They are not heated as I don't keep the chickens in the tractor during freezing weather. It has the same exact features as the 5-gallon bucket system for my larger non-mobile coop. The problem on the chicken tractor is the lack of vertical room for the bucket to be below the gutter yet high enough so the chickens can get under it to drink.
 
So I used a 2-gallon bucket. I used a piece of flexible sump pump hose for the overflow so I can have a little more control of where the overflow goes to get the water away from the tractor and yet it does not get in the way when moving it. I put a water level indicator on the outside, which works well but you have to take the slope into account. We have almost no flat spots on our hilly terrain so the buckets are never level. Depending on the slope, the indicator can make it look like there is more or less water in the buckets than reality. Just understand what the water level will look like with the slope.

To gain more water capacity, I slaved a second 2-gallon bucket to the 1st one. This is done by simply connecting the 2 buckets with a 3/4" pipe at the bottom of the buckets. It can be a straight pipe, mine has a 45 degree turn to get around the post. This connection allows the 2 buckets to act like one larger bucket. As one bucket fills, the other bucket fills, as one empties, the other empties. Be sure to drill a small hole in the lid of the bucket without the downspout so air can escape or enter to replace the water that is moving (otherwise you create a vacuum and the water cannot move). This works great so that I have about 3.5 gallons of water capacity yet the buckets fit in the tight vertical space (a little less that 3 feet total). I never put more that 6 chickens in the tractor so they never empty these buckets before it rains again. If I ever do need to add water as after cleaning, I just pour it in the gutter. I do the same thing with the large bucket system on the main coop.

The nipple is, again on the bottom of the bucket. I only have one nipple right now but I am going to add another. I used some bent lightweight galvanized steel conduit to mount the buckets, but I just used them because they were left over from another project. I don't know that I would recommend them as they are not perfectly stable when moving the tractor, but they are pretty good.

The entire roof of the chicken tractor opens which also lifts the gutter and therefore downspout out of the bucket. I can then easily pick up both buckets at once to remove them for cleaning or to take them inside in freezing weather.

One other note, I highly recommend the use of Uniseals to connect pipes to buckets. You can order them online very affordably in pretty much any size that PVC pipe comes in. Then you just drill the appropriate-sized hole with a hole saw (they tell you which one to use) and pop the Uniseal into place. You then push a piece of PVC pipe of the appropriate size into the hole with the uniseal in place. The pipe pushes the Uniseal against the sides of the hole and seals wonderfully. There are no glues or adhesives and you don't even need access to the inside of the bucket. They work equally well on curved and flat surfaces. The best part is you can pull the pipe back out, remove the uniseal and reuse it somewhere else. I don't know how long they last, but they have been great for the past 8 months with lots of sun exposure and freezing temperatures. We'll see how they last through the summer. I use these for making rain barrels as well.

You may also notice that I have tin roofs on my coops. Asphalt/tar shingle roofs may not work well because of tar from the roof getting in the water. That may or may not affect the chickens’ health. Also, the small pieces of grit from shingles clog up the screens requiring more maintenance. Debris also seems to wash off the tin roof much faster so you don’t get as much bacteria growing on the roof. I don’t know that bacteria is really a problem when talking about a bird eating off the ground all day, but at least that is less bacteria to be growing in their water bucket.

Thanks again for sharing your inspiring system, Glenn!

While I was out in the woods gathering leaves to refresh our deep bedding Monday, I noticed several periodic cicadas recently emerged from their skins.  Cicadas spend most of their lives as ground-dwelling nymphs, tunneling up to 8.5 feet below the surface to suck the juices out of roots.  You've probably seen the skins they shed after crawling up out of the soil and unfurling their wings, and have likely heard their mating songs in the summer as well.

Since the cicadas I was running into were newly transformed into adults, they were slow and easy to nab by pinching their wings together.  I tossed cicada after cicada into the chicken pasture, and the same Black Australorp scarfed down each one.

Cicadas actually enjoy a history as human food, so it's no surprise our chickens liked them so much.  I've read that a cicada has the same proportion of protein per pound as would be found in lean beef, and the taste has been descibed as similar to almonds or pistachios.  There are quite a few cicada recipes on the internet, and now I'm starting to wish I'd snagged a few for our own dinner instead of tossing them all to the flock.  For tastiest cicadas, find them young when they're still whitish and toss the insects in the freezer to die a slow death before cooking them (or eating them raw).

Given the level of enthusiasm our chickens showed when offered cicadas as treats, Mark started pondering how to raise or catch cicadas to feed the flock.  Any crazy ideas for catching cicadas in bulk?

In the field of rooster management, I've clearly got a lot left to learn.  Last year, we ate our rooster because he had taken to beating me up when I went into his pasture, a problem which (in retrospect), I'm pretty sure was my fault.  This spring, I noticed our rooster giving me the evil eye and I gave him a wide berth, moving slowly and trying not to get between him and his ladies.  Even though I think our new rooster had the same potential to turn into a person-flogger, my care ensured that the behavior was never triggered.

Unfortunately, this year's rooster turned his aggression in another direction, violently molesting one of our hens.  I can't quite decide why he turned mean after a whole winter of generously protecting his ladies as they free ranged in the woods.  Maybe spring simply fills rooster with aggression, or maybe being crammed into small pastures set him off.  Perhaps it shook him up to be rotated to a new pasture every week, even though I chose this rooster out of all of last year's cockerels because he was (and is) the smartest about heading into the coop and out a new pophole on rotation day.

Regardless of the cause, I'm afraid yet another rooster is going in the pot.  We'll keep one of his sons to fertilize this fall's and next year's flock, and I'll keep trying to learn to be a better rooster keeper.  Not that we need a rooster between April and August (when we'll start our fall batch of broilers).  Maybe the solution is to simply keep a rooster around for the winter and eat him each spring before he becomes a problem?

Free-Range Chicken Gardens by Jessi Bloom provided some handy tips about planting a garden with chickens in mind.  The author's general advice is to give the chickens as much space and as many types of plants as possible to prevent over-eating (or -scratching) any one spot.  She also admonishes us to provide multiple plant layers (ie trees, shrubs, vines, and groundcovers) to give the chickens plenty of nooks and crannies in which to hide from predators.

Starting at the ground and working our way up, Bloom considers annuals a bit dicey when mixed with chickens.  The only one she really recommends is nasturtiums, since chickens mostly avoid the strongly flavored leaves but will eat the seeds as dewormers.

If you're willing to use chicken deterrent strategies (more on that in a later post) to keep annuals from being killed at the seedling stage, chickens thoroughly enjoy eating Swiss chard, chickweed, cowpeas (she says --- my birds didn't want to touch them last year), corn salad, flax, lambsquarter, lettuce, all of the garden brassicas, purslane, pigeon peas, sesame, shepherd's purse, and sorghum.  For urban chicken-keepers with only a little bit of space, you can grow wheatgrass in flats, putting a container in the chicken run once the plants are four inches tall, then taking it back out to regrow once the chickens have grazed the grass down to the soil line.

Herbaceous perennials are much less likely to die at the beaks of over-zealous chickens, so they make a better addition to the chicken garden.  Bloom recommends chicory (although my chickens didn't seem keen on the greenery), birdsfoot trefoil, clover, dandelions, dock, plantain, comfrey, feverfew, and nettles.  She includes catnip in her chicken gardens for medicinal purposes (to repel lice, fleas, and ticks) and she is also fond of "ecoturf", which is a fancy term for a weedy lawn with plenty of clover and other broadleaf plants mixed in.

Larger herbs also have their place in Bloom's garden.  She sings the praises of Jerusalem artichokes since chickens enjoy eating the leaves and will also chow down on the tubers if cooked.  Although chickens won't eat large grasses, Bloom recommends growing them to be cut as winter bedding, which made me wonder if I could use pampas grass to produce my own straw.  What do you think?  Is there another large, perennial grass you'd recommend more?

The next layer in Bloom's garden is the vines.  Fruiting vines are very handy in chicken runs since the edible parts are out of reach --- just be sure to protect the roots and young stems.  Top edible selections include kiwis, grapes, akebia, magnolia vine, peas, squash, and tomatoes.

Shrubs are can stand alone in the chicken garden, or can be turned into hedges.  I'll have to try some of Bloom's chicken-friendly, useful hedging species, which include bamboo, elderberries, hawthorn, hazelnut, holly, rugosa rose, serviceberry, viburnum, and willows.  Standalone shrubs that provide fruits or nuts and handle chickens well include brambles, Darwin and Magellan barberries, gooseberries and currants, Oregon grape, aronia, blueberries, gojiberries, honeyberries, Russian olive (careful, this is invasive), serviceberries, sea buckthorn, and Siberian pea shrub.

Finally, just about any tree is chicken-friendly.  Bloom specifically recommends pairing chickens with fruit or nut trees so that the flock can perform pest control in the orchard.

Although it will take us years to get there, I've been realizing that a forest pasture is a chicken's preferred habitat.  These plant suggestions will help me round out my planting strategy as I change over from traditional pastures to more diverse mixtures of trees, shrubs, and perennial herbs.

We call our chicken waterers "automatic", but the truth is that you do eventually have to fill the buckets, whether that's once a week or once a month.  That's why I was so thrilled to see Glenn Ingram Jr.'s waterer, which used gutters to capture rainwater, creating a truly automatic chicken waterer.  Assuming the pipes don't clog up and there's no drought, Glenn's flock should keep right on drinking no matter what.

Glenn installed a gutter on his coop with a two inch pipe coming down to fill a five gallon bucket.  He recommends upgrading to a three inch pipe if your coop is much larger, but says his setup works great.

Screens on top of the gutters and below the downspout keep the water clean and prevent debris from filling up the bucket waterer.  Glenn mentioned that small particulates still make their way into the water, but the specks of dirt haven't caused a problem during the eight months his waterer has been in operation so far.

Glenn's reservoir stays unfrozen due to sandwiching heat tape between two buckets.  He added an innovative level indicator on the outside of the bucket to keep an eye on water levels without entering the coop.

Glenn wrote:

Stay tuned for more photos next week of Glenn's chicken tractor system.  Thanks for sharing such a well designed and beautifully photographed system, Glenn!