We're growing a little patch of sunflowers this year so that we can experiment with pressing our own oil, and one of our readers mentioned that she likes to tie the sunflower heads in the coop for winter entertainment:

After reading Bethany's comment, I looked up the protein content of sunflower seeds --- 26.3%!  That's three times as much protein by weight as you'd find in corn and more than two thirds as much as you get from soybeans.  Clearly I've been thinking too much inside the box when it comes to growing our own chicken feed.  Perhaps sunflowers are the way to go?  They are certainly easy to raise, and our honeybees love them.

After Mark killed our Plymouth Rocks, I set to work dressing the birds.  We kill so few chickens per year that we pluck by hand rather than springing for a Whiz-bang Chicken Plucker, and our unskilled fingers definitely spend more time removing feathers than on any other part of the dressing process.

I've read that a lot of small-scale chicken-keepers save time by skinning their birds rather than plucking but I usually like to keep the skin on so we can roast our birds to perfection.  Since our Plymouth Rocks were slated to be ground into sausage, though, I figured this was a good chance to try my hand at skinning.  Unfortunately, my first, unskilled attempt took as long as plucking the bird.  Oops.

I've included a drawing from this very useful article in hopes your first skinning operation will go more smoothly than mine did.  But don't fall into the trap of skinning all of your chickens --- honor your birds by eating as much of their body as you can.

One of my top tips from our Short, Sweet, and Self-Sufficient Guide to the Working Chicken is "Don't name your chickens!"  Chickens are so personable and individualized that I find it hard to follow my own advice, but the truth is that a working chicken flock needs constant management.  And "management" is often a euphemism for slaughtering and eating birds that are no longer pulling their weight --- hard to do if those birds have pet names.

How do you know when it's time for a chicken to go in the stew pot?  In my opinion, aggressiveness is the first and most important factor.  If your rooster scares your three year old out of the coop, that rooster has to go.  But on our farm, chickens also have to pull their own weight, so we try not to let even kind hens linger too far past their sell by date.

We keep our layers in three different tractors, each with a specific age and breed of bird, so it's pretty easy to tell who's falling down on the job when production plummets.  Currently, we have three Golden Comets who are probably pushing their fourth birthdays, a pair of two-year-old Golden Comets, and a trio of two-year-old Barred Plymouth Rocks.  I would expect the farm's eggs to be flowing primarily from the young Golden Comets and Plymouth Rocks, but in fact we get most of our eggs from our oldest biddies.  What's up?

The Plymouth Rocks are supposed to be a good multi-purpose chicken, feeding us both eggs and meat, but my record-book shows that our Rocks have been averaging about an egg per bird per week for months.  If I were more on top of our flock, I probably would have eaten the Plymouth Rocks this spring.  As it is, we butchered the three along with some of our Dark Cornish last week, and will be grinding the meat up for potstickers shortly.

The young Golden Comets didn't get the ax this week, but we're not thrilled with their production --- half an egg each per day.  (In contrast, our three old girls are averaging three quarters of an egg each per day.)  I suspect that one of our young Golden Comets is laying thin-shelled eggs that get crushed in the nest, despite the supplemental calcium I tossed in along with their laying feed this month.  Now that we have a spare tractor, we're going to split up the disappointing duo and figure out who's laying and who's not.

We attribute a large part of our four year old Golden Comets' productivity to our homemade chicken waterer, along with their great ability to forage.  I toss cupsful of Japanese Beetles and June Bugs into their tractor each week because I don't trust our other chickens to catch the beetles before they fly away.  Maybe the insect protein keeps them young.  Or maybe our old biddies just lay so well because of the subtle hint Mark pasted on the inside of their nesting compartment?

I received 25 chicks on Tuesday.  I had a water bottle hanging in the brooder for them.  I let them settle for a while, then reached in and began to tap the Aqua Miser waterer.  Several of the chicks went to it and tried.  Most ignored it.  I went outside to finish the work I was doing there.  A hour or so later, I went back in and heard the strangest sound coming from the brooder.  I quietly crept over and peeped in.  The chicks were gathered in a circle around the waterer and taking turns pecking it to get water. It was almost like a machine gun they were doing it so quickly. I have not had to worry about water.

I used the waterer with one little lone chick before the others arrived.  It took it a couple of days to do for itself.  I trained it by taking a Coke bottle top and using it to tap the waterer enough for it to get a drink from the top. By the second day it still took one drink, but without enthusiasm. The third day, it ignored the bottle top completely. This thing really works!

I have discovered a couple of things that you might want to post on your web site. 

• If you leave the water in the container too long it will get algae in it and that will stop up the waterer. Fresh water needs to be added/changed often enough to keep that from happening.  How often will depend on the weather, including humidity, and the water. 
• I was wanting to use something smaller than a 5-gallon bucket, but larger than the one gallon plastic bottle I was using.  I was in Lowes the other day, and as I was standing in line to check out, I noticed the water cooler water bottles stacked in a rack by the front door.  I went over to look and discovered that there was a 3 1/2 gallon bottle for $5-$6.  I bought it, took it home and put two waterers in the bottom.  I used a coat hanger to put through the holes I drilled to hang it by. A hint for this kind of bottle:  The type of water cooler the bottle is designed for, has a small post in the center.  The paper seal is peeled off the bottle top and when the bottle is turned over on to the water cooler, the little post in the cooler punches the center of the plastic cover back up into the bottle where it stays until it is taken for a refill.  The plug has an edge around it it keep it from coming out, however, I used a small pocket screwdriver and pried one edge in enough to get hold of it with a pair of needle nose pliers.  I was able to put the plug out.  I now use it to cover the hole. The lip keeps it in place.  The worst part of using this bottle is that a funnel has to be used to replenish the water. To me, having a clear plastic water bottle so I can see how much is in it and how it looks is worth using the funnel.

Thought you like to hear this.

Walt       (AKA Santa)
Troy, TN

P.S. I like them so much, I just ordered three more waterers.

Mark "met" Douglas Lain through their mutual interest in the physics of consciousness and the disclosure movement.  Douglas seems to be the type of multi-talented person we both enjoy --- he puts together a podcast, has a novel coming out from Tor Books in 2011, and is working on a self help book about urban foraging.

It just so happens that Douglas is also a talented sound editor, and he agreed to put together a short ad for the Avian Aqua Miser.  Download the ad and see for yourself that it's quite easy to tell a kid is adorable without looking into his face.

We butchered another third of our cockerels last week, and I decided to crunch the numbers on these 16 week old Dark Cornish.  You might remember that at 12 weeks old, our cockerels weighed an average of 2.25 pounds per dressed carcass, which came out to a cost of $2.51 per pound.  Our 16 week old birds weighed 3 pounds apiece, and the new weight cost us $4.33 per pound in feed.  Clearly, letting our cockerels get older makes the feed to meat ratio worse, not better.

The 16 week old birds were also considerably spunkier.  I thought it was cute the first time I saw the cockerels roosting on the coop roof, but now I'm wondering how we're going to capture the last 9 birds before our last butchering day.  Even worse, when Mark went into the coop to catch his first chicken on our kill day, the chickens were so big and vigorous that one accidentally gave him a big scratch across his face.

I had been considering keeping a breeding pair of Dark Cornish to experiment with next year, but I've changed my mind.  I've decided we don't need --- or want --- a predator resistant breed, and would instead prefer something sedate and docile.  So the last 9 broilers are slated for slaughter this week, and next year's experiment is simmering on the back burner.

Jamie from Alaska sent me a photo of his new bucket waterer in action.  He wrote:

Meanwhile, Louisa pulled out a stopwatch, then emailed to say:

David wrote in too:

Thanks for reporting in, everybody!  If you haven't taken the plunge yet, our homemade chicken waterer kits are extremely affordable, and --- as David says --- your chickens will love them even more than you do.

In the past, I've used pre-made Avian Aqua Misers for all of our chickens.  The small size is very handy in our equally small tractors, adding so little weight that they don't impact my ability to pull the tractors to a new patch of ground.

But with 17 cockerels left, plus our growing chick and its Mama hen, watering the forest pasture was becoming a chore.  When we decided to go out of town for a long weekend, I begged Mark to make me a bucket waterer to hydrate the flock.

I was surprised to discover that our chickens adored their new bucket waterer and started ignoring the smaller waterers.  My best guess is that the large mass of water in the five gallon bucket stays much cooler, which is quite a treat given recent hot temperatures.  The experience has solidified my belief that bucket waterers are the way to go in large coop and run situations where weight isn't an issue.

After less than a month in the larger forest pasture paddock, our cockerels have scratched the place up drastically.  I'm actually a bit shocked, and am revising my opinion of their foraging abilities.  It took our flock (larger then) two months to reach this stage in the much smaller paddock.  What's going on?

I've got a few hypotheses, as always.  Maybe Dark Cornish really come into their own as they reach sexual maturity.  Or could it be they watched the Mama hen and her chick foraging and followed suit?  Or maybe the vastly increased foraging is an optical illusion, brought on by the recent lack of rain, which has slowed down the weed growth and made it easier for the chickens to devastate their pasture.

While I was in the pasture conducting my photo shoot, I also stumbled across this chicken, who looks quite different from the others.  Could she be a pullet rather than a cockerel?  She seems to have nearly no comb and her speckled feathers are quite distinct from her brothers'.  Suddenly I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma.  Should I save a hen and rooster to keep the breed going and give them another try next year, perhaps using the Mama hen as a foraging trainer?  Or stick to my guns and eat the lot?  Decisions, decisions!

News stories about the backyard chicken craze sweeping the nation are nothing new, but the one in Food Safety News caught my eye.  Dan Flynn wrote:

The Center for Disease Control lists a bunch of tips for preventing the spread of disease from chickens to humans, but the advice  can be summed up in seven words: Don't get chicken poop in your mouth.  If your daily chicken care smells or looks nasty, chances are you're putting yourself at risk.

Although we didn't set out to clean up the act of backyard chicken keepers, lately I've been realizing that the Avian Aqua Miser serves that goal.  One more reason to use chicken tractors or forest pastures and to delete that conventional waterer ASAP.