My neighbor leaned over the fence at me. “Where’s your brown duck? I haven’t seen her in the last few days.” “Uh…she’s around,” I said. “Are you sure? I haven’t seen her lately and I’ve really looked.” “Well, I locked her up last night and let her out this morning, so, she’s somewhere.” But then…
Homestead Animals
Aggressive Duck Sex (Or, Why I Drink Whiskey.)
Starting about a month ago our drake (that’s the boy duck), regrew his penis in expectation of spectacular spring-time twitterpation. Oh, you didn’t know ducks lose their penis every year and regrow them? Yeah, duck-keeping is an education like that. Go ahead and watch this. I’ll wait. Okay, are you back? Holy crap, am I…
Chicken Rotation: Optimizing For Year-Round Laying From The Backyard Flock
Disclaimer: if you think of your chickens as pets, if you let them live out their full, natural lives regardless of economics of laying productivity vs. feed, then this may not be the post for you. While there is nothing graphic in this post, it assumes the reader is comfortable with the concept of slaughtering livestock. This…
Sand Litter Bed In The Chicken Coop: An Experiment
We’ve been managing our chicken coop through a hybrid sand and deep litter system. This hybrid system has worked extremely well in our particular coop. Briefly, how that system works is, the chickens roost over the sand, which acts like kitty litter to dry out their overnight poop, and in the morning the poop is raked to the…
Can You Seal A Pond With Clay Kitty Litter?
I wanted to build the ducks a pond. In fact, I started on the pond months before we eventually adopted ducks. Now, just so we are clear, our pond isn’t really a pond…it’s more like a very large puddle. It’s about 15 feet by 8 feet and holds about 1000 gallons of water. But for…
Meet The Ducks!
Here’s the list of homestead things we were hoping to accomplish in 2014: Install Solar Panels. Plant Suburban Food Forest Build Pond – working on it. Get Ducks. Get Bees – too late; pushed to 2015. The solar panels are churning out a ton of power (nearly 40 kWh on a lovely sunny day), the trees,…
How To Feed Baby Chicks
So you’ve got some new little chicks-congrats! Now you have to keep them alive. First job, warmth. Check. Second job, water. Check. Third job, food. How To Feed Your Chicks Ok, chick food. Here’s where it get’s interesting. Layer, starter, grower? Organic, or not? Medicated, or not? What the heck? Do you just buy the first bag with a…
Three Steps To Clean, Poop-Free Eggs
If you are a chicken-keeping gardener like me, you know that the second-best thing hens give you is eggs. The first best thing they give you is their awesome nutrient rich poop! As grateful as I am for both the poop and the eggs, I prefer them to be gifted separately. Typically if the eggs…
Will A Broody Hen Adopt Chicks?
Our Buff Orpington Goldie was broody. Really broody. I’ve had hens go broody before and they always seem to just get over it within about a week. Because I don’t rely on eggs for my income and the broodiness I’ve seen has been short-lived, I’ve never bothered to “break” a broody hen with a broody…
Best Chicken Breeds for Families with Kids
Nearly every backyard urban chicken keeper I know has kids. Part of that is probably my demographic (mid-thirties suburban mom in yoga pants – I’m a walking cliche) but I think part of it is that parents my age want their kids to see where food comes from in a way that maybe we didn’t,…
Forced Molt: Starving Hens For Profit
Lets’s talk about molting. Anyone who has ever kept chickens knows about the molt, that egg-production pause where hens shed old feathers and turn into tiny, ugly dinosaurs for a few weeks. During the molt, a natural response to reduced daylight, egg laying stops. Chicken’s can’t throw energy into making new feathers and eggs at the same…
{Giveaway} Scratch and Peck Organic Chicken Feed
When I first got hens, I didn’t understand how critical they would become to the entire system of my productive home. I just had that fresh-egg fantasy. You know the one: pastel-hued eggs in a Pinterest-worthy little wire basket. They would be laid by happy, fluffy hens and I would have omelets that were as…