Brewers Grain

Free Lunch for Chickens
A few weeks back a friend offered me the barley that was left over from his beer making. I know brewers grains have a good amount of protein but less carbohydrates than before the process. I had done a bit of research about the amount that can be fed to chickens, but I thought I would just try free feeding it alongside their layer pellet and see what happened. I received a 5 gallon pail of the leftover barley. My friend said he had started with about 11 lbs. of barley. Of course it was much heavier than that because what is left over is wet.

My plan was to see how much they ate, whether it affected their egg laying and how long the wet brewers grains would keep to see how practical and useful this free source of feed would be.

I free fed layer pellets and I added a 2nd feeder and free fed the barley. 18 chickens consumed the entire pail of barley in 7 days. I saw no change in the amount of eggs. They really liked the barley and ate more of it than their layer pellets. I often found the barley feeder empty. I know animals often eat more of a feed that is novel, but they did seem to like it quite a bit.

When I first got the barley it smelled really good. I was sorry I carried all into the chicken coop before saving some to try cooking with myself. After 7 days the barley did not smell as good as initially but it did not smell bad yet. It seems that it would not have kept too much longer without spoiling though. Temperatures were cool but above freezing. I would have liked to tried drying some for longer storage, but they ate too quickly and the weather was not good for drying anyway.

I really need to do a lot more experimenting and I eventually want to determine if it would be worth getting in larger quantities from commercial brewers. if I can not dry it easily then it may not be worth searching for larger quantities for a small flock of 18, but in home brew quantities of 5 gallon pails from a nearby neighbor it is definitely valuable and cost effective and the chickens really loved it and ate it before it spoiled.

I do wonder if it may be a bit short of carbs in winter, but I did think of providing some extra corn with it if I start feeding it for longer periods.

I'm also thinking about how I can add it into my meat birds feed. I won't be raising more meat birds until warmer weather so those experiments will have to wait.

Novella Carpenter is Coming to Boston

I really had fun reading Novella Carpenter's new book Farm City. It is probably not a big surprise that I enjoyed it and found it so interesting. After all, someone who writes a blog called Urban Agrarian is kind of already sold on the idea of urban farming and has probably already slaughtered a chickens or two. In addition to my love of her subject matter, I think that Carpenter is also a talented writer.

Novella Carpenter is coming to Boston MA. That's my neck of the woods (er um pavement) and I'm really looking forward to meeting her. I think she makes those of us who have raised and slaughtered our own chickens feel a little less strange, or perhaps it just lets us know there are more kindred spirits in the world than we imagined.

Here is the link for the Slow Food Boston event where you can meet her and here is a link to her farm in Oakland. Hope to see you all at Slow Food Boston. I'll be the one with the live chickens for show and tell!

Grilled Chicken Hearts

This fall I raised some broiler chickens again with my community garden cooperative broiler group and I also raised some at home in my backyard. Not only does this mean lots of chicken for my freezer for the winter, but it means I have ALL the parts of the chickens including giblets and feet. After raising and caring for an animal, I don't want any parts of my chickens go to waste. That just wouldn't seem like the right thing to do. That means finding tasty ways to prepare parts I don't often eat, such as the hearts and gizzards.

Recently, I thought about ways to use the hearts. I've seen them used in a giblet gravy. I've also had giblets in stuffing and in rice. However, I was thinking of having them be a little more front and center so I decided to try grilling them.

I started with some store-bought Thai Peanut Sauce. Just buy your favorite brand or make your own.

The chicken hearts were from my garden raised chickens

I cut them each heart lengthwise in two the long way. There were two reasons for this. First, to have more area for the sauce and second so they didn't look so much like hearts and scare people off from trying them.

I then added some of the peanut sauce to the bag , put the hearts back in the fridge and left it to marinate for a good hour. After that, it was simple, just skewer and grill. Add a bit more peanut sauce for the table if you want.

They were really fantastic. Much better than I would have had guessed. I've been really craving them since I made them and may have to actually go buy some more chicken hearts becausee mine are all gone now. I am starting to eye the package of frozen gizzards in the freezer. I'm not sure if want to go with the sure thing with the peanut sauce or try some thing new for the gizzards.

If you don't raise your own chickens and want to try this and you happen live in the Boston area then try Pete and Jens Backyard Birds. They raise fantastic tasting chickens the right way. Hopefully they will still have a supply of chicken hearts left.

If you live outside of the Boston area try localharvest.org to find a farmer that raises their chickens on pasture.

My Backyard Meat Chickens 2009

Community Garden Meat Chickens 2009

Community Garden Broilers

For the last two years I've raised broiler chickens in my community garden plot. This year I'm doing it as a cooperative project with 3 other people. We're growing 20 Cornish Cross together in the community garden. They are 7 weeks old and when I weighed one today. It weighed 7.25 lbs. We won't be processing them for 2 more weeks. Too bad because they are plenty big enough right now. We may have to change the slaughter date.

Bees Building Comb

I got 2 hives last year and 3 this year for a total of five. In one of my new hives the bees are building their comb in the wrong place. It's all my fault. I was short an inner cover and they built up up up. This is going to take a while to clean up and probably neither the bees or I will be totally happy with the process.

Back to blogging

Well... After a year an a half of no blogging, I'm hopefully starting again. There are many reasons blog posts can dwindle, but for me it was a good reason. After the birth of my new grandson, I was helping my daughter and son-in-law out with day-care for Nicholas about 20 hours a week while they were both at work. It was lots of fun, very fulfilling and exhausting! He is quite attached to me from all our time together and is now a fun-loving toddler of almost 18 months and the apple of my eye. Hopefully he will soon start to "help" me in the garden and tend the chickens.

Cold and Frost

Lately it's been cold. Cold enough that my car window has frost on the inside, as does my house and many other places that have breathing beings inside creating moisture on very cold windows. Frost seems to form in many patterns. Here is the feathery type as seen below on my bedroom window in the morning.
There is also a swirly type as seen on this chicken coop door. It's not my chicken coop door, but I wish it were, because I think it is a beautiful door with character. As always click on the photos if you want to enlarge them.

Nicholas

Nicholas, one day old

I'm now a grandmother. My daughter and son-in-law are now parents and my mother is now a great-grandmother. Meet Nicholas, born December 19th, 8 pounds 14 ounces, a health baby boy

Nicholas, home with Mom by the Christmas tree

hatching chicks

About three weeks ago I got a new incubator. I'm planning on doing some hatching in the spring. The incubator, a hova-bator 1588, holds 42 eggs, but I thought I'd give it a little test run with 8 eggs. Because I have no rooster there would be no point in using eggs from my hens, so I headed over to Codman farm where I volunteer, and collected the 8 eggs you see below. They are all shapes, sizes and colors and I think they are a photogenic bunch of eggs. I discovered that one was cracked a bit at the pointy end. All of them went into the incubator anyway.
Three weeks later 6 of them hatched, including the cracked one. Below you can see a chick emerging from an egg. This is actually the egg that was cracked. I really didn't think it would make it, because early on it appeared that the egg leaked a very tiny bit. I can only assume that the leak got plugged very soon and things progressed. I had heard of repairing cracked eggs with wax or clear nail polish, but I decided to just let it be and see what happened.
Below you can see the 6 chicks that hatched. The yellow one in the back corner is the one from the cracked egg. The other egg that I wondered about was the very small egg. It did hatch a small chick. I think it may be a bantam and is kind of cute with feathered legs.
Below is a close-up of the cracked egg after I took it out to candle. It was then that I discovered that it was developing so back in it went. After the hatch was over,I checked the two eggs that didn't hatch. One was not fertile and one had stopped developing after about 8 days. I'm quite happy with the new incubator and look forward to hatching more in the spring.

First Snow

It's a damp raw slushy day out, just right to stay home and bake for Thanksgiving

Today is the first snow of the season. It's the slushy kind. not the nice fluffy stuff and won't add up to much. It's predicted to be in the 50s for the next couple of days so I guess it won't even last the week. Here it is not really unusual for it to snow on November 20th. What is unusual this year, is that the leaves just don't seem to want to fall off the trees. You can see a Norway maple, and on the far left some mulberry leaves still hanging on. There are also crab apple and beech leaves still on trees in my yard. The tree in the background, an ash, always drops its leaves early and is the only one bare now. It looks like I'll be raking leaves in December when it will probably a colder than I would prefer for this task.

A Blue Egg

The type of chickens that lay blue eggs are called Easter Eggers. They are Araucana mixes and can lay blue, green, brown or white or a blend of those colors depending on the genetics. The gene for blue eggs is actually dominant. It is a seperate gene from the ones that control white or brown egg color. So the egg can have both blue and brown color. That can make them look greenish or kakhi.

I was wondering if this hen was ever going to start laying. She finally did start at 7 months and I'm really happy with the color of her eggs. The photo shows it next to a brown egg my Plymouth Barred rock layed for comparison.

Dust Bathing Chickens and Dog?

Chickens like to take dust baths such as here , but last week one of my dogs Kahlil decided to join some of the broiler chickens in a dust bath. Luckily I had my camera, because it was an odd thing to see a dog rolling around with chickens.

dahlias with bees

This year someone gave me some of their extra dahlia tubers. I ended up with showy dinner plate sized yellow ones, spiky burgundy ones and my favorite one, a salmon with petals that curl. I'm now hooked on dahlias and will save and replant the tubers next year. I took these photos a couple of weeks ago before the frost turned the plants black.

I am happy to see that the honey bees like dahlias too. After taking this photo and seeing it on the computer, I noticed that the bee on the left has ragged wings. I'm guessing it's an older bee. It seemed a little sad. I doubt it will survive the winter. To see the wings more clearly, click on the photo.

click on photo to enlarge

chicken tractor in the garden

This year I decided to try raising something a little different in my community garden plot, Cornish Cross broiler chickens. I've raised these before but not in my community garden plot. I got permission to do this and am calling it a pilot project. Hopefully next year other gardeners will join in also.
I started out with 13 female chicks, I brooded them in my garage for about 3 weeks. One suddenly died early on leaving an even dozen. At about 3 weeks I moved them into a 4 x 8 foot tractor in my garden in an area where the winter squash had been harvested. I butchered 3 of them at 26 days to see how they would be as Cornish game hens. They were about 1.5 lbs each and were quite good with a raspberry jam and balsamic vinegar glaze. The other 9 will be butchered shortly.

I often let the chickens out of the tractor while I'm in the garden or volunteering on the adjacent farm. Here you can see Kahlil acting as a good hawk deterrent while the chickens are busy helping eating grass and weeds and helping the soil fertility.

Frost in the Garden

Yesterday morning when I went to my garden in Lincoln, Massachusetts, I discovered the first light frost of the season. The dahlia leaves were black and the pepper leaves were droopy. I decided to pick the rest of the peppers. With hot dry weather this year I've had a great year for sweet red peppers. I'm not a big fan of green peppers, but they are unlikely to turn red before rotting so I'll blanch and freeze them and use them in stir frys over the winter. This last pepper harvest was 10.5 lbs.

Although the dahlia leaves were black, the flowers haven't turned to mush yet.

A few miles to the east at my home in Belmont, Massachusetts we have not had a frost yet.

Note. This post sets a record for time between posts. Where was I? Nowhere, right here. I have been doing lots of work on the house and I did quit my job in May. I guess I just got out of the blogging habit.

Cheep Housing

What if you have a few chicks that are are ready to go outside and you haven't had time to build that chicken mansion you've been designing? If you have an old plastic dog crate you are in luck. Get some welded wire, a wire cutter and a pair of pliers and create a quick and dirty version of the fancy igloo type chicken coop. I did this one in 45 minutes. The door is on the end away from the dog crate. Make the door large enough so the sides can fold around the pen for a little extra security and make sure the cage part if high enough for the dog crate to open and close.

Turn the dog crate upside down so rain won't get in and if it's still cool out duct-tape the side vents in the dog crate to let in less ventilation. Wire the cage part to the dog crate so predators can't sneek in. Voila, cheap, cheep temporary housing

" hinge"

"latch"

With four 8 week old chicks nestled in the corner and a black sex-link hen supervising

Microclimate

A microclimate is a local area where the climate differs from the surrounding area. This area on the south south east side of my eastern Massachusetts house forms a small microclimate. Due to the exposure, the cement foundation, the bricks of the house and it's proximity to a heated home as well as a westerly wind block it is much warmer than the rest of my yard. The daffodils just 20 feet away only have leaves 4 inches tall and have no buds yet.

The weather here today feels more like Christmas than Easter, but because of this micro climate I get to have some daffodils on Easter! I'm hoping to overwinter an artichoke in the warmest area in the corner next winter.

12 Day Old Baby Chicks

It always amazes me how quickly baby chicks grow and feather out. At 13 days old, they seem to have tripled in size and are sprouting wing and tail feathers. They also easily fly up onto a low perch.

An Easter Egger chick hams it up for the camera while her fellow Buff Orpingtons and Sliver Laced Wyandottes eat dinner.

New Baby Chicks

The baby chicks have arrived. They made it all the way from Ohio to Waltham Massachusetts in one day. The regional facility in Waltham called me to come get them there because my local post office was already closed for the day. They've done this before and it really speeds the chicks along. They're in the new brooder in the cellar for now, but will soon be moved out to the brooder house (aka garage) depending on weather and how soon they start to smell.

Baby chicks - araucanas, buff orpingtons, gold laces wyandottes, and barred rocks




Araucana chick

Amaryllis Time

I enjoy taking pictures of flowers but about the only thing that blooms now are my indoor amaryillis bulbs that I save from year to year. The red one is the last one that will bloom for the season. The pink one was impressive and is even interesting (to me) in its decay. Now I'll need to wait for the crocus and daffodil bulbs which were poking up, but are under snow once again. Last year I couldn't wait and needed to visit Wellesley College greenhouses.