Big Island Chickens

New and Improved Seed Station Or, protecting and taking the stink out of the seeds.   My last post was about the idea of sprouting seeds for our chickens gastronomical pleasure.Since then, I have run into a few problems that I think I have solutions for, we'll see. This is my Sprouting station as built: A standard set of big box store shelf racks set up on the ground near a water source. Seeds soaked in a bucket for 24 hours (convenience, as they need only 8-10 hour soaks) then spread out in an even layer on a 10" x 20" garden tray with pre-punched holes. Problem 1. Water distribution. Dry seeds in one side, flooded on the other. Problem 2.  During the night rats and during the day the birds  are getting to the seeds eating and fouling the trays with husks and their waste. Between the two shifts, I am losing almost half the seeds to these scavengers. This is my Sprouting station as it is today: We added 5 more shelves, a larger water recovery tub for reci

Use Sprouted Grains How much can I expect it to save me?  Wow, that is a good question. In my last post I outlined what I was spending on the chickens to "save" money and I realized I needed to bring the feed bill down even further. I had a few options. Feed scraps only Feed commercial feed only Feed fermented food Feed sprouted grain or a combinations of the above. Wait, before the comments go off on the "Free Range" options, we choose NOT to free range our birds for a number of reasons. Some are based in our laziness in not wanting every morning to be the Easter Hunt / Bill Murray Ground Hog Day debacle on our one acre, we don't want to chase the wild child chickens roosting in the trees, and now that we have turkeys, we know that is where they want to be (that is a story by itself!) and then there are the Mongoose that are invasive here.  Yesterday the girls killed a rat that somehow got in. So rats are not a real threat for the adult birds, but

Our "Teens" started laying The eggs are a bit on the small side for one of them. We got 15 eggs today, including the Peewee egg. We are ramping up our bid for food independence by raising our own chickens for meat and eggs, and for that, we need hens. We are building our laying flock up to 30 adult hens and will maintain that level until we feel a need to change. We obviously can't eat 25-30 eggs a day so the surplus eggs are to being sold to offset the feed cost. We are already selling to a local organic restaurant in a town down the road a piece.   We keep our hens in a coop and run so while they are "Free-Range" according to the US Government, they are confined for many reasons. One of which is that we do not want our chickens to become our neighbors dog's dinner. Their Coop is 64 square feet, with a second internal story, and the run is 20x20, so plenty of room for our initial flock. The small 'Mini-Cooper' on the left is the brooder we

Are there really such things?  Yes, Virginia. Chocolate grows on trees. Willy Wonka's ultimate dream! Rows of trees with bars hanging low for easy picking. 10-12 bars on each branch, 200 or more on each tree- Ready to make into Truffles, bars, creams, sauces and powders. What a dream but alas, all dreams fade in the mornings first light. Oh, Chocolate does grow on trees, but not like this, though it would make pruning less of chore wouldn't it? They grow like this. Medium height tree, with the seeds that chocolate is made from set in thick football shaped pods that grow directly out of the trunks and limbs rather than out on the outer portions of the terminal branches on fruit spurs like most other fruit.  And unlike other fruit, chocolate pods have to go through an intensive set of processing steps to become what we know as Chocolate. Fermenting, drying, classifying, milling, pressing, heating, mixing, tempering and a few I can't remember off t

The Pineapple Bed is in Start from a store bought pineapple I went for mulch yesterday and decided instead of putting it in the new chicken pen area (yes, I know that mulching the expansion should be this post, but...), that I would start a new pineapple bed.  I have been collecting pineapple tops from the ones we and our friends are eating and putting them into our saved and recycled pots. Its been a few months and many have really established roots on them. One or two needed to be planted as their roots are feeling their way out of the drainage holes.  I am a newbie to pineapple growing so most of my info is coming from interweb searches. This is a two to three year investment of time and space since I get the starts free.  This is what our little ones looked like in the front horseshoe last year. They turned a bright yellow and wow, did they small good! I have both the yellow and white varieties of fruit, white being preferred here by the locals. I still can't

Bad News Personal choices can have a far reaching effect on people that we just cannot comprehend. While the following information would be best discussed in a different forum, this very personal news is shared here only to point out that my past few weeks started on a less than stellar note.  Two weeks ago, I got a call from a family member that my sister was in the hospital and would most likely not go home. Turns out that though she has been getting treatment for multiple myeloma, a specific form of leukemia, for 3 years she has known about the disease for 6.  I and my siblings found out this info only last Tuesday. Of course I got on a plane the next day on the first flight out of Hilo and stayed the next week. She stabilized and seemed to be doing well enough that she went home. Most of my other siblings including me (we are 5 strong), started to head home one by one. That was bad news #1 JoAnn met me at the airport and on the way home she mentioned that the turkeys all

Our Second Brood We recently purchased a commercial version of a home incubator. A fancy way of saying a nice styrofoam box to hatch out chickens. We picked this up our local Del's Tractor Supply (no they don't sell tractors.) This one was the top of the line they had in stock. The Farm Innovator's Digital Circulated Air Incubator with Egg Turner.  It has a thermostatically controlled heater, a circulating fan to reduce hot and cool spots, a tray with room for 41 eggs, a motorized egg turner so we wouldn't have to, a lower set of water channels for maintaining the proper humidity, and small weave hardware cloth to keep the chicks out of the channels and the water once they'd hatched. It also has a large viewing window for watching the process, and a control module that keeps track on monitoring/ displaying the temperature, humidity % and the number of days left for incubation. Temp of the heater is preset, but you can change it to whatever you want in 1/2 deg

Something other than Chickens What do you mean,"other than chickens?"  Yeah, there is life other than chickens at our little one acre farm. Today, JoAnn and I got the log moving system perfected. Let me go flashback a bit to explain and get you up to speed on this. One of our good friends, Julia  introduced us to couple that had just gotten their Rainbow Eucalyptus cut down, but the tree guys left it laying in their driveway. Our friends knew I had a chainsaw and thought, how nice it would be if we could go over and cut up the tree and haul it off for them. If you've never seen one, the Rainbow variety of the eucalyptus is stunning while alive, sporting an exterior set of reds, greens, some yellows and a few shade of the above. The inner wood is a rich set of browns, and pale off whites when dry. This photo is not me, nor my friends but it was the best non-"enhanced" picture of the tree I am speaking of. It can grow quite large, 'ours being 30" and