Big Island Chickens

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 ...

Meal Worm Farm Or, How to build a suitable place to raise Chicken Candy Our hens go nuts over a handful of the shells and dead  dry moltings of meal worms. We buy them from Del's Tractor Supply in Hilo in a tetrapac package for, well, too much for dead chicken treats. Still, the girls love them so JoAnn buys them. The package says, among other nutrients, they contain 50% protein. I then looked up live meal worms and they say they have 50% protein. Hmmm... When I looked them up on line, this line of treats actually says the dead ones have more protein than live Meal worms! Hmmm again. I didn't have time to get into that search, but I will concede that they have a lot of protein. Buying them like this is pricey since they love them so much, so I started looking for a way to bring this cost down to a more reasonable number.  I found some live ones on Ebay and Amazon and chose the ones on Amazon. Bought them (or I thought I did) and told JoAnn I wanted to raise them...

Eggs! Well, Egg! Lots happening but one of the girls gave us our first egg! We got them, our hens, just 11 days ago and after all the reading, we expected to have to wait a bit longer. What, with all the stress of re-location, wing clipping, internment inside the coop for a week neither JoAnn nor I thought it would happen for another week or so at least.  But here it is, I half expected a mis-shapen thing but then remembered these were proven layers, granted, this statement may have been an overzealous sales pitch from the old owner, but it is egg shaped and beautiful. It is also small. I haven't researched the size parameters of eggs yet, but when compared to the ones in the carton in our fridge, it is small.  JoAnn and I both heard the hens futzing around this morning, but when we checked on them no eggs. This afternoon about one-ish we again heard the cackling of a hen but thought nothing of it. At 2:30 I went out to paint part of the pen where I had welded i...

Nest Box and More Too many spaces, not enough chickens! Chalk it up to being a newbie chicken coop designer, or wanting to have the opportunity to expand the coop for more birds, or my eagerness, but I made a space of 24" x 72" to be split into two levels of six boxes per level. With the conventional chicken Math (explanation of the phenomenon of Chicken Math is coming in a future post) of 3-4 birds per nest I would have room for 48 chickens! However, this does not  jive with CMath tenet #4 which is 4 square feet per bird, or a total of 16 birds for the floor space I have right now.  I then went back to the drawing board and came up with this new plan. You can see in the photo I have 5 boxes with storage above and vertical storage next to them. Hinged lids and doors create the access to each of the three areas. Each of the nest boxes have a plastic tote for cleaning and routine sterilization. With the outer door access daily egg collection and replacement of the beddin...

It Begins JoAnn and I retired to Hawaii, dream of a lifetime, right? Retirement in paradise. Well, the life in paradise is expensive. One of the higher costs here is at the grocery store. The high prices of meat has gotten us to rethink how we want to go about providing for ourselves here. Among the other choices we've made, we want to raise chickens. So the first order of business is to get a working egg and meat production coop up and running. We want to have both egg and meat provided from our future flock, and figuring out how many birds of each to have has proven to be vexing. I'll cover the thinking process in subsequent posts, as chicken math takes on a life of it's own. Those that know what I mean will be smiling, those that don't are invited to take the trip with us on our adventure to find out just what 'Chicken Math' is and how it corrupts. I'll be devoting an entire post just for that subject so I'll skip to the second step.  So the fi...