Blog » December 2007

Our good friend Kath asked a few chicken questions over here on this post about the plucker, and that reminded me:  Hey!  I wanted to write about the chickens!  So here we are, talking about chickens. 

1. How hard is it to raise chickens?
   For us, raising chickens was pretty much no work at all.  Because we already have ducks, we had a place for the chickens to live (and keep them safe at night), and it was already part of our daily routine to go out each morning and let everyone out for the day, fill up clean water, refill food, etc.  I would guess that it added 5 minutes a day (so, 20 minutes instead of 15) to add 17 chickens to our flock.  Obviously, if you didn't already have livestock, it would change your life a bit more. 

   In general, though, once you have a safe house for them, the rest is pretty easy.  All those chicken books make it sound like chickens are these delicate little flowers, apt to catch colds and faint at the drop of a hat.  Well, no.  They're big funny (relatively) hardy birds.  Don't let a fox get them, and they'll be fine.  (If anyone wants to know more about poultry housing, just ask!  I could go on all day.)

2. Cost Breakdown 
   We were keeping pretty close track of our chicken expenses for a while, but then we stopped caring.  So this is a guess on costs, but I think it's fairly accurate.   The chicks themselves (15 + shipping -- they sent us 2 extra, so we started with 17 birds) were $40, food averaged about $10/week, and bedding (shavings/straw/etc) totaled maybe $15.   We slaughtered the first batch at around 12 weeks (strictly speaking, these birds were full-grown at 9-10 weeks).  So if we add in a few extra dollars for intangibles (running a heat lamp, etc), let's say that's $200 total.   That's $12.50 / chicken.
3. How does that compare to other happy tasty chickens?
   A) In our area, an H.T.Chicken runs about $15.  BUT!  That's $15 for a 3.5lb bird.  Our smallest hens dressed out at 5lbs, and the roosters (we ended up with 12 roosters of the 16 birds) are 6-7lbs.  So price-per-pound is almost half of a store-bought H.T.Chicken.  That price even makes our own pretty competitive with industrially-raised chickens, though obviously that's not really the point.  The size is actually kind of comical -- we cooked two thighs-n-legs last night, and they weighed in at 1 full pound each.  That's alot of food.
   
   B) These birds taste good.  Really good.  I've never had a chicken that tastes like this, honestly.  Some people say they taste more "chickeny", and they do.  It's almost like eating turkey.  In fact, the only bird I've had that compares is the turkey we had for Thanksgiving, which was a heritage breed raised by one of our dinner guests.
4. Did any birds get sick?
   You might notice that my bird numbers vary between 16 and 17, depending on what time period I'm talking about.  We had one bird get sick in some vague "medicine isn't helping" kind of way.  We killed it.  It was awful, because we hadn't, at that point, learned how to slaughter properly.  Let's just say:  try to avoid that. 

   In general, I wouldn't have any problems giving medicine to birds you want to eat -- Terramycin, which is a farm-brand-name for oxytetracycline, is available at most feed stores, and has info right on the package about how long it stays in the body of different types of animals.  It's not very long -- something like a 3 day waiting period for poultry.  Treating a sick chicken is not at all the same thing as giving all your birds preventative blanket-antibiotics.  Terramycin totally saved Guillermo's (one of the Cayuga ducks) life after she was attacked by a bobcat, so I have a fondness for the stuff.  Also, it is mad cheap.  Like $4 for a year's supply.

5. Did you give them organic feed?
   Our birds got plain old feed.  We have two really good feed mills nearby -- sometimes the birds got Poulin Grains, but mostly we gave them Morrison Feed.  The Morrisons have a family-run feed mill about 15 miles from us, and their feed is really beautiful -- full of big chunks of grain and it smells really sweet, like good fresh flour.  The birds like it.  The Morrisons also sell organic feed (all of Pete & Gerry's hens -- also a close neighbor -- eat it), but we figured that: Hey, we know that they're eating good food, and they're roaming around the yard eating bugs and grass and stuff.  Organic wasn't as important to us as the proverbial 'happy'.
6. What about the part where you have to kill them?
   Well, yeah.  That part is not great.  Honestly, it was not as bad as I (a surburb-raised gal) thought it would be.  I'm pretty squeamish around blood, and was frankly expecting to spend most of the day lying down with the vapors.  But the very first thing you do after killing the bird* is to remove its feathers, and then it stops looking like a animal-chicken and looks instead like a meat-chicken.  Then you take out the guts and stuff, which is icky but not awful.  If you've ever butchered (as in:  cut up into pieces) a chicken, it's not that different.  The lungs are crazy looking.

   * I did not help with this part.  Aaron and our friend Clarke (who has been raising animals since he was a kid on his family's farm) did that part.  It's gross, but the birds really do die right away.  And then they really do flap around for a while even though they have no head.  It's odd.

   If you plan on raising chickens for meat, definitely find someone who is a good slaughterer to teach you the ropes (so to speak).  It makes all the difference.  I honestly don't know how you'd go about slaughter in a non-rural area...  There's a bunch of blood, and a whole bucket ("the gut bucket") of chicken insides that I carted out into the woods for disposal, and the plucker throws feathers everywhere.  It's a messy business.

   ** Special Note!  I am perhaps the only person you have ever heard of who made the chicken stock from The French Laundry Cookbook with the optional chicken feet!  I did not, however, cut my pounds of onions and carrots into mirepoix, because that's loony.  Who do you think you are, Thomas Keller?  Honestly.  It's STOCK. 
   P.S. Tommy K doesn't tell you this, but if you're starting from actual-live-chicken for this stock, you need to peel the feet first.  FYI.

So that's chickens.  We'll definitely raise them again.  We're excited about trying different breeds, and also establishing some breeding stock -- it seems silly to buy chicks every year, when chickens can make more chickens with relative ease.

Raising chickens is pretty cool, and I think it's more do-able for most people than they realize.  If you have any questions or comments, ask away!

Hey, remember a few weeks ago, we went to Weeks State Park?  Well, after getting 16" of snow last weekend, we thought we'd hike up to the top of Mt Prospect.  We had been waiting for a clear day to do this walk, because we had read that there were nice views from the top.  We decided to go up the (summer-only, unplowed) road to the Weeks Estate on the peak of Mt Prospect.

To use an internet-ism:  OMG.  That was the longest walk of my life.  Have you ever snowshoed through 16" of fresh powder?  It's like swimming in molasses, except cold.  The road is only 1.6 miles long, but it took us 2.5 absolutely exhausting hours to get to the top.  (Coming back down only took 45 minutes!)

We did see many great views, including these mouse tracks (each wide part is about 2 inches) :

There's nothing like trying to take pictures of tracks in the snow to remind you that you A) don't know anything about photography and B) have a really cheapo digital camera.   

The auto road winds around the mountain (apparently the old carriage road is steeper, but only .7 miles from bottom to top), which is great for views but hard on the legs.  Just below the peak, we spent about 4 years crossing a parking lot (wide open and full of snow drifts -- at least 22" deep), then finally reached the Weeks Estate.  John Weeks was a Senator, Secretary of War, and a whole bunch of other things.  He's credited with basically creating the National Forest system, and this estate was his vacation home.   There are tours available in the summer, and, nice for us, there's a generous second-floor porch (largely protected from snow) with picnic tables.  We set up, ate some hot soup, trail mix, and gazed out at the view. 

Sadly, the fire tower is also closed (and locked!  What do they think we are, ruffians?) in the winter. It's massive, and would be cool to climb up.  Ironically, if you came here in the summer, the leaves on all the trees would block most of the views. 

Going down was speedy-fast, and we even got in some good slides down a few of the steeper bits.   Then we went home and collapsed into couch-slugs, and did not get up again until morning.

Let this serve as notice that we have completed a second wiring project, one that you will not see any pictures of.  "Oh man," you say, "why no pictures?".  Well, my friends, today we re-wired a Schweiss Chicken Plucker.  A friend loaned us his, which he bought off eBay a few months ago.  It works great -- though who knows who the crazy person was who came up with the idea of using rubber fingers in a chicken plucker -- but the motor is old and the wiring was plain-old scary.  As in, exposed wired and bits falling off, and no switch, so you have to plug-and-unplug every time (in the snow, covered with chicken bits).  As a thank-you to the person we borrowed it from, we re-wired it, added a switch, etc.

Let this also serve as notice that we are down to 5 chickens; the other 11 are in the freezers in bags.  The last 5 will be dispatched (some people use the term "harvested", but that sounds a little too soylent green for me) as soon as they run out of food.  The birds are huge -- 7 pounds on average -- and totally delicious. 

The good folks over at Inhabitat wrote the other day about the Eastgate shopping center in Harare, Zimbabwe.  Keen observers of webmeadow may know that I lived in Zimbabwe in 1998, and spent many an hour in that very building!

Eastgate is a neat place because, as the article points out, it was designed to mimic the ventilation system of a termite mound, and as such stays at a pleasant temperature all year round without any external heating or cooling systems.  I remember someone telling me about this bio-mimicry design while I lived in Harare, but never learned any details about it at the time.

The post does not point out (though I will!) that Eastgate also serves as a very good meeting spot if you are gathering friends from various suburbs of Harare, as it's pretty much equidistant from all the major combi (mini-bus) terminals.  

Also, there was an internet cafe on the third floor, and a super-tasty deli on the second.  And, a joy for all us visiting Americans:  Mateo's, a great Italian restaurant, in the primo ground floor location.  They had fantastic garlic bread.

The termite-mound-inspired ventilation is sort of an urban and arid equivalent to passive solar design -- not every building has (or needs) great solar exposure, but there are still ways to use boring ol' physics and crawly ol' termites to make your building more comfortable and efficient.

Woo woo woo, snow!  At least 10" here on our lawn, and even more when you go up to one of the notches.  We  headed to Crawford Notch yesterday, to the Gibbs Falls trail.  Actually, the Gibbs Falls trail is more accurately titled "the Crawford Path, but you turn around after you get to the Falls". 

The snow was deep (18" or so in the more open areas, and 12"-14" in the woods), and we were the very first people on the trail.  Lookie here:

Man oh man, it was so pretty.  Hard walking, because breaking trail is tough in deep snow, but totally worth it!  Granted, when we finally got to Gibbs Falls, it was completely buried and we couldn't see a thing.  We could hear some water running under there, but the snow hid all the ice falls.  So we sat down on a rock (HELLO, that was cold), drank some nice hot tea, and headed back.

We didn't see any animals (and hardly any tracks, even), but there are tons of tracks all over our yard this morning, so the animals must be coming to terms with all this snowfall.  Me, too. 

It's December, and you know what that means?  'Tis the season to get LED light strings and great timer-plugs.   I love timer-plugs, and this time of year there are tons available -- ones that you can program, ones with "I swear I'm not out of town, so don't break in and steal stuff" randomizing schemes, ones that turn on automatically at dusk, and more.

However, there was one kind of timer switch that I couldn't find at all -- the kind where you say to it, "turn on now, then turn off in an hour."   I've been wanting this kind of timer for a while, mostly for the rechargable things in my life, like cordless drills and other batteries.  It's also great for things like iPods and cell phones -- unless the battery is totally dead, an hour or so of charging each day is more than enough to keep them full.

I couldn't find the kind of timer I wanted, so I decided to make one myself. 

Materials and Tools: 

• One power strip (or extension cord if you only want one timed outlet)
• One surface-mount plug box
• Two clamp connectors (sized to match your box)
• One timer switch (meant to be wired directly into your house, to control things like bathroom fans)
• Two of those plastic twisty wire connectors

You can get all this at Ye Olde Home Depot (though if, like us, you've been dabbling in electrical work, you probably have a bunch of it hanging around).  You'll also need a wire cutter/stripper and a screwdriver. 

How To:

1. Cut the cord on the power strip, then separate out the three wires on each side and strip the last inch or so.  Then remember that the timer switch actually has a strip gauge on it, and cut those little copper ends to match the gauge.  Look, that little pile of copper bits looks just like Christmas!  Try not to embed too many little copper guys in your thumb, because that smarts. 
   

    

2. Screw the clamp connectors into either end of your box, then insert the cord.  Use those little twisty things (do they have names?  Oh well.)  to connect the green wires to each other, and the black wires to each other.  Look, you're going to maintain the grounding wire connection*!  How safety-minded of us!
   

   

   *Truth be told, as far as we can tell, the grounding in our house plugs doesn't actually ever connect to, you know, the ground.  I think our house was built by monkeys. Drunk monkeys.
    

3. The white wires attach to the top-and-bottom of the timer switch.  For our switch, we inserted them into little side holes and then screwed in the connection screws on top of them.  Then stuff all of that stuff into the box and screw the timer into the box itself. 
   

   

4. Put the timer cover on (ours screwed on with a little tiny nut, then the dial itself slides onto the post), tighten all the screws on the clamp connectors, and voila!  A timed power strip!  We tested ours with LED lights, because I love those little guys.  (Who knows why you would ever want to put LED lights on a timer.  They only use 1 watt!  Leave them up (and on) all year! Bother the neighbors!)
   

   

This is one of the easiest wiring projects we've ever done (even though one of us* ended up needing a band-aid), thanks to the generous box size (easy to stuff wires into) and the nice flexible wires (easy to stuff).   It was fast and easy, and I'm looking forward to it helping us save power from now on!

* Not me.