The Ice Storm

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The ice storm today shut the city down. It's an inside chore day. I'll have to wait till the weather clears to keep going on the garden:

The chickens are laying very well now that the 15% sprouted lentil ration has kicked in. It usually takes about a week before we see the results of a dietary change. Our 11 starter hens were laying an average of 3 to 3.5 eggs a day over the past month. The last 4 days they've laid 26 eggs! That's 6.5 per day. We got 8 today, a record for the new flock:

But they have eaten 2 voles over the last week, and that may be causing the spike. They've also been getting a little fish oil as well, as we're trying eating high-DHA fish twice a week, like herring, salmon, and mackerel, following the research of Weston Price on worldwide indigenous and traditional whole foods diets.

The bucket-sprouting we resorted to to pull the chickens off fodder till we're back on track has done surprisingly well. 2 pounds of grain are filling out into 7 pounds of sprouts quite rapidly, with good root growth. If we can get some green shoots going with a day in the light it may be something to continue with the birds, as we've got limited shelf space, and once the does go into milk they'll eat far more fodder.
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The Goat House

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16 degrees last night and tonight. With the cold wind, it feels like single digits. It never got above freezing today. But it was a record day for eggs, 6 from 11 hens. Which looking at small-scale chicken economics, this is a $2 profit in one day. Not bad for birds . . .

It's great they're increasing laying as the 15% lentil ration kicks in. We've got to fill a customer order for 2 dozen quick.

Fodder at the moment is a crisis. As we expanded production with the does going in to their 3rd trimester, we ran out of trays. We had to skip 2 days till we could get out to Walmart for more trays [fodder does best for us with a very specific tray]. And with fodder, it's like steering a huge ship. Subtle changes hit slowly and cumulatively over time till we started to get short. And once you get short, it can be a downward spiral from there, because the feed you're putting out is under-mature and of less weight so it takes more of it. A fully mature biscuit of fodder on one of our large trays weighs 10lbs. The stage we're feeding it at now it's 3.5lbs. Rachel's stressed, and feels like she's bleeding grain . . . but we keep soaking double batch after double batch and traying everything out till we get caught up. We've had to pull the birds off fodder temporarily, and put them on bucket-sprouted grains and lentils, till we get through the crisis.

Our seedlings are sprouting up, especially the lettuce and onions. The Brassicas are about half up. We'll direct sow the mache on the 1st of February.

I'm now working on framing out the 6th garden bed, bed #9. It's a long labor-intensive project using whatever scraps I can find . . . even some charred pieces from the old burned down double-wide.

So far I've whacked 3 voles with a shovel and fed them to the chickens. They're the only animals I've ever killed. We find them hiding in the garden in the morning under the blankets we're using to protect the last plants they've left us. Of course they've probably been pigging out all night. And whacking down with the shovel takes out a few plants. We've been doing a lot of garden cleanup and brush removal to cut down on vole habitat. I've mowed the area around the garden very short. Once we can find well-used pathways, we'll put out traps.

We've spent much of the long evenings working on the Holdout Farm website. The 'Classes' and 'History' pages are now done.

Rachel and I got a bad cold over the holidays, and mine turned into pink eye. We used fresh juice from our aloe vera plant and that cleared it up rapidly. Rachel and I wonder if there are some immunity benefits from our raw goat milk, because we didn't get sick all year drinking it and now that the does are dry we're out and not feeling as well as we did. Though giving up caffeine has helped.

I built the above addition on the old chicken coop over the summer, so the goats will have more space to run in out of the rain. We now call it the 'Goat House', though it resides in the pasture we still call the 'Coop Pasture'.

It's a 12'x12' addition, and modeled on photos of traditional goat houses on open ranges. It's got a gutter on the back, so we can harvest rain, and is deeply bedded with old tall grass mowed down in the pasture. Since the goats are either in their stalls or out in the wooded 'Marsh Pasture', they don't use it much. But all the does are about to kid soon, and this is where we'll raise the kids. It's a bit of a hassle walking all the way up there and back for bottle-feeding, but it's a nice warm secure shelter away from the older does. We'll probably sell all the kids from the Samancha triplets as they're first fresheners and not proven milkers. But the kids from our mature Lamanchas, who are all good milkers, may be candidates for raising up. We'll have to see how big the demand for our fodder-fed raw goat milk is. So far we've got our existing customer base, and a great deal of local attention from getting the word out on the internet. We may not be able to fill demand this year, and will have to purchase additional does.
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The New Flock

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We've had endless rain the last few days with more rain to come. Temperatures have gone from a balmy 60/50's to 30's day and night. Graywater is backed up, the garden work has stopped, we're scrounging for dry wood, and the goats have been stuck in their stalls. But we have started the first seedlings for our spring garden - bunching onions, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and lettuce - in our little indoor nursery.

We're down to 12 chickens and the ducks are gone. Going into the winter we've decided to cull all animals that are non-productive to reduce feed costs. We put up a free ad for the 3 ducks, the 2 big roosters, and our 2 older hens. The stipulation was that somebody had to take them all - a guy came out the very night we put the ad up and took them away.  He's got a lot of land and a large pond, and he called us later to tell us the ducks never left the pond - they even sleep on the bank. He likes our barn and may hire me to build one for himself [simply walling-in his existing hay barn with board and batten].

The older hens, roosters and ducks were not only non-productive, they ate a disproportionate amount of the feed we put out twice a day - the shier starter hens were for the most part scared off, even with 3 separate feeding areas. The 2 mixed-breed duck hens laid great when in season, but we hadn't seen an egg from them for several months [regardless of how often the drake would go in to the duck nest box and call to them to get in and lay]. One of the Araucana pullets we got at the Co-op turned out to be a beautiful rooster - so we no longer needed the huge Cuckoo-Maran roosters. And our older hens that had come up with us from the beginning, Rosy and Claudia, were nearly out of eggs and on an extended moult. Since as vegetarians we don't eat the birds, the only solution was to give them away. They would at most sell for $5 a piece . . . but then we'd have to drag out the process selling them over time. We needed a clean break.

For us, from a purely economic standpoint, a hen's only major value is in her eggs. Sold for meat or production, she may bring in 5 bucks [10 at most if she's an exotic breed]. Since our eggs are worth 50 cents a piece, if she lays 200 eggs a year, that's $100 a year, paid out gradually, egg by egg. It's not her concern whether we personally consume or sell her eggs - just to produce them. Hens are most productive the first 2 years, as production typically decreases 20% a year. So we'll probably swap out birds every 2 years to a good home. Ideally one of our Araucana hens will go broody and we'll be able to raise our own chicks here for the next batch. Even if we ate an aging hen the value of her meat would still be only about $5. So losing a good layer to predation can be a loss of potential hundreds, not simply replacable with any old $5 bird.

Once the flock was thinned, we quickly went from 1 egg a day to 3 to 4 as the starter hens got more food. And we were able to reduce the total daily amount of feed from 6 lbs down to 4. This is 1/3 lb per bird per day - the recommended winter ration. Once winter's over and there's more at pasture we can go down to 1/4 lb per bird per day - a total of 3 lbs a day. Using fodder and sprouted lentils our feed cost for the birds is 20 cents/lb. Just 2 eggs a day generously covers their feed bill, as our pastured fodder-fed eggs sell for $6 a dozen.

Our fodder's made of mostly wheat, with some rye, oats, sunflower seeds and winter peas, all grown up into a forage grass. The chickens do best with it when the roots have developed a fine biscuit, and the grains are just pushing up new green tips. Anything beyond that and they tend to be a little wasteful [the ducks however would clean this up]. So while we increase the food volume 4 to 5 times from dry grain to full fodder for the goats, because the chickens eat it at an intermediate stage the volume is only doubled. This is where we get 20 cents per pound. We also add a tablespoon of powdered kelp per day to the chickens' feed. I used to break up their fodder biscuits before I put them out into their food bins, but found they do just as well tearing off fodder from the full biscuits to not bother with this anymore.

Here and there they get some table scraps, and if I'm working in the garden I'll inevitably find some fat Japanese beetle grubs to throw them.

We've always wanted to get the chickens on an all-natural diet, for the health of the birds and the quality of the eggs. We ran through many diets before we discovered fodder. However there's no question that protein content has a huge impact on egg production. This is something that gives us trouble through the winter [we have a light on a timer in the coop so they get 14 hours of light per day to keep them laying], as most of the bugs are gone and the pasture's down. We use the Pearson Square to calculate what ratio of feeds to get a specific level of protein - which for laying hens is considered to be 16% optimally. We put our fodder at 14.5% . . . though that's only the best approximation we can come up with after much research. If we use a minimal amount of a very high protein supplement it wouldn't take much to bring it up to 16%. But the problem with using say fish meal or blood meal is now you've lost control of the health of the diet and of the eggs. Meal worms are great but need indoor real estate and require time and care - and we only really need them a few months out of the year.  We've used sprouted lentils so far as the birds' protein additive through the winter. We'd need to use a whole pound and a third according to the Square to hit 16%, but some research has shown chickens should only be given 15% maximum legumes out of their total diet - about half of what we need to hit 16% protein. So we've opted for doing that 15% of total feed per day as sprouted lentils [which the birds eat well], and the other 85% fodder. If we get a few less eggs it isn't the end of the world - as long as we get some. Though we have to buy lentils at the grocery store at $1/lb [much higher than normal feed costs], it expands so much through sprouting that it's not much more than the cost of the fodder itself. And it's a small part of the overall diet.

Our new starter flock is half Araucana and half Sexlink. We purchased them all as day-olds at the local co-op. We ran fodder and sprouted lentils with kelp through a manual meat grinder, then set it out in the sun to dry till it got crumbly. As a protein treat they occasionally got some scrambled eggs [which they loved]. They were handled as much as possible. The Araucanas are still a little skittish, but the Sexlinks are extremely friendly and excellent layers. They mob me when I go into the coop to feed them, trying to leap up into the bucket. The Sexlinks lay brown speckled eggs, and the 2 Araucanas so far laying have one a large blue oval egg, and the other a smaller pale pink.

We still have not lost a single bird to predation since we put up the 7 strand electric fence around their pasture. It has an 18" skirt of orange plastic mesh along the bottom to dissuade the chickens from ducking out under the bottom line. Ducks respect electric wire very well . . . but chickens not so much. However they're easily fooled with the plastic mesh.

We're going to purchase a batch of day-old Welsh Harlequin ducks in the spring. They're a production strain with the capacity to lay from 200-300 eggs a year. They also go broody and can raise their own. We love ducks - they're entertaining, great foragers, easy to herd, not as hard on high-intensive areas [like tearing mulch apart around perennials the way chickens do], lay huge wonderfully-flavored eggs, and make a great high-nitrogen fertilizer in their duck pool/stock tank which is drained, cleaned and filled once a week. And though ducks require 1/3 lb of feed per day all year . . . they do very well on fodder at all stages, and their pastured eggs sell for $10 a dozen.
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The Winter Garden

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Our big winter project is framing out the garden beds with old boards. I started using board and batten scrap left over from siding the barn, and am now tearing down a neighbor's old chicken coop for boards. Most are usable, by doubling up the 1x's - those that aren't will become firewood. Considering how poorly our hated Homelite chainsaw is currently functioning, any additional firewood that falls from the sky is worth burning.

3 out of 9 beds are done so far.  They're terraced in sections due to the slope to the west. Between them are the nice concrete pathways from the old double-wide foundation. The beds aren't so much raised as given a form to hold them in place. Before we'd constantly had good fertile soil washing off the mounded beds into the pathways. And once summer hit the plants had gotten so huge and sprawling the garden turned into a jungle we could barely wade through.

I'd read the best way to put a garden to bed for winter is to give it a bath, something to eat, something to drink, and a blanket. This means cleaning out all the old plant debris to compost, adding a couple of bins of finished compost - for the blanket, either moldy hay from the floor of the barn, or shredded composting leaves we'd had around a fruit tree that was used for growing potatoes [which the voles mostly ate]. And for water, graywater from the sink and rinsewater from the fodder. This will go out in rotation to the fallow beds through the winter. In the same analogy, the beds need plenty of water to digest their food. Unfortunately the Dishmate soap with only one ingredient we've been using isn't all-natural like we'd thought after some research. So we'll switch to Dr. Bronner's.

We'll be adding some true raised beds to the north and east side of the garden - probably a series of 4x8's or 4x10's with 3' pathways between them. These beds will be made with 2x12 's, so a foot high, and filled with topsoil removed from where the cabin porch will go, and compost which we've accumulated massive amounts of with the humanure, the poultry, the goats, kitchen waste, weeds, and grass clippings. We fill a 5'x5' bin every 60 days.

With me working full-time this summer we got way behind in the garden and never had the chance to get up our row tunnels. It didn't make much of a difference though as our vole population has exploded. They can wipe out an entire garden bed in 2 nights. Late winter is the time to really go after them, when there's not much food - we'll try a combination of traps, bait, buckets of water, clear out as much mulch and debris as possible, and we're hoping giving some structure to the garden with all the raised beds will help. The common phrase I see over and over again in Permaculture is "productive mess". Unfortunately that's exactly the environment in which voles thrive. And they're now going after the trunks of our young fruit trees. Hopefully we can get it under control by spring.

On the flipside, we've got a forecast of lovely warm weather for the next week - we're already sick of the cold, and the constant freezing nights we have to cover the garden for and thaw animal water for are a hassle. Longer days too . . . we can get more done.

We have a lot of free time in the long winter evenings and have been reading Dr. Weston Price's 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration'. He's a dentist that traveled the world in the 1930's and studied the teeth of indigenous and isolated rural people before and after they were exposed to modern foods. To sum it up . . . people eating a traditional whole food diet had nearly perfect health and teeth, and once exposed to modern foods such as white flour and sugar, they developed rampant dental caries and malformed dental arches, as well as crowded and irregular teeth - and other ailments such as arthritis and tuberculosis took over. It's a great read. Here's a link. We've so far cut out alcohol, caffeine, replaced white sugar with demerara and minimized it, and will soon get a hybrid manual/electric grain mill to start milling our own flour. The organic artisan-grown tobacco we smoke will probably be the last and hardest thing for us to give up.
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