The New Coop

So here's a project that's taken up far more of our spring time than I would have imagined.  It's our spankin' new chicken coop.  As you can see, it's an A-frame and a rather large one.  The seed ideas for the design were mostly mine, but in the course of constructing it with the help of our WWOOF volunteer, design became very much a collaborative effort.

Our previous coop-and-pen system was our first attempt at providing mobile housing for our laying hens.  It served reasonably well for four years, but we built in plenty of flaws because we didn't really know what we were doing.  We had to build chicken housing before we'd ever kept chickens.  Some of these flaws were remediable, and we fixed what we could; others not so much.  My two biggest complaints were that the coop wasn't easy to clean out and that both the coop and the pen were quite heavy, making it hard for me to move them by myself sometimes.  A lesser issue was that we had no way of providing a dust bath for our hens in a mobile system.  So they tore into our grass to cool themselves down in summer, thus leaving significant divots in the lawn.  I didn't care so much about the aesthetics, but rolling a heavy coop and pen around was hard enough to begin with.  When the wheels fell into some of these divots, it became really difficult.

So the new design had to eliminate the difficulty of cleaning, shed excessive weight, and offer dustbathing possibilities for the birds.  I also wanted easier access to the interior, and room for at least two nest boxes.  We started with one nesting box for four hens, which was reasonable, especially since the box could hold two hens at a time if need be.  But over the years the number of hens we've had at one time has varied considerably, with nine being the upper limit.  This resulted in the occasional queue for the nesting box, and the occasional egg laid outside the nest.

Here you can see the elevated dust box in the back.  Since it's raised up this way it doesn't take away any area of the lawn.  This also shows the articulated door, which folds down so I can access the feeder and waterer, or throw treats to the girls without giving them too much temptation to escape.  When I need access to the inside of the pen, I can open the entire door and get inside without much crouching or discomfort.

The nesting boxes are situated towards the peak of the new coop.  The girls don't seem to have any aversion to laying their eggs so far off the ground.  Since they have to make three jumps from the ground to the nests, their feet seem to be cleaner.  The eggs I've been getting have been mostly pristine.

Here are a couple of pictures of the wheels and the slight advantage we gained by not placing them at the very back edge of the bottom frame.  You'll notice that they're on a lever bar that can be propped into place when it's time to move the coop.  The rest of the time the frame rests almost in contact with the ground.  By moving the wheel slightly towards the front of the coop, the weight of small portion of the coop behind the wheel acts as a counter balance to the rest of the weight.  This makes it easier for me to move.  I don't quite have the technical vocabulary to describe this, but the idea was described in an excellent article about the Chinese wheelbarrow in the Energy Bulletin a short while ago.  The article will fill you in on the principle, if you're interested.

Here you can see the lever bar positioned to raise the coop off the ground to make it easier to move.  We're still tinkering with this a bit since our smallest hen scooted right under the coop while I was moving it one morning.  We have a few ideas on how we might fine tune the system.

Here's a shot taken after the main construction was done that shows most elements of the interior.  We have diagonal bracing in a few areas to strengthen the wooden framing.  After painting was finished, the whole thing was sheathed in chicken wire.  Then an old billboard was used to cover the sides/roof and most areas of the gable ends.

I've already been asked, "Why purple?"  My standard response is, "Why not?"  My tendency to splash bright colors around my garden is already on record.  It helps curb the impulse to paint something loud on the walls of our home.  Deep purple was one color not yet represented in the garden.  It all looked so pretty until it was time to put that used billboard on as roofing material.  I'm hoping that I can find an artistic soul who might paint something attractive on it.  After all, it looks like nothing so much as a blank canvas to me, just waiting to be filled up with something whimsical or chicken-related.

I will say this for the ugly billboard.  It is very sturdy stuff, designed to be out in all weathers.  The white backing of the advertisement should help keep the coop from heating up too much in full summer sun.  Oh, and it was free, by the way.  The billboard companies give them away for nothing once they're taken down.  I know a man who used this material in lieu of roof liner when he built his own home.  I expect the billboard to hold up extremely well, and thus protect this coop from the elements for several years at least.

The only thing missing from our new coop is a clever name.  My husband calls it the "land yacht."  I sometimes refer to it as the "purple menace."  Neither moniker seems to really capture the mixture of charm and clunkiness of our new coop.  So what say you, readers?  Got a clever name for this behemoth?  I have no prizes to give away and make this a contest, but I'd love a snazzy label for our newest piece of homestead infrastructure.  All suggestions will be gratefully received and considered.

PASA Conference Coming Up

Here's my annual publicity for PASA's Farming for the Future Conference.  I've been attending this conference for the last four years, and have always come away excited, energized, and having learned many useful things applicable to my homesteading endeavor.  The conference is held at the beginning of February each year in State College, Pennsylvania.  If you're interested in the sorts of topics I cover here on the blog and reasonably local to PA, I suggest you consider attending.

In the coming year I'll have the honor to be presenting with the man who first inspired me to start keeping a tiny flock of backyard chickens at the PASA conference four years ago.  Harvey Ussery will be leading an all-day pre-conference track on Integrated Homesteading.  I'll be playing backup.  Harvey is more than capable of presenting a knock-out presentation all by himself, as I have seen more than once.  He's concise, well-spoken, and his talks are carefully honed.  He does not waste the audience's time.  My hope as a novice speaker is to not look incompetent by comparison.  Frankly, I'd rather be learning than teaching, but it's hard to say no to an invitation from someone I admire so much.

From now until December 31st, you can receive an early bird registration discount, and additional family members receive discounted registration as well.  There are many ways to reduce the cost of conference registration if you want to attend but need to watch your pennies; everything from scholarships, to facilitated carpooling, to a WorkShare program.  So check it out even if you think it's not in the budget.  The next conference is going to be an even better deal than in previous years, because PASA has decided to pack an extra workshop slot into the two-day conference.  So I'll be able to attend six 80-minute talks instead of five.  I look forward to all the other wonderful extras of the conference as well: picking up free shipping coupons from Johnny's, checking out the free seed-swap table, the local cheese tasting, free live music in the evenings, a free seed packet or two from various seed vendors, the great quotation posters, a wonderful fund-raising auction with so many lovely and useful items, and all the unpredictable things I'll learn from formal presentations and conversations with other attendees.

I'd love to see some of you there, whether at the Integrated Homesteading track or the main conference.  If you plan to attend, please drop me a note.  If you can't attend, I'll most likely to a summary post after the conference, detailing some of the highlights and things I learned.

Tiller Hens and a Reconsidered Routine

Our hens moulted about five or six weeks ago, and are slowly regrowing their feathers.  This is a calorically intensive process, and so our egg supply has fallen off a cliff.  On a good day we get two eggs from four hens; on the not so good days, one or none.  It doesn't help that we slaughtered the two Cuckoo Marans hens that were the more consistent egg producers with the last of our broilers at the end of September.  The Cuckoos were younger birds, but my experience suggests that their egg laying becomes pretty sporadic after the first year of laying.  Aside from that, the Cuckoos were much flightier than our Red Stars, who I'd made a point to handle regularly during their winter sojourn on deep litter bedding in our shed.  While the Red Stars aren't exactly thrilled about me picking them up, they tolerate it pretty well instead of panicking as the Cuckoos did.  I suspect it's all down to conditioning and handling rather than reflective of innate disposition of two different breeds.  The breeder we got the Cuckoos from didn't habituate them to being handled.

The reason this is all relevant is that I needed the hens to do some weeding and tilling for me this fall.  I knew the Cuckoo Marans would never be easily moved from one spot to another.  Getting the hens in and out of the poultry schooner requires twice daily handling, since the schooner must be positioned over each garden bed and maneuvered carefully around beds that still have plants on them.  The hens go back into their mobile coop each night, leaving me free to reposition the empty schooner.  Dealing with hens that were terrified of me wasn't on the agenda.  So the Cuckoos met their end with the last of our broilers, and went on to a useful afterlife of chicken stock, schmaltz, and a hearty dish of chicken and knefles, which I may tell you about sometime if I find the time.

The remaining hens, our Red Stars, are now earning their keep by clearing a large weed infested area for me.  This is the bed we referred to as the three sisters, where we meant to grow the three sisters crops this year: winter squash, beans, and corn (maize).  That came to nothing when labor was spread too thin and the bed never made it close enough to the top of the list to get weeded.  What the squash vine borers didn't kill, or the birds pluck out of the ground, or the long summer dry spell didn't kill outright, was overwhelmed by weeds of every stripe.  It was a jungle in there.  With the help of some garden caging that is easy to move around every day or so, the hens have weeded and lightly tilled this area into submission, while adding their own manure and mixing it into the soil.  Which is great; saves me a lot of time and prepares the area for some heavy-duty, remedial lasagna mulching.  It also gives me a chance to see the fanciful nesting box in action.  I banged this thing together this spring in anticipation of hosting a broody hen with some eggs.  The hen never materialized, but the nesting box was ready to go when I needed it for this project.  If they aren't earning their keep by giving us eggs, at least the hens are contributing labor and fertility in the form of their manure.

Weeded and yet-to-be-weeded areas are clearly distinguishable

 The hens eagerly hone in on each new slice of territory when I move the caging every other day or so.  That must mean that they've picked over the ground they've had access to pretty well.  In order to encourage them to scratch and till the ground I've adopted a feeding strategy gleaned from Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener, which I reviewed a while back.  Namely, I don't feed the hens in the morning while they're on tilling duty.  Their hunger early in the day motivates them to scratch down the weeds to look for grubs, worms, and other choice bits in the three sisters area.  I add plenty of garden cullings and whatever kitchen scraps we have.  Then late in the afternoon I provide them with some of their purchased grain feed.  That way they don't go to bed hungry and they have something to look forward to most of the day.

The afternoon feeding doesn't work with the mobile coop and pen we've been using most of the time since we got chickens four years ago.  In that system, the hens go into the coop in the evening and are locked in until I let them out the next morning.  I always try to let them out close to sunrise so that they're not literally cooped up and unhappy.  The time before I release them each morning is the only time during the day that I have access to the pen without them in it.  So I always provided their food and water first thing in the morning.  I like the late afternoon feeding not only because it gives me a more leisurely cup of tea in the morning, (though it's grand, let me tell you) but also because I think it saves money on feed.  The hens eat less when they've scrounged for themselves most of the day, even though they're currently regrowing their feathers.  This was precisely Deppe's reasoning for the afternoon feeding time - to conserve money when times are tough.  Seeing how well this works is encouraging me to consider ways of making this standard operating procedure for the hens next year.  I have to think on it some more over the winter, but we'll likely need to build new housing for them next spring anyway.  So it'll be a good opportunity to change things up.

Book Review: The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

I've got a bit of a problem today.  This is a review of a book that's worthy of all the gushing I can muster up.  But there's also a credibility issue.  I want my readers to trust that my opinion can't be bought, and that what you read here is my unbiased viewpoint.  To that end I don't respond to offers of products in exchange for reviews. (The implicit expectation of course being, that the reviews would be positive.)  While I have Amazon links to books and a few other products, these are for things I have paid for and been very pleased with, and am thus happy to recommend to others.  I also link a couple of books at a time in the sidebar without endorsement, simply as books I'm reading. Few of those ever end up on my Bookshelf list, which I'm pretty choosy about.

So with that out of the way I have to disclose that I'm not wholly disinterested in the book I'm recommending today, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.  The author, Harvey Ussery, is the person I consider my chicken guru.  Hearing his presentation at the PASA conference four and a half years ago is what convinced me to get started with a backyard flock.  His enthusiasm for not only keeping chickens for meat or eggs, but using them in an integrated way around the homestead spoke deeply to me.  A link to his non-blog website has been on my sidebar since Living The Frugal Life got started.  I had the chance to see him at another small conference early last year.  Speaking with me after his presentation, he mentioned that he had just secured a book contract for a title on small-scale poultry.  I offered to review his book when it came out, fairly confident that I would be able to give it a glowing recommendation, which I can.  He gave me his card and after that I began an intermittent email correspondence with him on poultry topics.  What I didn't expect was for him to invite me to give feedback on the manuscript before it was even submitted to his editor.  I was more than flattered to be asked and I happily devoured his first draft, offering what few comments and suggestions occurred to me.

Well, I had to wait for the finished copy to come out to see the pictures.  The end result is fabulous; well worth the wait.  Blows every other title I've seen on backyard chickens right out of the water.  Harvey's view is both broader and deeper than the typical small-scale poultry guide.  He considers the behaviors of various poultry species and how those behaviors are best incorporated to the benefit of the homestead and the homesteader.  Harvey's approach to poultry husbandry is to build health into the flock from the ground up.  Or rather, from below the surface of the soil on up.  He believes, as I do, that healthy soils are the basis for all sustaining and sustainable food production.  To that end, he manages his flocks so that they are able to express their full range of natural behaviors, and so they are always benefiting, rather than damaging, the soils they are on from day to day and month to month.  He also has a discernible frugal streak, which obviously appeals to me.  Both his frugality and his desire to provide healthy natural feeds to his livestock have led him to look for ways to feed poultry from the homestead's own resources.  This is right up my alley, and a topic rarely addressed by other writers.

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock will certainly help those who are poultry beginners. Though all aspects of keeping poultry are covered comprehensively in this book, it's not the equivalent of trying to drink from a firehose for anyone who has yet to start their first flock.  If you are an aspiring backyard chicken keeper, this book contains everything you need to get started, plus a great deal more.  This is really a book pitched to those who already have some experience with one or two poultry species, who want to take things to the next level or beyond.  I'm not speaking here in terms of flock size, but of integration - specifically, fully utilizing the labor potential of poultry, reducing the need for purchased feeds, recognizing and using the fertilizing value of manure, and choosing species, breeds and management practices to best suit a particular bit of earth.  Harvey is a tireless observer of the natural world, as well as a keen experimenter.  What he has to share has been learned through decades of trial and error and empirical observation of his livestock.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this title to anyone who wants to keep chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, or guinea hens on a small scale.  Whether you want birds for meat or eggs, whether you want to start with pullets or hatch out your own chicks, whether you are on a small suburban lot or have a few acres in the country, whether you want to slaughter your own birds or are comfortable with running an old age home for hens past their productive years, this book should be on your bookshelf.  The Small-Scale Poultry Flock makes the other two backyard poultry books I own look rather limited and simplistic.

As it happens, when Harvey's book was printed and bound I received one complimentary copy from him, and another from his publisher, Chelsea Green.  Much as I love the book, I don't require two copies.  So I'll be hosting a giveaway of my extra copy next week sometime.  Stay tuned for the giveaway, plus some other news on this topic.

Slaughter Day

We sent our two largest broilers to ice camp on Sunday.  We didn't have any spare clean hands to hold a camera once we got started.  So I don't have any footage or even still pictures of the slaughtering process itself.  We're still in the market for someone to hold a camera while our hands are occupied.  But I did take some pictures just before we got under way.  I thought I'd share these and also some of the videos I've turned to for help figuring it out on my own.

Obviously, if this subject is going to upset you, stop reading now.  I think most readers here will be comfortable with this topic, and I think the methods we use are pretty humane.  But this is a post about killing animals for food.  If you're categorically opposed to such things, here's your notice.  

Our setup

A place to work - This is our solar cooking station equipped with a cutting board, knives, latex gloves, and containers to receive various parts of the chickens.  We save or use just about every part of the chicken except the intestines, gall bladder, oil gland and the head.  What doesn't come into the kitchen gets used or buried somewhere in the garden.

Slip knotted cords - these will hold each bird by the feet.  We have sometimes used a killing cone in the past, which takes care of the movement problem.  With the birds hanging freely like this you need two people to stabilize the chicken; one to hold the wings against the body, and another to hold the head as they bleed out.  The wings should be held closed because otherwise the bird can flap so hard that it bruises its own wings.  In a commercial operation the resulting discoloration would make the bird unsalable.  Stabilizing the head ensures that the movements of the bird (either voluntary or involuntary) don't send blood flying everywhere.  Holding the head at an angle away from the cut also speeds the bleeding out, thus hastening death and limiting the suffering of the animal.

Wheelbarrow with mulch - We situate this directly under the cords or the killing cone that holds the bird.  It will collect the blood from the chickens and be used around our fruit trees.  This saves on cleanup and preserves the value of the blood as a fertilizer.  For the number of birds we slaughter at any one time, even a small amount of mulch will suffice to soak up the blood; there just isn't that much of it.

Knives - A well-sharpened boning knife, paring knife and a cleaver.  The boning knife is used both for cutting the chicken's jugular and for the small amount of cutting needed during evisceration.  The paring knife is sometimes not used at all; it's there as a just in case alternative to the boning knife.  The cleaver is useful for decapitation and for cutting through the neck, which I've always had trouble doing with a boning knife.  If you don't have a cleaver, a good strong pair of kitchen shears might work for the neck.  Whichever knife is used for the killing cut needs to be very sharp in order to spare the bird as much suffering as possible, and working with a sharp knife during evisceration always makes things much easier.  We devote time to getting the knives ready the day before slaughter.  But as you'll see in the Joel Salatin video below, there's really very little cutting necessary in the whole process.

Scalding water - A large pot is required.  I use a water bath canning pot.  The water should be roughly 145-150F/63-66C.  I  heat the water above that temperature before hauling it outside, so that it's just right when we've gotten through the first few steps in the slaughtering process.  When slaughtering more than a couple of birds, I leave a kettle simmering inside so that we can top off the pot with hot water, keeping the water at the right temperature for all the birds.  The birds displace a lot of water, so the pot should not be completely full.  When it's chilly outside I set the pot on cardboard so that heat is conducted away a little more slowly.

DIY Chicken plucker - This works well for the very small number of birds we process at any one time.  It probably wouldn't be workable for anyone slaughtering more than a dozen birds at once.  A day ahead of time we make sure to have the batteries for the drill charged up.  When we're processing only one or two birds at a time, we sometimes don't even bother with the plucker as it's quick and easy enough to pluck a bird by hand if you get the scalding right.  We try to pluck the feathers into a garden bed that is ready for lasagna mulching.  Feathers are high in nitrogen and break down quite slowly.  So they'll feed the soil very gradually while adding a bit of structure for soil microorganisms.  Strangely enough, yellow jackets will steal the small feathers, for the protein content I suppose, if you don't cover them with mulch right away.  An older post of mine details the DIY plucker.

By the way, if you like your chicken skinless, you can skip the plucking entirely and just peel the skin off the entire bird.  This isn't a great idea if you plan to roast the bird whole, since the skin keeps the bird from drying out.  But if your birds are destined for other preparation methods, and you don't want the fat from the skin, you can save some time and effort.

Chilling bath - We use a cooler, filled with all the ice we have on hand and water from the garden hose.  This brings the temperature of the eviscerated bird down very quickly, and can hold 4-5 broilers, but really only one turkey at a time.  It's wiped down with a bleach solution before and after use.

Bags, scale, permanent marker, freezer - Once the birds are nicely chilled, I drain them as well as possible, weigh them, bag them up, and write the weight of the bird on the bag.  We let our broilers live a little longer and get a little bigger than many farmers so I use 2-gallon freezer bags, which I'll sanitize and re-use just for our own chickens.  I wouldn't like to count on our larger birds fitting into the 1-gallon bags.  The two birds we slaughtered on Sunday averaged just over 6 pounds (2.7 kg).  I put the giblets from all birds into one container, to be used when it's time to make gravy for the Thanksgiving turkey.  (We grill our turkey so we don't get pan drippings to work with.)  Then the birds and giblets all go off to ice camp. 


Instruction

I've learned all I know about slaughtering and eviscerating chickens by watching videos and doing it myself.  I've never come across a text description or even still photos that have helped me as much as video has.  Here's a sampling of videos that show the process in detail.  These first two videos don't show the exact method I use, and there's a lot of extra material covered, but they're definitely useful for amateurs and novices who don't have expert help on hand.


Respectful chicken slaughter - Part 1


I think it's an especially good tip to locate the chicken's jugular by feeling for the jaw.  I've never been able to precisely identify where a chicken's ears are, so that point of reference hasn't been useful to me.  The jaw can be easily felt.  You may not make a perfect cut the first time you do it.  When you get it right, you'll know by the steady stream of blood that the cut produces.  Practice makes perfect, though the obvious difficulty is that homesteaders work at such a small scale that getting enough practice on a regular basis isn't easy.  That's why I watch critical parts of these videos a few times over the day before slaughter.  


Respectful chicken slaughter - Part 2


Good tips in this video on how to use legs and other parts of the chicken.

Joel Salatin - chicken evisceration



If you're contemplating your first poultry slaughter yourself, you might want to study other homesteaders' take on the process.  Paula recently posted about her own chicken slaughter.  And Kristeva had a post quite a while back with good pictures.  If these videos and posts don't answer your chicken slaughtering and processing questions, I'd be happy to try despite my meagre experience.  On the other hand, if you have any tips that you'd like to share, please sound off in the comments.

Harvest Meal: Chicken in a Pot

I never posted about the source of the main course of this harvest meal.  It was a runty broiler that my farming friend gave me when it was half-size to the rest of her broilers, which were ready for slaughter.  Something was definitely off about this Cornish Cross bird, because it took me more than two additional months to raise it to a size that looked sort of ready to harvest.  I finally decided on the slaughter date (Sunday) only because our own broiler chicks really needed the extra room provided in the poultry schooner, which is still in service.

Monday night's method of preparation...well, that was an experiment for which I had to work up my nerve.  "Experiment" only in the sense of trying something entirely new with a precious bit of homegrown meat.  I'm usually loathe to branch out too far with high value ingredients, and no food is so scarce as meat raised on less than an acre.  But this Chicken in a Pot came from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table cookbook which I found on the new arrivals shelf at the library.  Greenspan is no slouch in the kitchen.  The rustic appearance of this mundanely name dish appealed to my peasant cooking propensities.  (But trust me when I say the cover photo of this dish is far more beautiful than the one above.)  So I took a risk, and I'm glad I did.  Basically, the chicken steams itself inside a cast iron dutch oven sealed air-tight with a ring of simple dough.  The bird and the accompanying vegetables are pre-browned to ensure some color, but every drop of juicy goodness collects in the dutch oven.  Everything turned out super moist, super tender.  For copyright reasons, I'm not going to reproduce her recipe verbatim.  But I will tell you what I put in the pot.

Our broiler chicken weighed just under 5 and a half pounds.  Had it been any larger I don't think it would have fit into our standard size dutch oven.  Aside from the bird, I put in homegrown purple potatoes, garlic, shallots, rosemary, thyme and a few boughten carrots.  I browned the bird and all the vegetables except the potatoes in a mixture of bacon fat and olive oil.  The dough was just water and flour, though I did add some of the leftover fat from browning the ingredients.  The rest of the fat went into the dutch oven.  I enjoyed the challenge of tucking as many potatoes as I could around the chicken, without stuffing it so full that it wouldn't cook through.  Greenspan called for adding both white wine and chicken broth to the pot, but I omitted these, largely because I was moving 100 miles an hour on Monday and only scanned the recipe well enough to get a general sense of it.  At serving time there were plenty of juices in the dutch oven; I think it would have been a swimming pool of liquid had I been more faithful to the author's intention.

The only tiny disappointment of the meal was the crust that sealed the chicken and vegetables into the dutch oven during cooking.  I was surprised to find that Greenspan's recipe made no reference to it after the chicken was cooked.  I wondered whether it would be worth breaking up and soaking in the abundant juices in the bottom of the dutch oven.  I can't abide the thought of wasting the flour, you see.  Not only did my crust end up just this side of well charred, but it also had little flavor or texture.  We tried the juice soaking technique and found it really only made the crust marginally edible. If I were to repeat this dish in the future, I might try sealing the dutch oven with a loop of good yeasted bread dough.  If the dough started out well chilled I can imagine it forming a beautifully browned and scrumptious ring, the perfect vehicle for dunking in roast chicken juices.

It was incredibly satisfying to tuck into a meal that was almost entirely homegrown.  The carrots might have come from the garden if it hadn't been for the few that I had hanging around in the fridge, the leftovers from a spate of morning glory muffin baking.  Other than that, the only ingredients that weren't produced right here were the fats, salt and pepper.  This bodes very well for our six broilers, which are coming along nicely and are now out on the "pasture" full time, in the poultry schooner.

By the way, if any of you are raising birds for the table, or mulling it, and are planning to do your own slaughtering and processing, you may have pondered the same questions I did.  How soon does rigor mortis set in?  How long does it last?  Does it adversely affect the dish to cook a bird in rigor mortis?  And if so, what are the windows of opportunity for cooking the bird?  The basic answers to these questions are that rigor mortis sets in very quickly with poultry, and yes, it's best to avoid cooking a bird in rigor mortis.  Fortunately, it doesn't last too long.  Either cook a bird immediately upon slaughtering and processing, or refrigerate the bird and wait about 24 hours for the rigor mortis to dissipate.

Some of you have asked for a pictorial guide or even video on my slaughtering process.  So far we haven't had any clean hands available to hold a camera on slaughter day, but I'm keeping it in mind for the broilers we are raising at the moment.  If I can corral an innocent bystander with enough intestinal fortitude into taking some pictures or video, I will certainly post them later on.

News of the Flock

It's been a while since I posted anything about our backyard flock.  So some parts of this update could not in fairness be called news.  But it's news on the blog, so probably worth a post.  If you're a newish reader, or just want an overview of our mobile coop and pen system for our laying flock, I wrote about it in detail in this post.

Last fall we did some minor upkeep to the mobile pen with help from some WWOOF volunteers.  The half of the roof that consists of plywood had pretty well rotted, so it was replaced.  It and the rest of the pen got a wash of primer, and then the remainders of all the paint samples we had lying around were used to give the pen a piebald, hickish sort of charm.  At least the colors are bright and cheery.  We figure we'll get one, maybe two more years of service out of the pen (first built in spring 2008) before we need to build a new one from scratch.  While I don't relish the work of building anew, it will at least be a chance to build smarter.  The pen definitely does its job, but it's much heavier than I would prefer.  I'd like to build something lighter that will be easier to move each day.

I got tired of the difficulty of cleaning out the mobile coop, so I've instituted a few changes there too.  For one thing, the screened floor of the coop never worked well in allowing the manure to fall through onto the ground.  The hay from the nesting box would get spread over the floor and catch the poop, so it was just one big mess, not at all easy to clean.  This year I cut a piece of corrugate plastic to fit over the entire floor, including under the nesting box.  When it's time to clean out, it's now much easier to just take down the nesting box roof, and pull it out along with the plastic on the floor.  That accounts for about 98% of all the poo in the coop.  The plastic can be hosed off, exposed to a few hours of solar radiation, and replaced in the coop.

The second change is that I now close the coop up during the day.  Once the girls come out into the pen for their breakfasts, they're out all day.  This achieves a couple of things.  Firstly, there's a little less poop in the coop, which means less for me to deal with at cleaning time.  More poop ends up on the lawn where I don't have to do anything with it.  (Though to be perfectly honest, this effect is small since chickens seem to do most of their pooping overnight from the roost.)  The other benefits are to do with the eggs.  I no longer have to squat down to check the nesting box in the coop.  Instead I mounted a new nesting box in the pen, based on the bucket nesting box they used in their winter quarters in the shed.  I can check this nesting box easily without physical strain.  I know I sound like a total wuss when I say this, but it's long-term thinking.  Both of my parents have had joint replacement surgeries, and I want to be able to keep chickens well into my dotage.  So designing now for physical ease is important to me.  Eggs laid in the bucket nesting box also tend to be cleaner, since the hens are no longer walking through a manure-y coop to get to the nesting box.

As alluded to in an earlier post, we just added two Cuckoo Marans hens to the flock, bringing our total up to six laying hens.  These are very different birds from our Red Stars.  The various Marans breeds are all dual-purpose, meaning they put on some meat, and lay some eggs.  In terms of feed efficiency, they don't put on meat as well as dedicated meat breeds, nor produce eggs as well as dedicated layer breeds.  They're significantly bigger than our Red Stars, and assertive too in the ways of chickendom, which is to say rather mean.  The Red Stars laid eggs with bleached looking eggshells for a few days - a typical indication of stress.  Now the pecking order has been established, and the Marans clearly rule the roost.

I briefly kept a small flock of White Marans before, and wasn't impressed enough with them to keep them long.  The Cuckoos have a couple of advantages on the Whites we had before.  They're younger, so they are laying better than the older whites.  And they cohabitate with the Red Stars, who demonstrate to the Marans that all the weeds and greenery I throw into the pen are good to eat.  Thus, the Marans learn behavior that improves the quality of their eggs and reduces my feed costs.  The person I got the Marans from is a hobby breeder for show.  I don't think he cares much about feed efficiency or egg quality.  His birds had been kept in stationary runs denuded of vegetation, so there wasn't anything for them to forage.  Still, he gives me free hens, so I'm not going to complain.  With a little tutelage from the Red Stars, they seem to be learning to appreciate the weeds.

While the Marans were free, there's a downside to them.  They're too big to easily fit in the bucket nesting box, which is a snug fit for the Red Stars.  One of them managed to lay one egg in the bucket, but the rest of the time they've deposited their eggs in the grass.  It would be a good idea to add another nesting box just based on the numbers alone.  A bigger nesting box could fit alongside the one we've got.  I just need to figure out what could be used to provide more space while not adding too much additional weight to the pen.  Meanwhile those extra dark Marans eggs lying around on the grass tell me that the worst of the egg-eating tendencies the Red Stars exhibited in February are apparently over.

I don't expect that we'll keep the Marans all that long.  Right now they're quite young and thus in their prime so far as egg laying goes.  They're laying decently.  As soon as their production tapers off a bit, we'll slaughter them and convert them to canned meat and chicken stock.  By then it may be time to replace the Red Stars with some fresh pullets as well.  We are running perilously low on chicken stock at the moment.

Having recently scrounged a large plastic storage bin that would be suitable as a brooder box for chicks, I'm now considering raising a few meat birds for the freezer over the summer months.  I'm not at all sure that this is going to happen, but I'm mulling it.  If we decide the project is a go, there will certainly be a few posts on the topic.

Native Bee Boxes

With the arrival of intermittent spring weather, I've been very busy lately.  The outdoor projects have begun in earnest and my hands and forearms are feeling the strain of that work.  Typing doesn't help much.  So excuse the recent lack of posting. 

But here's something I wanted to write about: nest boxes for native bees.  My husband made one of these a few years ago and put it up on our shed.  We've already observed that the sealing walls constructed by mason bees last year have been dismantled, and a new generation of bees is checking out the nest holes for deposits of eggs.  So early in the year!  It seems there's so little in bloom yet for them to feed on, but the warmth has them up and about.  The nest box consists of a block of wood with deeply drilled holes in various sizes.  They serve as shelter for the eggs of several kinds of bee.

We have a huge three-bay garage that came with the house.  Its footprint is larger than the house itself.  It's great for storing all kinds of stuff pulled out of dumpsters and projects in progress, which means it gets packed to the point of becoming unnavigable.  On rainy days I've been working to triage some of the ungodly mess that has piled up in there over the last six months.  I found a short length of 4x4 post and decided to turn it into more nest boxes for native bees.  Small pieces of scrap wood furnished roofs to keep off the worst of the rain.  These will be mounted on the scaffolding for our solar array.  I'm sure they will soon be fully occupied.

Our foray into keeping honey bees last year resulted in unmitigated failure.  Our longest surviving colony didn't make it through the winter.  We're going to try again this year, and we hope that we'll have more success with some hard lessons under our belts.  Seeing the help our efforts provide to native bees offers some consolation. These bees are under the same environmental stresses as honey bees.  The human race cannot afford to lose the free services of pollinator insect species, and bees are preeminent in this work.  As it turns out, some of our native bees are even more effective pollinators than honey bees.  Keeping honey bees requires a significant commitment of time, labor and monetary outlay.  It took me all of two hours to build these two native bee nest boxes at almost no expense whatsoever.  I paid for four screws, a tiny bit of silicone sealer (leftover from energy efficiency improvements for our home) and the electricity to run a power drill.  My work for the native bees ends the moment these bee boxes are mounted. 

I mentioned recently how last year there was a sense of my garden and homestead finally beginning to come together.  If anything, that feeling is increasing this year.  When we bought this house the backyard was a monoculture of open lawn, with a border of conventional, uninspired landscaping.  Now it's stocked with dozens and dozens of perennial plants, and we grow a wide variety of annual vegetables there every year, both of which supply food and habitat for numerous insects, which in turn provide food to birds and other wildlife.  That's biodiversity that simply wasn't there before.  Putting up these boxes for the bees is another effort towards that cause.  It's the inter-species connections on this tiny piece of land that are going to make what we do here sustainable over the long term.  I'm convinced that every additional species I can encourage is a strength for my homestead.  I don't even know exactly what these native bees are doing here.  I'm sure they venture off my property as much as they conduct their business on it.  But they are a knot in the living tapestry I am making of this place.  I want them here.  With some scrap materials and a couple hours of labor it's easy enough for me to make this place attractive to them for decades to come. 

One way of looking at this is as a token gesture of atonement for the environmental damage my actions have caused, and continue to cause; a tiny way to give back to the world that supports me.  Seen another way, it's self interest.  Monocultures are fragile things.  By encouraging as much biodiversity as possible, I get more resilience, healthier soil, lower pest pressures, better pollination of our fruits and vegetables, and less work for me.  That's what I'm talking about when I say things are coming together.

If you're interested in helping populations of native bees, you could build your own bee boxes.  You could even salvage the materials from a dumpster on a construction site, thus diverting useful stuff from a landfill and saving yourself some money.  For guidance on this simple project, check out this fact sheet (pdf) from the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation organization.  On their website you can also find lists (tailored to each region of the US) of beneficial plants to for native bees, including many edible plants.

Making It

It hit a surreal 78 degrees (25.5 C) here almost two weeks ago.  Too hot in the sun to even lie in the hammock, let alone do any work.  Last week was grey and miserable, with high temperatures in the 40's, and a dump of the dreaded "wintry mix" precipitation.  We've had sub-freezing temps overnight ever since, and this week is sunny but cold.  Sigh.  Where'd my spring go?

I'm trying to make the best of it and have been quite productive lately.  I got a lot of outside work done during that warm week, while the sun shone.  Now there are many seedlings to attend to indoors.  And I spend a little time outside during the warmest parts of each sunny day.  Otherwise I've been keeping my hands busy inside while I bide my time, however resentful of the vanished warm weather.  Here's a rundown of the projects I've been working on lately.

I painted the nesting box we made all from scrap wood.  Bright colors of course, because if the wood needs protection from the elements, I might as well use colors that make me happy.  Now that we're more or less set up for the broody hen, I'm eager for her arrival.  Still no firm date for that yet.

I finished two new two planting templates - a cool looking hexagonal one for the three sisters planting, and another one for the garlic planting on 6" centers.  I've been using an 8" planting template for the garlic, but after getting carried away with some 350 garlic plants last fall, I've rethought my spacing for this crop.

I also worked on finishing a few projects started with the help of our WWOOF volunteers.  The first is a greens feeder for the chickens.  The idea here is that you plant greens the chickens like to eat under the feeder.  The plants then grow up through the caging and the girls can eat what pokes up.  But they can't tear the roots out of the soil, so the plants in theory should re-grow and continue to feed them for a long time.  Since we move the hens daily throughout most of the year, I plan to use this in the yet-to-be-constructed hoop house which will house the girls next winter.  In the meantime though I'm also hoping it will shield some tiny catnip seedlings from the ravages of cats - both ours and the neighborhood ne'erdowell toms.  The caging for this project was repurposed from a tomato cage that will be replaced with a trellising system this year.

The second is my solar cooking station.  This still needs a bit more work, but it's good enough to supercharge our seedlings with tons of sunlight at the moment.  It mounts to the scaffolding for our solar heating array.  A piece of rebar supports a wooden countertop from the back, and a wooden upright supports it in front.  It's reasonably easy for me to set it up or remove it by myself.  I'm hoping that the solar array doesn't completely shade it out in summer.  I'll watch this, and if need be, lower the station a bit to get it out from under the shade.  All of these projects - templates, nesting box, greens feeder and solar cooking station - were made with salvaged lumber and other free materials.  Only the paint, screws, nails and some other hardware were, in some cases, purchased.

Hand carved wooden spoon and a spoon blank

I carved a wooden spoon (from a spoon "blank") using the awesome woodcarving tools that my husband received recently as a gift.  It's a rather addictive occupation, despite being tough on novice hands, and definitely one best pursued when the weather is fair enough to allow all the shavings to fall outside.  Last year we broke our last two wooden spoons, so it's nice to be able to make some for ourselves.  This one isn't very large, but it could be used with smaller cooking pots.  I put a nubbin on the back of the handle end so it won't just slip into the soup if I set it against the rim of the pot.

Based on a good tip from The Urban Homestead, I made a baking soda shaker from a glass jar with a metal lid.  This is for dish washing, as baking soda is a mild and non-toxic abrasive.  Just take a nail and make lots of holes in the lid, then fill with ordinary baking soda.  The gaffer's tape bands around the jar were my own tweak.  They're there to provide a better grip to wet hands.

Also, a couple of knitted dishrags.  These are made from cotton butcher's twine and based on a pattern for a baby blanket I made many years ago.  Look for large spools of this stuff in a restaurant supply store.  It's much cheaper than buying the small rolls of a thinner gauge kitchen twine in a supermarket.  I recommend you get a couple of spools.  Keep one someplace clean for kitchen uses, and the other one with your garden tools.  You'll find a thousand uses for it outside, but it's not easy to keep the twine clean if you take it to the garden.  These dishrags can be made fairly quickly on days when you're cooped up inside.  They don't wear out as quickly as scrubby sponges, and if you throw them in with the laundry they won't abrade your clothes.  Also, they're thin enough to sterilize just with sun exposure.  Google for a thousand pattern options.  And I'm sure there are crochet patterns as well if that's your fiber art.  I may experiment with dying these later as I have a dying project in mind and these could just be added into the soak.

Pelmenyi.  These are meat dumplings from central Russia.  I've been meaning to make them for ages now.  Some unpasteurized whey graciously donated by Sandy, defrosting my freezer, and unfriendly outdoor temps, were the impeti to finally undertake the project.  And they are a project, believe me.  It would be much more fun and go so much faster to have another set of hands to help with assembly.  But I'm on my own this week.  My recipe uses the whey plus one of our eggs in the dough, and three kinds of ground meat (pork, veal, and lamb - discovered while defrosting the freezer, and all local and pastured, of course) plus onion and spices in the filling.  Traditionally these are kept in huge sacks on balconies over the many months of the Russian winter where there's no danger of thawing or spoilage.  They are boiled and then served either with vinegar, or with the super high fat content smetana, to which our closest equivalent is sour cream, though it contains only roughly half the fat of smetana.  Green onions are sometimes added as a garnish with either topping.

Unfortunately, while working on the greens feeder I manage to bash my thumb with the hammer.  I've never been unlucky or clumsy enough to do this before, and I can assure you that it's an experience I neither recommend nor care to repeat.  It didn't seem like that hard of a bash, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.  It hurt like the dickens, and still requires a lot of caution when doing everyday tasks.  I'm really hoping that I don't lose the nail, 'cause that would seriously screw up the fast approaching heavy spring workload.

It's very satisfying to see a few things made with my own hands that will endure and be useful for many years, mostly with very little expense.  My head is full of little homesteading projects I want to undertake this year.  Last year about this time I had the sense that things were finally starting to come together on the homestead.  And indeed, things did run better last year; more things turned out the way I hoped.  I have that sense this year too.  It's a good feeling, though hard won.  If my productivity holds up (and I freely admit that it's extremely fickle), it could be a great year for progress on the homestead.  We'll see.

I will probably do a post on the three sisters' template around planting time.  If you simply must have more details on any of the other projects, leave me a comment and it may inspire me to get into the nitty-gritty.

On the Horizon - A Broody Hen

I can't tell you what a great thing it is to know a few local farmers on first-name basis.  I get all kinds of benefits from my acquaintance with them, and being a paying customer for the foods they produce is just the tip of the iceberg.  Last year my farming friend offered up a disabled turkey poult, and we had the experience of raising it for our table.  She also sends pork jowls my way for free because her customers don't want them.  So I get to turn them into guanciale.

This time we'll get a broody hen with some heritage breed fertile eggs under her.  The idea is that we'll foster her and give her a place to rear her chicks.  After that we might split the chicks with the farmer providing the hen.  I've toyed with the idea of raising chicks before, but could never motivate myself to place an order and then buy necessary equipment to set up a brooder for them.  Being a surrogate chicken mother has just never appealed.  The alternative - a broody hen with good mothering instincts sounded fantastic.  Such a hen is all the equipment needed to rear chicks.  But my laying hens are production model Red Stars with no mothering instinct, and besides, I have no interest in keeping a rooster.  I'm pretty sure my neighbors have their limits in my residential setting.  So the out-of-the-blue offer of a broody hen was another fantastic opportunity just dropped into my lap through the magic of personal acquaintance with farmers.

After last year's turkey+honey bees infraction, I'm trying to stick to my one new species per year rule this year.  The Black Soldier Fly is going to be this year's unglamorous species of choice.  But a broody hen with chicks is all sorts of excitement without rule breaking. Chickens we know.  Chickens we've done.  The brooding-hatching-rearing process is entirely new to us, but it still falls within my self-imposed and sanity-preserving limitation.  So I'm psyched!  Our homestead will be host to a new phase of animal husbandry.  At least I hope.  I'm bearing in mind that old adage about counting chickens. I'm especially eager to see this process through because in the back of my mind I've thought about using a bantam hen to brood quail eggs and rear the young, should I ever decide to try my hand at quail.  (Domesticated quail aren't known for their mothering skills.)  Working with a broody hen ahead of time seems like the smart move.

Details are still a bit unclear as to the timing and other issues.  Sometime around the middle of the month we should take delivery of a broody girl and "her" eggs.   They may not all be hers biologically, but I'm pretty sure she'll feel rather proprietary about them. I don't know whether the farmer will want the hen back with the chicks, or whether he'll want us to keep her.  Details should be forthcoming eventually; farmers are busy people.  In the meantime, a small DIY project is on the agenda.  I'm guessing she and her chicks will do best with a separate space from our layers.  At the very least she'll need her own nesting box for her fertile eggs.  I figure she and her chicks can use the poultry schooner while the other hens are kept in the mobile pen and coop.

I find myself wild with the hope that the brooding experiment works out.  I am uncharacteristically excited about all the potential cuteness of tiny chicks.  It's a good thing that they go through an ugly phase as they grow and molt for the first time.  I'm not sure yet whether we'll keep any of the female hatchlings.  We definitely won't keep any males, though if the farmer doesn't want them either we could always turn them into meat and chicken stock.

As for our current layers, if you were waiting for details on their conversion to canned meat and chicken stock due to the egg-eating habit, they've been given a stay of execution.  Securing a small number of layers this time of year isn't proving easy, and I don't want to get rid of the ones we've got before I know we can replace them.  The egg-eating has also eased up a bit lately, though I'm not at all convinced the problem is solved.  I'm keeping them for at least a couple more weeks as I try to figure out where the next layers will come from.

Homesteading Books Giveaway

In honor of a certain overreaching family in southern California, I'm giving away three homesteading titles this week.  I've ordered three copies of Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen's book, The Urban Homestead.  They're now shipped and on their way to me.  One is my copy, and two are up for grabs.  Also, I'm giving away my own, gently used copy of The Backyard Homestead.  Here's your chance to win one of these great titles.

To enter the drawing for one of these books, leave a comment on this post briefly describing your homestead - either as it exists right now, or what you hope to achieve in the future.  Comments must be received by 6pm Eastern time, on Friday, March 11th, if you want a chance at winning one of these books.  Sorry, but this is open to US residents only.  **If you're not signed in with an identifiable account, leave enough identifying information so that I can verify the prize goes to the right person. (e.g. Clare in Boston, or something similar.)**  If you're only interested in one or the other of these titles, please indicate that in your comment so I can be sure they go to readers who will use these books.  If the random number generator picks someone not interested in a given book, I'll generate another number.  I'll announce the winners by Monday, March 14th at the latest.  Good luck!

I Am an Urban Homesteader

I wasn't sure I was going to engage with this fracas, but in the end I feel it's necessary.  The Dervaes family of Pasadena, California have apparently trademarked the terms Urban Homestead and Urban Homesteading.  They dress up this action as an attempt to protect these terms from use by evil corporations. And yet it is the Dervaeses themselves who are now sending what are in effect cease and desist letters to public libraries, bloggers, and other organizations who have used these terms, even without attempting to profit from them.  They have privatized part of the commons and are now wasting no time trying to assert their exclusive legal rights.  This despite the fact that there are previously published books, magazines, public service organizations and innumerable blogs that use exactly these words in their titles.  At least one of them has already had their page shut down thanks to the Dervaeses.

There are many things I find despicable about these actions of the Dervaes family.  Their behavior is exactly what one would expect from an evil corporation.  Monsanto, anyone?  It would be one thing to trademark these generic terms and then turn them over to the Creative Commons for all non-evil uses.  That is not what they are doing.  It would be one thing to take these actions and then actively listen to those people who have formerly supported and admired their work.  That is not what they have done.  Instead they have, one by one, shut down their social media pages and several of the eight websites they maintain.  Recent posts on their main blog (I'm not going to link it here.) have closed comments.  They didn't like what they were hearing; it didn't support their worldview.  So they refuse to listen.  This is a family that has solicited donations, boldly and repeatedly, for years.  And yet this family of four able-bodied adults somehow manages to find the spare time to trawl the internet looking for people who have "infringed" on their newly acquired legal rights.  It sickens me to think of all the monetary donations given in goodwill that are now paying for the Dervaeses to act like a corporate goon squad. Wise people recognize when they have made mistakes, admit them, and correct them.  That is not the path the Dervaeses are pursuing.

I was initially only profoundly disappointed with the Dervaeses.  Now I'm angry.  I have in the past mentioned and linked to the Dervaes family here on my own blog.  I can assure you that I will never do so again.  I have removed the links that I was able to find.  The food production they have managed to accomplish on a tiny amount of land is truly impressive, and by rights it should stand as a shining example of what can be done if one is determined to produce food at home.  But this high-handedness over concepts they did not originate and have no moral claim to is unacceptable.  They are doing damage to a cause and a way of life that should never be the property of one person, or one family.  We need as many people as possible growing food in backyards large and small.  That the terms "urban homestead" and "urban homesteading" are now legally restricted does no service to that cause, and may indeed mean that fewer people pursue the goal of home food production.  That is wrong, whatever the law may say about it.

I'm not on Facebook, but there's a group making an effort to reclaim the term urban homesteading.  Check it out if you use Facebook.  If you've ever linked to, publicly praised, or financially supported the Dervaes family, I would urge you to weigh in on this matter, either on your own blog, or by sending a message to the Dervaeses.  I think it pays to be civil, no matter how much you may disagree with someone, so I recommend you keep it polite.  Rudeness and name-calling only make it that much easier for people who disagree with you to dismiss what you say out of hand.

Black Soldier Fly Larvae

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

I hope the title of this post doesn't put anyone off.  If you're not fundamentally squeamish about insects, I promise there's nothing terribly icky about what I've got to say today.

Included in my formal list of goals for this year is the project of trying to feed our laying hens more and more with food we produce ourselves.  We've already got well established routines that provide some of the chickens' food, such as kitchen scraps, trimmings from the garden, feeding them Japanese beetles and squash bugs in the proper seasons, and gleaning acorns for them in the fall.  Still, we end up buying a few 80-pound bags of feed for them each year.  This is grown organically, fairly local to me, and milled by the farmer that grows it, so on that score I feel pretty good about it.  But it's a 45-minute drive to buy the feed, and the price (though much cheaper than the nasty pelletized chicken feed from Tractor Supply) has been nudging up steadily ever since I started buying it.  This feed easily accounts for more than half of the hens' caloric intake over the course of the year.

So I've been looking a bit harder at what we might do to close the gaps in our homestead economy and nutrient cycles.  Worms from our vermicompost are an excellent possibility, but I'm going to leave that project for another post.  Right now I'm going to talk about the Black Soldier Fly, which is probably the coolest idea easily adapted for use by very small scale homesteaders I've come across in a long time.  I have this tendency to think that if I've heard of some cool idea, then everyone else already has too.  But I've gotten comments from time to time that ask for more detail on stuff I mention in an off-hand way.  So I'm going to review what I know about this species and how those with small backyard poultry flocks can partner with it to their advantage.

The Black Soldier Fly is well established in many parts of the world, including most of North America in hardiness zone 7 or warmer.  Though it is a fly, it's a world apart from the common housefly in terms of the nuisance factor.  The adult phase of this insect's life, the only time it can fly, is very brief and devoted solely to reproduction.  The adult BSF doesn't even have a working mouth, so it cannot bite or eat and is not attracted by food, except as a resource for the next generation of BSF.  Even so, the mated female BSF does not land on food.  She seeks to lay her eggs nearby - not on - a food source, where the newly hatched larvae will be able to land on the food and begin feeding.  BSF larvae can consume small amounts of meat, but this is not a species that specializes in carrion.  Mostly what she's looking for is decomposing plant matter.  In fact, they may already be resident in your compost heap.  Once her eggs are laid, the adult fly has accomplished her mission in life, and dies shortly after.  The males also die shortly after mating.  The larvae remain on the food source as they pass through several sub-stages of growth, until they are ready to pupate, at which point they seek to burrow into the earth to complete their development into adults.  So you can see that there is little purpose or opportunity for the BSF to interact with humans in any way, unless we deliberately facilitate such an interaction.  Indeed, even if you live in a region with a BSF population, it's entirely feasible that you have never noticed these insects before, since they have little interest in us, and such short life spans in adult form.

The point at which we would want to intervene in the life cycle of this insect is when the larvae are fully grown and ready to pupate. Clever people have designed a clever contraption for harvesting the mature larvae at just this stage.  Or rather, using the BSF's instincts in order to have it harvest itself.  The BioPod is a custom built bucket system that provides an exit route for the larvae leading to a closed container, which makes feeding them to poultry or other livestock trivially easy.

I'm going to post another piece soon about the knockoff BSF composting buckets I'm working on.  What I want to dwell on a little more at this stage is the idea of partnering with this species.  Although in my formal goals for this year I wrote that I'm not committing to adding another species to our homestead, that was an oversight.  In reality, the Black Soldier Fly is another species I very much plan to work with.  It may not look like livestock, just as our red wriggler worms for the vermicompost bin didn't look like livestock.  Perhaps they're not.  But they will be a new species for us, and partnering with them will involve a learning curve.  I see the cultivation of these insects as one more item in the self-sufficiency toolbox; one more thing that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels.  For without fossil fuels it would be very difficult for the farmer to harvest the grains that make up our purchased feed, and very difficult for us to go and buy them multiple times per year.

It may seem grotesque to call my intended relationship with BSF a "partnership."  After all, it looks pretty exploitative from one perspective.  But in reality, I don't see this as ethically any different than keeping other species for food.  I will be establishing an insect where it doesn't currently exist, and responsible not only for feeding each generation, but also maintaining a "wild" population that survives to adulthood in order to reproduce and create the next generation.   After obtaining a starter colony, I'll need to heavily "seed" our garden soils with ready-to-pupate larvae.  This will reduce my usable harvest in the first year.  But with luck, a good population will take root right in the backyard, and continue to take advantage of the shelter and food the composting buckets will provide for them. From what I've read, I will very much need to actively tend the compost buckets.  I expect to derive both animal feed and a small amount of compost tea from this partnership.  In other words, the BSF will become part of the system of this homestead.  I'm always looking for ways to increase the diversity of species, and the connections between them, on our tiny piece of land.

Sooner or later I'll post more on the buckets themselves.  In the meantime, having read this post, would you humor me please, by participating in my poll on Black Soldier Fly composting?  It's on the sidebar of my blog.  I'm curious how many of you have heard of BSF cultivation before, and what your attitudes towards it might be.