Predator Troubles

Hello friends! Welcome back to the blog!

I should know better than to brag about the predator awareness of our creatures. On September 13 I wrote a post about our wonderful ducks, and how all 12 had made it through the summer. We are down to 6. The ducks had up until now enjoyed much more freedom than our chickens, because the chickens get picked off quite easily by hawks. The ducks are much more hawk-savvy than the chickens. I guess, naturally sitting in lakes and things, hawks would be their biggest threat. Foxes and coyotes don’t tend to swim out into open water to nab ducks.

The mud puddles that form on our road, and the kiddie pool we have filled to entertain the ducks, are not nearly as protective as an expansive lake. Our best guess is that the ducks believe they are safe when they are sitting in water (except for the sky predators as observed earlier) and therefore pay no mind to the land predators skulking around.

Of the 6 we have left, 1 is in the house being treated for a wound to his armpit / under wing area. On Wednesday it was a large (a little larger than a half dollar coin) wound, which appeared to have bone and meat exposed. We are managing twice-daily dressing changes, flushing the wound with Vetrycin and dabbing original Neosporin on the gauze to keep it from sticking to the wound, then wrapping a sort of harness out of vet wrap to keep the gauze in place. It appears to be healing very nicely. The scab looks gross, but to me scabs always look gross. There is no smell of infection, no appearance of pus or redness, and no noticeable heat difference between the wound and the rest of the duck. Mr. L. and I will keep Duke the Duck inside until his skin is fully closed, lest he decide to splash a bath of duck-yuck water onto his wound and bandages.

At the moment we are unsure what type of predator exactly has been making off with our precious ducks. Our answer, at least for now, is to confine them to their coop and run unless we are going to be out with them. Everyone, ducks and chickens, get a couple of hours of free roam time in the evening (between work and dark, although that window is rapidly closing as the days get shorter.)

Next year we will be working with the moveable electric poultry fence. I always am saddened to lose birds, so “accepting that there will be losses” isn’t acceptable to me, but neither is leaving them locked up all the time - without anthropomorphizing excessively, they do appear to have fun and enjoy moving about freely, plus the ducks have decimated the tick and slug populations on the property. No matter how sizeable the enclosed run is, it still gets trampled and pecked down to bare dirt in no time. And presently we have too many birds to feasibly keep them all in moveable poultry tractors to keep them on fresh grass.

Anyone with experience using electric poultry net against predators, I’d love your input! Is it worth the investment? I look forward to reading your thoughts! Please comment below, or send me an email: info@honeybunnyhomestead.com. Thanks for reading!

Living in New England

Hello friends!  Welcome back to the blog!

I have to tell you, this year’s foliage is incredible.  I’m typically a summer person.  Summer is my season, spring is ok… fall and winter are not usually my jam.  This year, the trees look like fireworks on the mountains.  I don’t think I have ever seen such intensely beautiful foliage.

My understanding is that this is caused by the harsh cold snap we had earlier this month, combined with the extreme drought.  We have had less than 1/10th of an inch of rain this whole month.  This does not make for happy crops or happy ducks, but it does make for some truly incredible foliage.

We have to take the small pleasures where we can.
I look forward to reading your thoughts! Please comment below, or send me an email: info@honeybunnyhomestead.com. Thanks for reading!

Chicken Bone Broth

Hello friends! Welcome back to the blog! Today I am making bone broth, and I wanted to share my process. I am going to put my process first, and the story after.

WHAT YOU NEED

• Large stock pot

• Chicken Carcass(es)

• Onion

• Garlic if desired

• Bay leaf (or 2 or 3, depending on # of chickens)

• Salt

• Water

• Apple Cider Vinegar

HOW TO PREPARE

• 24 hours before cooking chicken(s), salt them generously. Bag and return to refrigerator. The salt will diffuse through the muscle (salt always moves from high concentration to low concentration; thank you 10th grade science class) and where salt goes, water follows. Once the salt is inside the muscle, you lose a lot less water during cooking, so the meat stays more tender and juicy.

• Roast the chicken(s). I do 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour 15 minutes or so - I always use a meat thermometer to make sure the chicken is fully cooked (165 degrees Fahrenheit in the thickest part of the meat).

• Let the meat cool, then pick the meat off the bones. Save the skin. If you’re starting with whole chickens, save the feet and necks too. All that goes in the broth. All the fat too. It adds incredible flavor, and you skim it off later.

• Store or eat the meat. I’m making chicken soup once the broth is finished, so the meat is in the fridge until the broth is done.

• Put the chicken bones, skin, and odds and ends in the stock pot. Mine holds about 4 chickens. Peel and coarsely chop the onion, toss in a bay leaf (I use 2-3), and peel a few cloves of garlic. Smash the garlic with the broad side of a knife. Cover with water, bring to a simmer. Add a splash of vinegar (helps leach the minerals out of the bones). Add salt. After a few hours, taste the broth, and probably add more salt. Keep tasting every so often and adjusting the salt. I used about 4x as much as I expected to, but you will know when you have it right.

• Simmer, covered, 24-48 hours. Strain with a fine strainer or layered coffee filters or cheesecloth (I lined my colander with paper towels and used that). Refrigerate for 6+ hours until fat has risen to top and solidified. Remove fat. I’m reserving the fat to cook with - it adds an intense chicken-y flavor almost like adding a bullion cube to things like rice or couscous. Your broth is ready to use! I will add the chicken soup recipe another time.

STORY TIME

This broth is incredible. It is loaded with minerals like Calcium. It’s delicious and intensely flavorful. I think my favorite part of the homesteading journey so far is getting to learn to make incredible, healthful food from scratch. The chickens I used for this broth were not hatched on the homestead, but we had them shipped here as day-old chicks. They ranged in age from 18 months to 4 years old. We needed to make some space in the chicken coop before winter, so we butchered 11 birds and they will nourish us all winter long.

I look forward to reading your thoughts! Please comment below, or send me an email: info@honeybunnyhomestead.com. Thanks for reading!

Duck, duck... DUCK!

Hi friends! Welcome back!

This spring we added ducks to the farm! As always, I agonized endlessly over the breeds. We wanted good layers that would get big enough to eat, that could free range well, would sit and raise their own replacements, and that didn’t need to swim.

I settled on Silver Appleyards. Heavy bodied ducks, males can be upwards of 10 pounds. Beautiful green heads on the males, the females have unique freckle patterns so the individuals can be identified.

The pluses: They’re hilarious to watch. They’re noisy and alert to predators, which has proven to be useful in keeping the chickens safer as well. We haven’t seen a single tick since we moved them out of the basement. The eggs (they started laying Tuesday, finally) are delicious.

The minuses: They’re messy. Really messy. We had our brooder in the basement. I was certain they were going to catch chill and die because they were constantly splashing all of the water out of the dish. They love mud, and they know how to make it. They also poop liquid. It builds up fast. It smells really bad. Worse than the chicken coop. Way worse. They are noisy. I don’t mind the noise, but that’s unusual for me, and for someone who did mind the noise it would be insufferable.

The drakes still have not grown in their adult feathers, so I have no idea how many we have yet. We will be keeping one drake and probably all the hens, and eating any extra drakes this year. In the spring, we’ll be hatching out a bunch of babies - as many as we can naturally, but we were also gifted an incubator that I want to play with.

As always, Thank you for joining us here at the farm! I look forward to sharing your thoughts below.

Chicken Success!

Hello Friends!

Welcome back to the blog. At the last update about the chickens, we had settled on getting 2 dual-purpose heritage breeds with the hopes that one or both would go broody.

We did have 2 Jersey Giant hens go broody. They each sat on 9 eggs, we hatched a total of 6. We did lose 2 in the first 36 hours (all errors were ours; I had miscounted the days to hatch and had an inappropriate water dish in the enclosure. 2 babies fell in, got wet, got out, but were chilled and did not recover). I have been very pleased with the mother hens’ abilities. The 2 hens and 4 babies escaped their enclosure during a terrible rainstorm while Mr. L and I were both at work, and I fully expected to lose the remaining 4 babies because of the rain. When I finally tracked them down, THEY WERE BONE DRY! Both mama hens were sopping wet, sad feathers all hanging down, but somehow the babies were still fluffy. I have no idea how they managed it, but it beat the heck out of a brooder in the basement!

Unfortunately, our Jersey Giant rooster was badly bullied and ended up passing due to heat stroke. This coming spring we will add a few more JG hens and a rooster, as well as a few more colored egg layers. We will be sending the rest of our brown egg layers to Camp Kenmore so that going forward all our brown eggs will hatch purebred JGs.

We have noticed significantly fewer losses to predators with the heritage breeds, even with all the free-ranging. The only bird we lost this summer was our JG rooster, and that was not a predator problem.

All in all, I have to recommend heritage breed chickens. They take longer to grow to butcher weight than Cornish X, but the flavor is remarkable. My experience has been that the meat is not tough - it isn’t mushy, it is a bit more firm than I think of chicken being, but it is miles away from tough. They lay well, they sit well on their eggs, they make good mothers, and they don’t simply wander away to get eaten.

Thanks for checking back in with us!

Mega Update

Welcome back to the Blog!

Sorry for going AWOL all summer! I graduated from an Associate’s Degree program in May, Mr. L and I tied the knot in June, and then we set about actually buying a house! We found an adorable property with 8 acres, and we close on it right around Thanksgiving, so we are well on our way.

We did add the Jersey Giant and Buckeye breeds of chickens. We ended up with 8 roosters, we’re keeping 2, we lost 2 to predators, and I learned how to dispatch and process the other 4. It was an experience. Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, but I managed. 3 are in the freezer, and 1 we have already cooked and eaten. Butchering is a lot of work, but Wow! The flavor difference in pasture-raised poultry is undeniable.

All 4 of the roosters (representative of both breeds) ended up about 4.5 pounds after cleaning. Not huge birds, by any stretch. The drumsticks on them are larger than the breasts!

We also got back into bees this year. We started 2 hives, one from a package and one from a locally-overwintered split. I will always and forever pay the extra to get local bees. We got them nearly a month later than the package, and they managed to put up over twice as much honey. We invested in the Mighty Mite thermal Varroa treatment unit, and going into winter our mite count is 0. We’ll see if we can get these girls through this winter - Come springtime, we may have small amounts of honey available for purchase.

Now that things are starting to settle down, I hope to get back to my regular once-a-week posting schedule. Thanks for reading!

Copy of Chickens and Rabbits: Building Houses

Welcome back to the blog!

Mr. L. has started planning some of the big spring projects.  If you’ve been reading along, you know that we’re adding a couple of heritage breeds of chickens to our homestead this spring.  A dozen of each, straight run, with the intention to keep a rooster and 2-3 hens of each breed for eggs, and 2020 spring chicks, and to butcher and eat the rest come fall.

We have had significant chicken losses to local predators, so the challenge is always keeping our chicks alive long enough for them to start laying or reach market weight.  Mr. L. has been working diligently on designing chicken tractors that can hold 6 birds, that we can move here and there around the yard so the birds can have fresh forage without getting gotten by any of the fox, bobcat, hawks, or other critters we have roaming the area.

We have also decided that we want to raise meat rabbits.  Mr. L. thinks it would be most economical to add a story to his chicken tractor build, and house one rabbit over top of each half dozen birds.  My reading indicates that rabbits on the ground get laden with disease and/or parasites, and also that rabbit poop is actually nutritious for chickens, but that chicken poop can be really bad for rabbits, so if we want to house them together we should do so with the rabbit over the chickens.  I’ll see if I can get him to sketch out his plans to share with y’all, and for sure I’ll take pictures when we start assembling them. He’s talking about a wooden coop/hutch on one end, with a roost and nest boxes for the chickens and a hidey-hole with a solid floor for the bunny, and the rest of the run be galvanized hardware cloth - 0.5”x0.5” for the bunny’s “floor”, and probably 1”x2” for the walls and the ceiling, with PVC supports so the danged thing is light enough for me to move!  There are enough trees on the property that we can easily ensure that we park it in the shade during the summer months. I don’t know what he is planning for dimensions, but I do know that he tends to air on the side of “plenty of room”, since he frets about the chickens bullying each other. And if it will be big enough for 6 chickens, it will be plenty big enough for one bunny, or possibly even a momma bunny with kits. I know, if we start talking kits, we’ll need to do something different about the floor.  Hooray - something to research!

As always I am keeping tabs on cost, etc.  I will update you when we have purchased the materials.  I know the 24 birds are going to run us $112 from https://www.mypetchicken.com because we always spring for the Marek’s vaccine.  We haven’t lost a single chick yet - all of our losses have occurred once the birds were old enough to move outside.  We decided on Jersey Giant and Buckeye, and we’ll pass on the Speckled Sussex for now - in spite of how pretty they are, they have a reputation for laying teeny-tiny eggs and making a royal ruckus about it.

As always, thank you for reading along with us, and your comments (below) are appreciated.

Dairy Plans

Welcome back to the blog!  

Great news!  I finally convinced Mr. L. that we’re going to need a dairy cow!  It was a hard sell. He had a lot of farming experience growing up, and dairy cows are the one creature that his dad gave up on - they are allegedly “way too much work.”

But I make my own yogurt, and I want to experiment with making cheeses and various other things.  I’ve been told repeatedly by a number of different people that I need to sell my yogurt. This most recent batch that I made, I used farm fresh unpasteurized milk from a dairy up the road, and the flavor is different.  That was what finally made the sale. Well, that, and probably also talking about how much milk I drank growing up (a lot) figuring out how much it will eventually cost to feed the children we hope to have.

And so, you all know me - I’m a compulsive researcher of things - so even though we’re 2+ years away from being able to even consider adding a cow to the mix, I’ve already started looking at breeds and best practices for keeping a dairy cow.

At least for now, I think I’ve settled on the Milking Shorthorn.  They’re a smaller cow, they give a little less milk, but the milk is higher protein and lower fat, perfect for making yogurt.  They also claim to be way less prone to birthing issues, mastitis, etc than Holsteins or Jerseys.

Or we may end up with mutts.  I tend to research breeds, because it’s something to do, but it seems like most small farms end up crossing their breeds with other things until the result is essentially a mutt.  I’m sure people have good luck with them. I know in rabbits, meat crosses like New Zealand x Rex, Californian x Silver Fox, and so on - the crossed breeds put on weight faster than either breed on its own.  In dogs, mixed breeds or mutts tend to have fewer overall health problems than their purebred compatriots.

… I guess I have more research to do … :)

There’s a lot to learn on the front of keeping cows, too.  We’re hoping to purchase our home or our plot on which to build our home this year, in 2019.  We are trying to determine how much land we need to build our dreams, and things like pasture quality are starting to come into play.  Of course, cost is a factor as well. We intend to rotationally graze, probably keeping all the pasture critters together - the cow (or two or three), the sheep, possibly an alpaca.  Potentially a couple of beef cows as well. The pigs we hope to get will live separately I think, as will the chickens and the rabbits.

If anyone has thoughts, comments, or advice, feel free to leave that below.  I’m also collecting recipes that can be made from fresh milk!

Thank you for reading along with us. See you next time!