@nosummer where did you get yours from? I keep 6 chickens, I would love to supplement their diet more. I took a quick look on Google and found some seed sources but they are few and far in between!
It’s in just about every nursery here as 1 or 2 year old seedlings due to the permaculture popularity. Not sure about in the US but it’s usually americans talking about it online so I’m sure it must be around.
In the permaculture orchard side of the internet they’re big into interplanting their fruit trees with nitrogen fixers like honey locust, pea shrubs, goumi and autumn olive, and sea buckthorn to increase soil fertility.
I’m not sure how effective they really are at feeding surrounding fruit trees, but goumi is yummy and productive, pea shrubs are good for the chickens and an easily storable famine food, so what the hey I’m trying those two out at the center of each grid of trees.
Would definately do that to give them shade and for fruit. Another trick I did when I kept chickens is I kept wheat growing in the winter to feed the chickens the greens. They stay very healthy on wheat but for whatever reason wheat causes chickens to lose feathers. The grain is a perfect food for chickens. The way I buy wheat is drive my truck to fields or the coop during harvest and fill the bed with wheat. Took it home shoveling the wheat into trash cans as inexpensive food. The yearly food supply set me back around $100 for 35 chickens. Here is part of my old flock Clarkinks older fruit and vegetable growing Projects in Kansas
You can also see a patch of open pollinated rye growing there I raised for their feed. I would just set up a mobile chicken wire pen between garden rows and they kept things cleaned out for me. @dutch-s that little one in the top picture is a rescue I flew back as an egg from key west Florida. Most of the eggs were an omelet by the time i got them. His family was apparently apprehended assaulting tourists for their sandwiches. He’s small and looks innocent but he was far from it. A wilder chicken I never owned he made pheasants look tame. He’s standing in front of that barred rock. Barred rock are predator chickens with a hooked beak like you posted earlier. They kill mice with that beak just like a hawk.
Black Sex Links are derived from crossing a male Rhode Island Red with a Barred Rock Hen . Thats why you see so many barred rocks around. They call them sex links because they are easy to sex as the males all look barred rock and the females are all black with red flecks in the feathers. If your planning to eat chickens a sex link makes things easy. Then you know the roosters from hens quickly.
Lovely girls. Mine are Blackrock which I think is also Rhode Island Red x Barred Rock or maybe the other way round. They’re hardy, healthy, forage all day, don’t try to escape, smart enough to handle 3 buzzards nesting 100m away, and love to stand around in the bucketing rain all day like it’s nothing (more slugs to hunt). Their black feathers have a sheen like an oil slick. They went off laying every single day for maybe a month in the winter. One of them was laying double yolks every time for her first 6 months, and her eggs are still huge.
Have not kept chickens in a few years but @39thparallel drops me by some farm eggs from time to time still. If I was raising chickens that’s who I would get eggs from to incubate them. His are a wild bunch and they are similar to the ones in the photos above.
A few chickens is a great way to get along with the neighbours as well, since I always have too many eggs now. I was a blow-in last year, now I’ve met everyone and I’ve got some great potatoes flowing back at me in return. One neighbour promised to teach me to fish which would be great, supposed to be great salmon and pike around here!
I think this community sharing aspect is also a big buffer against shortages, and used to be so much stronger. The concept of self-sufficiency kind of misses the point for me when it comes to resilience and food stability.
I’m an all in Locals guy. I really love the atmosphere and camaraderie of the local attitude. I won’t get political for fear of being out of line but will just say Local is where I think it should all start and end as far as what we expect from real life.
There is nothing wrong with buying and raising things locally it’s practical and efficient. Working with other local farmers in Kansas just makes sense for us. Neighbors helped me out today.
The last video of the Alaskan Youtubers that have chickens//they were feeding their chickens salmon. I guess they like to give them a lot of energy. Also their chickens are laying eggs again (longer days?) They said the cold up there in November killed some of their birds…it was just too cold/too soon and they weren’t ready. I would do chickens here but everyone we know that has tried them they always get chomped by wild animals (fox/etc).
My chicken pen looked like fort Knox I didn’t lose any birds. The coyote and dogs paced the perimeter. Once found some determined dogs had dug down nearly a full 3 feet only to find I buried rebar and fencing 36". They were so warn out they were sleeping on the dirt pile when I arrived. In hindsight I should have back filled with concrete. They scared the chickens pretty bad. The hawks swooped down too eat my birds finding I fenced the top of the pen as well. They would perch on top. If I got a determined predator I wired up the electric fencer. Get your chickens but be ready for war.
I have wire on the ground all the way round and top and sides wired . I bought a pre-made coop from Tractor supply that has a metal pallet on the bottom and I put predator proof locks on everything. It would have to be a damn determined animal or a bear that would get in. A bear could rip the coop apart if pissed but their usually to lazy here to do that. Plenty else for them to eat without working for it.
Kept them in 5 ’ fences when I was home that covered large areas. Had the chicken yard sectioned in 4 spots and 2 were orchard , 2 were gardens. When I left I put them in fort knox. The other photos show the 2 chicken pens im talking about. The photos below I posted earlier show the big fence . I rotated them amongst the 4 pens totalling 1/2 an acre or more.
I found this -
