Picture Sundays: A Chicken Coop Made From a Trampoline

October 28, 2012

...From the Homesteading/Survivalism Facebook page, a chicken coop made from a trampoline. Here’s a little more on the project. This coop appears to be a DIY variation on the Joel Salatin movable poultry pen. I’m assuming there’s a way to lock the chickens in the top part at night to keep out critters that might dig under the run....

Read…

Saturday Linkages: Collecting Seaweed, Microfarming and DIY Bike Lanes

Mr. Homegrown

November 19, 2016

Saturday Linkages

3 Comments

...inst #Salmonella: https://t.co/G2IgoBuG78 pic.twitter.com/BCATGNFEot — The Poultry Site (@thepoultrysite) November 14, 2016 This is the kind of language I hear from people who are getting on with the work to be done… https://t.co/JYXJZUHD0w — Root Simple (@rootsimple) November 19, 2016 Yup. This is what we have to do more of: Guerrilla Bike Lanes: San Francisco Makes Illicit Infrastructure Permanent https://t.co/JnP88SPAp3 — Root Simple (@rootsimp...

Read…

More Araucana Egg Colors

Mr. Homegrown

January 15, 2008

Animals, Chickens

2 Comments

...Still got the flu, so another short post today. We got another beautiful Araucana egg this morning. For those who like to be precise about your Araucana egg colors, we present the chart above, painstakingly crafted by British poultry enthusiast Frank Decmar and available on ebay....

Read…

A tip for bored chickens . . .

Mr. Homegrown

June 30, 2015

Animals, Chickens

11 Comments

Yet more ideas from the poultry seminar I attended last week. Behavioral specialist Richard Blatchford of UC Cooperative Extension had a great idea for entertaining hens like ours that are confined to a run: give them a bale of straw and don’t even undo the strings. I used to cut the strings and toss them the bale in sections. Keeping it intact keeps them occupied for a much longer time. They’ve been obsessed with the bale for days now and are sl...

Read…

Do Hens Make Noise?

Mr. Homegrown

January 7, 2008

Animals, Chickens

13 Comments

...out an egg, or some wonder of selective breeding, a way to announce to the poultry farmer, “Hey, time to collect an egg!” In fact, research presented by University of Sheffield animal scientists Tommaso Pizzari and Tim R. Birkhead, in an article entitled “For whom does the hen cackle? The function of postoviposition cackling,” posit that cacking is a way for hens to get the message out to nearby roosters that they ain’t in the mood. As Pizzari and...

Read…