The Screwdriver and the Tree

Here’s something you don’t see every day. On my morning walk, I noticed that someone had driven a screwdriver deep into the trunk of a tree:

It’s about six feet off the ground. Pounding it in must have been mighty inconvenient.

What could the purpose be? If I pull the screwdriver out of the tree, do I become King of the Loggers?

I’m afraid to try!

More Crazy Book Auctions

Let’s go nuts and do it all again! Last week I auctioned off a full set of Norton Creek Press titles (thirteen in all), which sold for low prices, with savings ranging from 10% to 99.93% of full price — one book sold for a penny!

So a bunch of people got great bargains, especially considering how good these books are (I won’t publish a book I don’t love). And I’m doing it again this week. Why? I think that a consistent presence in eBay auctions will eventually attract enough bidders that prices will become reasonable. So far, though, it’s a bargain-hunter’s paradise.

So check out my auctions. Christmas is coming! Buy books for your friends and don’t let them know you got them at a bargain price!

Winter Pasture for Grass-Fed Eggs

A lot of us live in climates that are mild enough that “winter pasture” is a valid concept. If you can manage to keep a green range going all winter, you can achieve that grass-fed goodness year-round. So what kind of winter pasture works best?

Cool-season grasses for free-range chickens. Traditionally, cool-season grasses have worked very well, with cereal grains (oat, wheat, and barley) providing good, reliable, palatable, rugged, nutritious cool-season ground cover. Here in Western Oregon, it’s not too late to plant such things. A lot of people live in warmer climates than I do, and they’ll have even better luck.

The problem with these annual grasses is that they die in the summertime, so you’ll want to sow something else by the time the cool-season annuals start to give up the ghost. This is where a grass-legume mixture shines, since clovers do very well in the season where cool-season annuals don’t.

Perennial grasses for free-range chickens. I haven’t seen any perennial grasses that leap out of the ground after a fall sowing the way wheat and oats do, but of course they don’t turn up their toes and die as soon as summer arrives, which is a bonus.

Permanent pasture for free-range chickens. Having a pasture ecosystem with a maximum amount of biodiviversity, that is tuned to your local micro-climate, sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? This is what happens on permanent pasture, where you never plow, and just accept whatever grows. All you do is mow (and re-seed bare spots). Start with whatever will create a good ground cover quickly, and allow other species to creep in. You’ll soon have a mix of multiple grasses and legumes. That’s what I do.

Grass height for free-range chickens. chickens are fairly low-slung. Tall grass restricts their movements, provides concealment for predators, and gives them opportunities to lay eggs where you’ll never find them. There was some research done on the topic of grass height, way back when (don’t have the reference handy, sorry), and cutting the pasture at two inches worked best. Six inches was too high.

It’s not edible if it’s not green. Chickens will happily eat bright green pasture plants, but when the green starts to fade and the plants go woody, they lose interest.

A lot of this information came from Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. If you want to do anything more demanding than feeding your chickens out of a sack, you need this book. Over 600 pages of information and wisdom about poultry nutrition, including a chapter on green feed and pasturing. Written in the Fifties, when people still knew about such things, but when modern nutrition had been figured out, too. Highly recommended.

Happy pasturing!

What To Do When Your Chickens Lose Their Feathers

What do you do when your chickens start to lose all their feathers? Nothing, if it’s fall. They’re molting and look revolting. Nothing you can do about it.

Chickens grow a new set of feathers every year, usually in the fall, so they’re ready for cold weather. They can also molt in response to stress.

My older hens are in various stages of molt. Many of them are missing the feathers on their necks, others are missing wing and tail feathers, and a few over-achievers are missing both. In most cases, unsightly pinfeathers (the stubs of the new, emerging feathers) are making them look even worse.

Hens generally stop laying during the molt, which is why the fall is the worst season of the year for egg production. Winter is actually better, so long as you keep the water flowing and the feeders full and the hens aren’t exposed to too much wind or rain.

In the commercial confinement industry, the hens tend to get seriously overweight, and they lack the environmental cues that outdoor hens get, so their bodies tend not to realize that it’s molting season. Getting them back into trim sometimes requires that their water be withheld for several days and always requires that they be given little or no feed for up to two weeks. But we’ve never had these problems on free range.

Some people think you should feed hens extra-high protein diets during the molt, but I’ve never seen the point (or any research supporting it). A diet that will support high egg production will support high feather production.

Wrestling With Google Groups

[Update: the links actually work now!]

I invited all 4,400+ subscribers to my monthly poultry newsletter to join the Grass-Fed Eggs discussion group, and then the fun began.

It turns out that Google Groups will let you sign up without having a Google account, but if you do, you can’t change your subscription options. And the default subscription option is “send me every posting as a separate email message,” which — because the group has become lively — is too many email messages for most people.

And to add insult to injury, Google Groups managed to double-subscribe a lot of people under two different email addresses. How, I have no idea. People who were dual-subscribed could edit the options of only one of these, leaving the other one blasting them unwanted emails. Sigh.

This has pretty much blown over now.

In general, I think the problem revolves around bugs in the “invite new members” feature, and there are similar problems for people who subscribe via email rather than through the Google Groups Web site. If you use the Web site, you should have no problems.

So when you join the group, do yourself a favor and subscribe via the link, using the Google Groups Web interface, and not with the hokey email subscription mechanism. This requires that you have a Google account. If you use more than one email address, set the email options in your Google account to let Google know this, and you won’t have any trouble. And set your subscription to “Daily Email Digest.” It’s the best compromise for most people.

It turns out the Google Groups are notorious for being sadly neglected, as discussed in this article from Wired. I had decided to put my discussion forum on Google Groups because I was tired of the long, slow decline in quality in Yahoo Groups. Just goes to show.