Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter, February 2016

We’ve had floods, we’ve had freezing, and we’ve even had some nice weather so far this winter. Here in in Oregon’s Coast Range, the lilacs are in bud and the daffodils are sending up shoots, as they always do in February. For us, at least, the worst of the winter weather is likely over.

News from the Farm

Our egg production is increasing by leaps and bounds. The hens didn’t much like it when their water was frozen, and the ones on the back pasture were put out when the flooding put water a couple of inches deep around their houses, and the soggy ground made it hard to get feed out to them. But the main thing is the increased day length. Even though the days are still short, the fact that every day is longer than the day before has a powerful effect on our hens and their egg production.

Corvallis is fortunate to have an indoor winter market, which opens in mid-January. It has more customer every year and now gets positively crowded! So we have an outlet for face-to-face sales of fresh eggs as well as frozen chicken. (Why frozen? Because raising pastured broilers in the winter is a little iffy, so we raise extra broilers during the rest of the year and sell them in the winter.) Other vendors have cool-season vegetables, root crops, nuts, and many other products. Every week will include more fresh vegetables.

Our baby chick season is about to start. We’ve brooded chicks in every season, including the depth of winter, but this year we chose to allow our brooder houses to be empty from October through January.

Which means that it’s time to re-read Success With Baby Chicks. Just because I wrote it doesn’t mean that I don’t benefit from reviewing best practices!

Other projects, such as raising pastured pigs, will wait until the weather is warmer and the ground is drier.

Publishing News

I’m getting busy with my publishing company, with one new-old book out already! This one is The Fiction Factory by William Wallace Cook, the autobiography of an amazingly prolific pulp-fiction writer (who helped invent science fiction) who is most commonly remembered for his plot-generation book, Plotto, which I republished a few years ago.

I have several other books in the works, and hope to have not one, but two poultry books back in print before my March newsletter.

Why do I publish books? One reason is that, when I get interested in a topic, I read everything about it. My reading constantly reminds me that the best, most useful, and most readable books on any topic are generally out of print, and sometimes forgotten as well! Sometimes I write books on my own, sometimes I edit books that need some TLC, but often what a book really needs is simply (a) to be back in print and (b) have someone go to bat for it.

February Notes

February is the last of the laid-back, off-season months for most of us. March will introduce baby chick time.

Those of us interested in selling eggs at farmers’ markets, though, probably shouldn’t wait until March, since ideally our pullets are laying by Memorial Day, the traditional start of the farmer’s market season.

For the rest of us, there’s something to be said for dragging your feet until March or April.

February To-Do List

Inspired by a similar list in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.

• Look for better stock. Are there better chickens than what you’ve been using? Karen and I tried one more or less commercial-quality breed after another until we’d tried ’em all.
• Set hatching eggs, if you incubate your own chicks.
• Remove damp or dirty litter.
• Provide warm drinking water in cold weather. Laying hens apparently don’t drink as much ice-cold water as they should, and warmer water can result in more eggs.
• Brood early chicks.
• Adopt a sound feeding program. Have you slumped into a feeding program that lacks a reasonable rationale? Fad diets are okay for humans, since we can indulge in “cheeseburger therapy” at will, but livestock have only the options we provide, especially in winter when the foraging is poor or nonexistent. Now is a good time for review.
• Plan to keep a flock of at least 2/3 pullets (that is, brood enough pullets that you can cull most of your old hens in the fall, when they stop laying).

More Winter Chicken Care Tips

Here are links to past articles on winter care:

• Brooding Baby Chicks in Winter
• Winter Chicken Care
• How to Have Grass-Fed Eggs in Winter
• Cold and Snow vs. Open Chicken Housing: Who Will Win?

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

These are my top-selling books from last month:

1. Plotto by William Wallace Cook.
2. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout.
3. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
4. Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon.
5. Through Dungeons Deep by Robert Plamondon.

All of these are fine books (I publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get good reviews.

I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print — techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles.

Recent Blog Posts

Here are some posts since last time, from my various blogs:

• Brooding Chicks Without Electricity [Video]
• Five Things You Should Know About Subliminal Messages [Videos]

 Adventures in Social Media

And if that’s not enough, you can use social media to stay up to date:

• Friend me on Facebook
• Follow me on Twitter
• Follow me on Google+
• Follow me on LinkedIn

Ice Storm, Winter Chicken Care, and More

Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter
December, 2014

Sleep Well or Else!

I never got a November newsletter out. I’d been feeling increasingly tired, even exhausted, and I dragged myself to the doctor (Dr. Curtis Black at Philomath Family Medicine: he’s good), and got referred to Dr. Mark Reploeg at the Sleep Medicine unit of the Corvallis Clinic (he’s good, too), and … sleep apnea. Well, that would explain it! So I’m being treated and my energy is gradually returning to normal. I blog about this experience here.

Ice Storm

The dry fall ended and we got some rain, and then we got an ice storm, with temperatures hovering right around freezing and ice accumulating thickly on the trees, some of which hadn’t lost their leaves yet. Our power was out for over three days.

During the first evening, I stood on the front porch with a cup of coffee in my hands and listened to the sound of branches trees falling nearby. Crack! Thud! Repeat! It made me glad I live near a forest and not in one.

In the morning we found our mailbox smashed by a fallen limb, and the power wires down between our house and barn.

The chickens are all fine, with no damage to any of our rather flimsy chicken houses. The electrician fixed the downed wire with no problem, we got a new mailbox, and all is well.

Which is better than I can say for the neighboring forests. Plenty of limbs and big trees fell, including ready-to-harvest Douglas Firs. And a lot of medium-sized conifers lost their tops: the top ten or 20 feet of the trees bowed under the accumulated ice and then broke off. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Other notes:

• Our Honda generator started on the first pull. This always amazes me! It had been sitting unused for a year, and we didn’t prep it for storage, we just closed the fuel valve while it was running, and let it run until the carburetor was empty and it stopped.
• Several of the UPS systems we use for our computers (and even our TV) had disappointing battery performance, and I’m in the process of replacing some batteries.  I recommend APC Smart-UPS systems because they’re more generator-friendly than most, and are available with big batteries. I never buy them new anymore, since the units seem to last forever if you replace the batteries when they die. You can get used ones with dead batteries cheap on Craigslist, then replace the batteries, or you can buy refurbished units with new batteries over the Internet.
• We ran low on seasoned firewood. Sigh.

Another Web Site (or Two)

As some of you know, I got interested in hypnosis after using self-hypnosis to eliminate my insomnia. My dad also taught me a couple of simple self-hypnotic self-help techniques when I was a child, especially to get through dental visits (dentistry used to be a lot less pleasant than it is now). So I took a full training course in hypnotherapy (and then two more), and opened a part-time practice in Corvallis: Robert Plamondon Hypnosis. Which has been a pretty cool experience.

But my newest site is for alternative/unlicensed practitioners in Oregon who want to do things legally and ethically, and also not run afoul of the sometimes-bizarre obstacles that the State of Oregon puts in our path.

The State of Oregon has chosen not to license a wide range of alternative and not-so-alternative practices (because it’s Oregon, that’s why). So there are broad exemptions, but also some rules, and the rules are more or less hidden, leaving people open to some nasty surprises. I had to do an amazing amount of digging to unearth even the basics.  This surprised me, because the other branches of the state government are super helpful and do all kinds of outreach.

Anyway, the new site is unlicensed-practitioner.com, and it sets forth the basics as I currently understand them, aimed mostly at the hypnotherapist/counselor/life-coach/NLP practitioner  end of things, which is the part I have some kind of grasp on.

Winter Care

I’ve written about winter chicken care many times before, so let me offer you just a few highlights and then a list of links:

• Egg production falls dramatically when daytime highs fall below freezing.
• Chickens are much more cold-tolerant if they are dry and out of the wind. They’ll get frostbitten combs and other problems not much below freezing in damp houses, but I’m told they hold up pretty well until about -20 F if they’re dry.
• Chickens that roost in evergreens over the winter will have a wonderful time but won’t lay any eggs.
• Egg production will fall after an interruption in water that lasts a day or longer, so keep it flowing! Other shocks (running out of feed, horrible weather) will also cause slumps in egg production.
• Egg production will likely start climbing around New Year’s Day.

Here are links to past articles on winter care:

• Brooding Baby Chicks in Winter
• Winter Chicken Care
• How to Have Grass-Fed Eggs in Winter
• Cold and Snow vs. Open Chicken Housing: Who Will Win?

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

Christmas is coming! And the baby chick catalogs always arrive right on the heels of the holiday season, getting everyone fired up about the coming poultry year, so now is a great time to give books to everyone you know who likes chickens (or gardening: Gardening Without Work is a fun book).

These are my top-selling books from last month:

1. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout
2. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
3. Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon
4. Feeding Poultry by Gustave F. Heuser
5. Genetics of the Fowl by Frederick B. Hut

All of these are fine books (I publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get rave reviews from readers.

I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print — techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles at the bottom of this newsletter.

Recent Blog Posts

Here are my posts since last time:

• Practical Chicken Feeding Tips.
• How I Slept Through Sleep Apnea.

December Notes

December weather tends to go from bad to worse, with freezing and power outages to keep things interesting. (See one of my blog posts about winter experiences with free-range birds in open housing.) On the other hand, most people don’t have any baby chicks in the brooder house in December, and adult chickens are relatively tough, so December is something of a low-stakes gamble.

Later in the winter, though, people start brooding their early chicks, so the stakes get higher. If you want to have pullets laying well by the start of a traditional Farmer’s Market season (Memorial Day), you need chicks in January. If you hatch your own eggs, that means hatching eggs in December. Slow season? Wait, wasn’t winter supposed to be the slow season?

Not to mention that the hatchery catalogs will start arriving right after Christmas, with special low prices on early chicks. By January, you’ll be on fire to start the new season!

December To-Do List

Inspired by a similar list in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.

• Do final winterizing before things get really nasty. Stake down portable houses.
• Ensure plenty of liquid water for your chickens in cold weather. Warm water is better than cold if you can manage it easily.
• Give your chickens as much feed as they want. Winter is no time to save money on feed. Keeping warm requires lots of calories.
• Use artificial lights to maintain the rate of lay and to give the chickens enough light to eat by on those short, dark winter days.
• Remove wet or caked litter. If you use the deep litter system, toss it into a corner, where it will heat enough to dry out and decake itself in a few days.
• Clean out brooder houses and make ready for early chicks.
• Put out rat bait in empty houses (use bait stations and bait blocks: they’re less messy and more foolproof than other methods). Nobody likes using poison, but having rats invade the brooder house is worse. (Been there, done that.)
• Get your brooders and incubators ready for the coming season. Lay in spare parts (heat lamps for brooders, thermostats for incubators, etc.)
• If you have a breeding flock, figure out your matings now.
• Sign up for farming conferences in your area.
• Sit in front of the fire and read poultry books.

Baby Chicks in September? Seriously? And Lights for Hens

Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter, Sept 2014

News From the Farm

We’re in the busiest time of the year, but things are moving along pretty well. Our pastured pigs haven’t escaped for a while. Egg production is holding steady. The local predators seem to be finding their food elsewhere. The weather is hot and dry, and the grass is browning off, but this brief excursion from Western Oregon’s trademark “cool, damp, and green” is normal.

Baby Chicks in September? Seriously?

Everyone thinks of springtime when they think of brooding baby chicks, but fall is my personal favorite. It’s warmer and drier, and while things get colder and wetter as fall turns into winter, the baby chicks get older and hardier before the weather has time to get bad. September and October are both good times for brooding in most climates.

Why brood chicks in the fall?

If you normally brood only in the spring, it’s a way to brood twice as many chicks, or twice as many kinds of poultry, using the same equipment. If you raise egg-type chickens in the spring, you can raise broilers in the fall. Or ducks in the spring and chickens in the fall.

What kinds of chicks to brood

What kind of day-old chicks can you get in September and October? Commercial hybrids, mostly, though you never known until you contact the hatchery and see what they have available. That’s why we order ducklings, poults, and heritage-breed chicks in the spring; they’re available then. The rest of the year, we order commercial broiler and layer chicks.

This year, we’ll start our last batch of broiler chicks around October 1, so we can have fresh broilers at the Corvallis Farmers’ Market till it ends in late November. These pastured broilers always do great in the increasingly chilly late-fall weather, because they get big fast and their high metabolism keeps them comfortable even in pasture shelters.

We’ve raised pastured broilers right through the winter a couple of times, and it works fine if it doesn’t snow. If it does snow, it’s a real headache just getting feed out to them. We get meaningful amounts of snow about every other year, and that’s enough to take the shine off. We keep our broilers on a hill that’s always well-drained. On your bottom land, it would be too wet for broilers in the off-season.

For egg-type pullets, we’ll start them as late as Halloween. We keep them in the brooder house for as long as eight weeks, and by then they can withstand Oregon winters.

How to brood the chicks

I’ve written an entire book on brooding chicks (Success With Baby Chicks), with extensive chapters on off-season brooding, but the process is basically the same as spring brooding.

Some main points to keep in mind are:

• Buy your chicks from a hatchery that’s been around a while and has a good reputation. We buy our pullets from Privett Hatchery in New Mexico and our broilers from Jenks Hatchery in Oregon.
• Have the brooder area completely ready for the chicks before they arrive, and turn on the heat 24 hours in advance Don’t place baby chicks on cold, damp shavings.
• Have a fresh bag of chick starter on hand. Baby chicks are too delicate for old feed, which may have lost vital nutrients or become musty.
• Don’t try to mix chicks with older poultry. They need their own space until they’re mostly grown. (That’s why you need not one chicken coop, but at least two.

Lights for Hens

Why use artificial lighting for hens? It helps even out their egg production, so they lay pretty well over the winter. In years when we didn’t use lights, we’d often run out of eggs at the Farmer’s Market at 10:00 AM, sometimes even earlier, and that meant we disappointed more customers than we satisfied. That’s not a happy feeling!

The lights only increase the total number of eggs per year slightly, by less than 15%. The main effect is to encourage the hens to lay more eggs year-round. They’ll lay fewer in the spring to compensate.

Some people will try to convince you that using artificial lights on hens is like giving them 63 cups of coffee a day, not letting them sleep, and making them nervous and stressed all the time. That’s not hens, that’s us! When I go out to the chicken coops at night, when the lights are on, most of the hens are sleeping soundly on their perches. Makes me a little envious.

September 1 is the traditional time to start using lights, and April 1 is the traditional time to stop. Fourteen hours of light a day is the traditional amount. The big commercial guys use fancier algorithms than this, but if you don’t have thousands of hens, I doubt you’ll be able to tell the difference.

Last year we started using the new LED lamps, which I like better than the compact fluorescent bulbs because they’re not as fragile. We basically run many hundreds of feet of outdoor extension cords across the hen pasture, with lamps in every roosting house. Where cords connect together, we wrap the joint with electrical tape, and if necessary use a chunk of wood to keep the cord out of a puddle. This sounds pretty casual, but the connections are just as bright and clean at the end of the lighting season as they were at the beginning. In theory, we’d be okay with a 25-watt equivalent bulb for each 8×8-foot chicken coop, but we use 40-watt equivalent bulbs, just to be sure.

For more details about lighting, see this article I wrote way back when, in my March 2003 newsletter.

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

These are my top-selling books from July:

1. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout
2. Genetics of the Fowl by Frederick B. Hutt
3. Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook by Robert Plamondon
4. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
5. Company Coming by Ruth Stout

All of these are fine books (I publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get rave reviews from readers.

I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print — techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles at the bottom of this newsletter.

Recent Blog Posts

Posts on my farm blog since my last newsletter:

• More on Blog and Newsletter Migration
• U.S. Patent #38
• Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work, Still Going Strong
• Scratch Feed for Chickens

September To-Do List

September is one of the easiest months in the poultry calendar.

To-do items:

• Start using artificial lights for consistent egg production. A bare bulb, equivalent to 60 watts for every 100 square feet of floor space, is plenty.
• Brood fall chicks.
• Repair roofing (winter is coming!).
• House pullets (if you raised them on range).
• Avoid overcrowding.
• Cull molting hens. (Hens that start molting this early probably won’t start laying until spring. It would be cheaper and better to make chicken and dumplings out of them and replace them with baby chicks.)
• Begin artificial lighting. (Traditionally, providing a day length of 14 hours between September 1 andMarch 31.)
• Cull any poor pullets.
• Provide additional ventilation. (Always, always, always provide more ventilation than seems necessary.
• Gather eggs more frequently in warm weather.
• Remove soiled litter. (If using deep litter, shovel some of it out to make room for the additional litter you’ll add over the winter, but only if it looks like the litter will get so deep it will make things impractical. “More is better” with deep litter.)

List inspired by a similar one in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.

Adventures in Social Media

And if that’s not enough, you can use social media to stay up to date:

• Friend me on Facebook
• Follow me on Twitter
• Follow me on Google+
• Follow me on LinkedIn

This newsletter is sent out occasionally by Robert Plamondon to anyone who asks for it. Robert runs Norton Creek Press.

Norton Creek Press Book List

• Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout
• Company Coming: Six Decades of Hospitality by Ruth Stout
• Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
• Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon
• The Dollar Hen by Milo M. Hastings
• Feeding Poultry by Gustave F. Heuser
• Genetics of the Fowl by Frederick B. Hutt
• Ten Acres Enough by Edmund Morris
• Gold in the Grass by Margaret Leatherbarrow
• We Wanted a Farm by M. G Kains
• Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook by Robert Plamondon
• One Survivor by Robert Plamondon.
• The Tom Slade Series by Percy Keese Fitzhugh. (Two volumes in print; more on the way.)
• A Thousand Miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards.
• A Plotto: The Classic Plot-Suggestion Tool for Writers of Creative Fiction by William Wallace Cook.