permaculture

Sump oil and chook feet

I've mentioned a few times on this blog the problems our chooks have with scaley leg. Over the years, we've been treating it by dunking the chooks legs in vegetable oil (an operation that requires at least 2 people) and dusting the perches with Derris dust. I later had the good idea of trying spray-on oil cooking. It was great - the spraying was much easier than finding a suitable size vessel for dunking the legs, and it used less oil; the only downside was that it didn't work - the oil just didn't go on thickly enough.

Recently, the problem has re-emerged, and at the same time we've had our local vet out on the property giving the donkey injections for an abcess on her leg. Bruce raised the question of scaley leg with the vet, and she told him that we weren't using the right materials. She recommended sump oil rather than cooking oil (because it's so thick and heavy, it sticks well to the legs), and tobacco juice rather than Derris dust. You take a packet of rolling tobacco, soak it in water overnight, strain the tobacco out, then paint the resulting foul-smelling brew onto the perches. It's apparently extremely toxic to all sorts of bugs.

We have tried this approach with great success (although I made the mistake of stirring the tobacco in with my hands, which left them smelling as though I had a 50-a-day habit!). The chooks perked up almost immediately after the treatment and are looking really good a few weeks later.

Oiling the chooks

From time to time our chooks suffer from scaley leg (an infestation of mites that make their legs look lumpy). There are a range of different treatments, but the one we've used successfully in the past is to cover the legs with cooking oil. We would fill a small container with the oil, then Bruce would hold the bird while I 'painted' the oil onto the legs using a shoe brush. The whole thing was very messy, and we often ended up tipping over the oil container, or dripping oil onto our clothes.

At the backyard chook course I attended recently, we discussed scaley leg, and Glynda, our instructor, mentioned that someone she knows sprays WD40 onto the birds' legs! This sounded a very blokey thing to do, but Glynda pointed out that a spray can of cooking oil would probably work just as well. So today I bought a large spray can of canola oil from the supermarket and we've just oiled all the chooks in the main dome. It worked a treat, used a lot less oil, and made it easy to coat all parts of the chooks legs (doing the underside was a challenge with the shoe brush method).

Lots learnt about chooks

I've just been on a backyard chook course at Canberra Institute of Technology. I attended the course because I wanted to find out more about keeping ducks; after all, we've had chooks for years now, so I thought I knew most of what I needed to know. Well, I was wrong, there were lots of useful things about chooks that I should have known, but didn't. The main things I learnt about chooks (and ducks) were:

• don't use straw for the nesting box - mites and other insects live inside the stalks and infest the birds; instead, use a mixture of things like shell grit, sand and wood shavings
• if you're delousing a chook, you only need to powder the underside, not the whole bird
• if the chooks have scaly leg, you can spray their legs with cooking oil from a can (I already knew about the oil, but had been trying to put it on from a container with a shoe brush - spraying it on sounds much easier) 
• chooks drink first thing in the morning, so if you want to worm them, you take the water away at about 4pm the night before, then give them fresh water containing the worming chemical the next morning and they'll all dose themselves on it
• a 2-L plastic milk carton with part of the side cut out makes a great drinking vessel for chooks (keeps the dust out of the water)
• if you're killing a chook to eat, don't feed it for 24 hours (so that the intestines are clean), then once it's dead, you can remove the skin with the feathers on as an alternative to plucking the bird (saves a lot of time and mess if you're only going to throw the feathers away anyway)
• ducks don't need a whole bath full of water, just something deep enough for them to put their heads into.

There's still another session of the course to go, so no doubt I'll learn even more useful things at that.

Feeding the chooks

There hasn't been much activity on this blog of late because we have had problems with our internet access for some months - very frustrating. However, our chooks continue to flourish. We've given two hens away to the neighbours and will soon be getting a new rooster from them in return (we decided it was time for some fresh blood in the flock), and there are some young roosters almost ready for the pot. Our local vet has instructed us in the art of chick sexing so now we don't have to wait for them to crow or lay eggs before knowing which birds to keep and which to eat.

I was delighted to get comments from a reader in China! In response to Lale's comment, we buy organic chook food and get through several kilos a week. That's supplemented by our food scraps and some greens from the garden. In addition, we have 3 families around Canberra saving their food scraps for us, so once a week we visit them to pick up a full bucket compost and leave a replacement bucket and some eggs or produce from the garden. This helps to give the chooks a more varied diet. Of course, the chooks in the main dome also get to feast on greenery, worms and insects each time the dome moves, which is generally every two weeks.

Thanks to CRTOMIR for all that information on raising chooks - it sounds as though you've got a really good system going, with some very contented birds. Ours don't have much protection from the weather, so they are not so good at laying in the height of summer or winter.

Reaching full capacity

Our poultry population continues to expand - the broody chook I brought home from work (which Bruce has christened 'Janet', after my boss) successfully hatched six eggs and we still have two of our own hens sitting on yet more eggs. I thought we were doing very well until I saw Rose's comment that she has 67 chicks - can't compete with that!

Actually the domes are nearly at full capacity. The Permaculture Home Garden suggests a maximum of 12 birds per dome, and we've currently got:

• 8 hens and 1 rooster in the main dome that's travelling round the mandalas
• 4 hens and 1 rooster in the smaller dome that sits next to Bruce's veggie patch by the septic tank, plus 13 chicks ranging in age from about 2 to 6 weeks
• 2 broody hens sitting on eggs in the A frame that we use as a maternity ward.

That makes 29 birds altogether, plus whatever hatches from the two broody hens, which is way too many. So, once the chicks get big enough, we'll eat any that are roosters, and keep the female ones to replace some of our older birds that aren't laying very well. We'll also do a rooster swap with our neighbours, to get some new blood into our flock, which is getting rather inbred.

Tasty bird

I'm proud to say that yesterday we successfully killed one of our own birds and had it for dinner in a delicious casserole. We learnt from the mistakes we made last time we tried this exercise (when we mistakenly killed a 3 or 4-year old rooster, and had roast leather for dinner). This time we chose one of the birds that hatched at the end of last year, so we were quite sure it wasn't going to be old and tough. Six little chicks survived that hatching, and 3 of them appear to be roosters; as we don't need them (we've already got a rooster in each dome), we decided to knock one off.

Bruce caught and swiftly dispatched the bird, then I did the processing. That involves dunking in very hot water then in cold, to remove the feathers, then fiddling around and cutting a bit to remove the innards. It's all very messy, but this time I used much bigger buckets (last time I couldn't get the bird right into the water), and wore gloves (to avoid stinking of blood for hours afterwards) and my gardening shoes (to avoid blood-stained tennis shoes - most embarrassing on the court!).

I was following Jackie French's instructions, and she said that you could eat the bird straight away if you casserole it (for roasting, you have to leave it to stand for at least 24 hours). So, I made chicken paprika, and although the servings were pretty small (when plucked, our little rooster only weighed about 900gm), it tasted fantastic. What made it even better was knowing that we'd raised it ourselves, which made it a very low-food-miles dinner.

Meanwhile, the garden looks wonderful after all the rain we've had recently. We're harvesting masses of zucchini, basil, aubergines, silver beet, capsicums and even a few tomatoes (we had a pretty poor crop of those this year). Grain amaranth is the main thing we've got growing, so at least the chooks will get well fed! Here is a photo of the middle circle from the second mandala, which contains a bath-tub pond (full of tadpoles and now more frogspawn) and several native plants, and of course, the ubiquitous grain amaranth (on the right-hand side of the photo):

Click on photo to enlarge image

Chook food dilemma

For the past 6 months or so, our chooks have had the luxury of being fed with high-quality organic grain (supplemented of course with our kitchen scraps, garden trimmings and the odd handful of worms from the worm farm). Now, thanks to the drought, our organic supplier has had to resort to getting grain from Queensland. The bags he delivered a few weeks ago contained a completely different mix, and included layer pellets. This was fine for our older chooks, as it looks similar to the non-organic feed we used to get from our local stockfeed store. However, for the 6 birds that hatched in November last year, it's a disaster. They've never seen the pellets or these particular grains before, so they get very excited on seeing Bruce approaching in the morning, but then totally ignore the food that he kindly scatters around for them.

Paul, the supplier, suggested we try soaking the grain to make it more palatable, but the chooks are no more impressed by the soggy mess that results than by the dry stuff. Luckily this week we managed to get a couple of bags of the old-style grain from Paul, and the young birds are getting stuck into that. It's an issue because we want to start eating those birds (or at least the ones we can identify as roosters), so we want them to be good and plump.

More chicks

This morning the broody chook finally came out into the dome, accompanied by a brood of seven little chicks. This is quite an event, because in the past we've only had one or two eggs hatch, in spite of the chook sitting on about eight eggs. Interestingly, five of the seven chicks are either black or grey, suggesting that they may be the offspring of the Orpington-cross rooster, who appears to be doing a better job of fertilising the eggs than his predecessor.

Here is a photo of two of the chicks:

Click on image to enlarge photo

Record hatching

A couple of weeks ago we put the broody hen into the second dome with our spare rooster and new Barneveld/Orpington hen. She was sitting on about nine eggs and this morning had three chicks - one grey, one black and one yellow. This is something of a record, as we've only ever had one or two eggs hatch from previous batches. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the old rooster (the one we recently ate by mistake) has gone, and in his place we have two much younger roosters, who are perhaps more active!

Bad choice of bird

This weekend we bit the bullet and killed a rooster to eat. However, choosing the one to kill turned out to be difficult. On our return from holiday we had found that instead of one rooster we had three — a black Orpington cross and two brown ones (one of which was busy trying to disguise itself as a hen, by keeping its head down). We had decided to keep the Orpington, because it's so pretty, and eat one of the brown ones. However, we made the foolish assumption that the rooster that was trying to look like a hen was the new one, and that the one strutting around, obviously in charge, was the one we've had for a couple of years.

So, on Saturday evening we picked out the 'new' rooster, despatched it from this earth with one fell swoop of the cleaver, and then spent a very messy hour dunking it in hot and then cold water (to get the feathers off) and removing the innards. On Monday evening, having given the meat time to 'set', I duly roasted the bird, but when I tried to pierce the skin next to the leg, to see if the chicken was done, I realised we'd made the wrong choice —the skin was as thick and tough as old boots. Since this was the centrepiece of our evening meal, we sat down to eat it anyway, but it was revolting and we gave up. Not being one to waste anything, I've now turned it into delicious chicken stock, but I think it will be a while before we try homegrown chicken again.