Vegetable Gardens

» Sally Morton - caring for young chickens

Hello Shadow. And thanks Bob for asking the most important question- the age of the chickens is vital to determining their best care.

"A day old chicken will need to be kept in a warm brooder box, such as a cardboard box, initially. When they are young, chickens are not able to maintain their own body heat easily so an external heat source is needed. A 60-watt light bulb suspended over their cage will do the trick.

The temperature of the brooder box should be 35 degrees centigrade at first, and should then reduce to 30 degrees…”(1)

Day old chicks should be on a high protein starter ration (get the feed from your local lawn and garden supply or poultry supplier). As they get older, switch to “grower ration” and then when they start laying eggs, put them on a calcium rich laying mash or pellets. If you really want to go into this professionally or as a hobby, you can buy everything from incubators to feed online, and you can get all the knowledge you need on the Internet.

Now that is the professional advice for raising young chicks. Here's the simple how-to. I used to have laying hens and a rooster. I kept them for the eggs and because I think they are quaint to look at and it gave me a great “one with the land” feeling to have them. I bought cheap chicken feed in large bags at the garden store or even at my local grocery store. They also love collard leaves and other vegetable scraps!

We kept ours in a wire chicken pen. They need a place to "roost", overhead cover so they can get out of the rain - and not get out of the pen, and fresh straw. The biggest problem is keeping the pen clean and putting down fresh straw often.

What can you do with them? Lots of things, such as:

* Fry, roast, stew, bake, grill… (you get the idea – my personal favorite is Southern fried)
* Raise them to be show poultry; put them in your local agricultural fairs
* Keep them as pets – they are inexpensive to maintain
* Eat the eggs!
* Sell future chicks
* Sell the eggs
* Start the nucleus of your own farm animal show
* Harvest the nitrogen-rich manure for fertilizing your garden
* Keep them for pest and weed control purposes
* Become a poultry farmer – Make money with Pastured Poultry Guide and this PDF guide from Sustainable Agriculture (SARE).
* And there must be even more ideas…

Check out these resources:
(1)http://www.oldandsold.com/articles17/hum...
(2) http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/li...
(3) http://geocities.com/farmlinks/
(4) http://poultryone.com/
(5) City Poultry Farmer http://pathtofreedom.com/pathproject/sim...

I have a true “chicken story” from my youth. My family always kept chickens. There was one season when my mother decided the chickens had to go from being egg suppliers to being fried chicken for dinner.

This is how she did it. She got one of my male cousins to hold the chicken down onto a concrete block, with the neck as straight as possible. Then he chopped the heads off, one by one. This is not a pretty experience for youth as the body of the chicken will flop around even after the head is off. So there were about 15 chickens lying around with their bodies jerking and their heads off—gruesome stuff.

Green around the gills at the sight, my cousin said, “Aunt M, I just ain’t going to kill any more chickens.” And in complete understanding (after all, she hadn’t wanted to do it either), she told him, “That’s all right. This is plenty. You did a great job.”

So we ended up keeping some of the hens for eggs anyway; a couple were stewed for supper; and the rest went into the freezer. To pluck the feathers, you dip the chicken’s body into boiling water; then you pluck the feathers off.

Tip: Some people claim that allowing them to free range makes them produce eggs better. But they will scratch up your gardens in no time, and they’re not easy to catch once you let them go. I know that from personal experience . Some people clip their wings to keep them from flying.

Tip: Make a great Southern-style chicken stew by adding generous amounts of sage and flour dumplings to your chicken.

For more about poultry farming, simply put "raise poultry" into your favorite search engine.