Rebuilding the Chicken Flock

During November of 2018 we had a dog attack that killed 18 of our 24 chickens. We ended up with 6 survivors 1 rooster and 5 hens.  The owner of the dog took full responsibility and properly compensated us for the loss of the chickens. With the daylight finally lengthening the hens are laying again and our rooster, Lucky, is doing is job. The fertility rate is probably not the best since it has been so cold and the hens are just starting the lay.  However, it is time to start to rebuild the flock. This will probably be the the 1st of many incubator hatches. I am also going to supplement with a few chicks from the local feed store.

Some of the survivors of the great 2018 dog attack.

The selection of eggs is still kind of light but we did place 15 eggs in the incubator on Friday, Feb 8th.

Some of the eggs collected

Eggs placed in the incubator

I am going to candle them on Wednesday, Feb 13th to see their 5 day growth.  Most likely I will be tossing some then do to the fact they were not fertilized. 

A New Year and a Year in Review

Wow time flies.... I was just thinking I really should update this blog more often.  In the year of 2018 we got two Babydoll Southdown sheep. We got them as bottle ewe lambs and after they grew up a bit they did a great job on mowing the South Pasture down.

Right now they are off the pasture and into their winter area. But they still like to hang outside in the snow. Ah... the magical thermal insulating properties of wool.

Sheep shearing time will be around the end of March or 1st half of April. 

In addition we raised and processed 14 turkeys in 2018. 7 Broad Breasted Bronze(BBB) and 7 Bourbon Red(BR)turkeys. Those Bourbon Red turkeys sure now how to fly and we spent a good part of last October and November herding them back in the pen.  

The turkeys were moved to different areas of the unfinished vacant ground that will be turned into the North Pasture during 2019. 

I had 300ft of electric netting to enclose them. We processed them the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The overall avg weight of the BBB was a respectable 24lbs and the BR were around an avg of 10lbs. 

We also raised to pigs for meat in 2018.  They were a Mangalitsa X Kunekune.  We got 2 very healthy gilt pigs at 8 weeks old in April and had them butchered on the November 1st. Live weight was around 300lbs for each and a hanging weights were 197lbs and 199lbs. Final pork pork products were around 135lbs for one and 140lbs for the other. 

In addition they gave a lot of fat to render. They were moved around in some paddocks throughout the first 4 months and then the last 3 months moved to a big pen. The last 6 weeks they were finished on at least 5 gallons of apples a day in addition to a free choice grain mixture. Which yielded some great tasting pork.

Our pig experience was by far the best that we have had with out farm animals. They were incredibly smart and great easy going animals.  I think it is the Kunekune side that was coming out.  We loved that we had very minimal food waste in the fact that all extra cooked food that we don't eat gets fed to them.... and they love it. In fact that lead to us getting some more pigs right before Christmas of last year. I will have to create a separate post for those pigs.

Anyways, I will attempt to keep this blog up to date more often at least one post a month.

2017 Garlic and Shallots

So, I was inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka treatsie "One Straw Revolution" to try a few things in the garlic and shallot patch.  My goal was to spend no more than 2 hours of work TOTAL from planting to harvesting the garlic and shallots, use organic fertilizers, and mulch with straw.  Well, I did it with only 5 water turns too. The shallots turned out great. Some of the largest best tasting shallots I have grown. The garlic did 50/50. The hardneck varieties of Music and Duganski did fairly well.  However, the soft neck Susanville and Red Italian Late did not fare as well.  All of the garlic and shallots are currently curing. I will pick the best and largest garlic and shallot bulbs to be replanted this fall.

Garlic and Shallot patch with heavy straw

HARVEST 

Pasture Update

So, I put out some pasture seed last October and this March and so far the results are promising.  Some of the seed that was sown are Meadow Brome, Ryegrass, Orchard Grass, Tall Fescue, and Blue Grass. I am also grow some weeds and I am hoping to reduce the weed load by the next Spring. I am learning that establishing a good pasture takes work,time and patience.

First cutting (mid May)

Second cutting(July 2)

I have never done anything pasture related in my life. So, the whole process is one big learning experience. I definitely learned a lesson that if I am not making hay I should wait for the heat wave to pass. It is brutal on the pasture to be cut and then exposed to almost a week of 100+ degrees Fahrenheit days. I hope that it will recover in fall when it cools down.  I anticpate this will not be my only mistake along the pasture journey. 

I purchased the cattle panels to fence the pasture in. I will do that around first half of September after the weather cools down a bit. 

The chickens sure do enjoy foraging out there in the mornings and evenings. Next Spring, we will be adding some sheep to the farm that will graze out on the pasture. 

Another Chicken Coop

I was also able to get another chicken coop made. I call them "Apple Coops" since they use a retired apple orchard box as the base. They are approximately 4 feet in width X 4 feet in depth X 3 feet high. Just under the roof, the top is covered with hardware cloth to keep predators out. One advantage of that is that gives a lot of ventilation. In the winter, I just covered up the hardware cloth with some plywood to keep the cold drafts down.  They are portable with a simple garden cart. The total cost was around $40 and took about 4 hours to build. The cost could be further decreased by using recycled or upcycled materials.  This is Version 2(V2) and the changes to this version are as follows

• Sliding coop door to reduce hinges and overall cost.
• Increased slope of roof so snow does not accumulate as easily

Apple Coop V2 on the garden cart 

Apple Coop V1(left) and Apple Coop V2(right)

Apple Coop V1 has been deployed for over 1 year and has performed well, even though one of Utah's worst winters on record. Apple Coop V3  is in the works and will include a better way to access the freshly laid eggs.  When I build V3, I will document the whole process and get a better bill of material made. I will then do a  post about it.  

Broiler Chickens

We had 40 broiler chickens arrive at the end of March here at the little farm. After 9 weeks,  we had 36 that made it to the slaughter date.  Our max dressed chicken was 9lbs and the smallest 6lbs 14oz. I calculated the cost per lb of chicken to be $1.39/lb. I figure I can lower it to around $1.09/lb when I get another round of broilers in the fall. I am also not going to get any more than 20 broilers, processing 36 broilers took around 8 hours.

Day old chicks in the brooder

4 week old chicks, time to get outside

8 week old broilers

8 week old broilers

We tried a couple of things while raising them this time.

• Invested into electric poultry netting
• Brooder nipple waters while raising them as chicks
• Bulk poultry feed from Leland Mills

I will speak, in more detail, about each of these below 

Electric Poultry Netting

After the dog attack,one day before slaughter date, last year that wiped out 80% of my broilers we were determined to defend our investment. We purchased a Premier 1 PoultryNet Plus 12/48/3 electric poultry netting. I deployed it 5 weeks with a solar powered energizer when they were big enough to not fit thru the netting. I was extremely happy with the setup and it kept away all predators. All in all I would highly recommend it.

Electric netting deployed around the broiler coop

Brooder Nipple Waterers
I ordered a four of these small brooder nipple waterers. They worked out great.  If you have ever hated  cleaning out the wood chips, poop, and feathers from those small mason jar waterers every 6 hours you would love these waters. I highly recommend them. In fact, I plan on expanding nipple waterers to the whole flock soon.

Bulk Poultry Feed

We are luckly enough to have a great feed mill around 20 miles away, Leland Mill.  If you provide your own container, we put ours in 35 gallon galvanized cans, you can get 100lbs of 24% crude protein broiler mash feed for $20.35. Each can carried up to 200lbs of feed. This is about the max weight that I can move around the farm by myself without the tractor.  We got a total of 850lbs of feed for broilers from here.  It really helped lower the cost of  raising the broilers.  I highly Leland Mill for bulk feed.

Full 35 gallon cans

All in all, it was a good experience. We learned a lot and have a bunch of delicious fresh farm raised chicken. I can't eat the factory farm raised chicken anymore, it has no taste.

GARLIC AND SHALLOTS

I love this time of year.  The feeling of Winter slowly thawing and the garlic and the shallots breaking their dormancy. That means that Spring is just around the corner.

Next Saturday, is February's Farm Day around here and that means we're  building some chicken brooders and grow out coops. We have 40 broiler chickens arriving in about 3 weeks. It will be the largest single chicken brooding we have ever done here. We are looking forward too it!

It has been a long time...

WOW! It has been a while since I last updated.  A lot of projects were completed in 2016.

• Grass in the front and portions of the backyard. The kids love it.
• New chicken coop(still needs paint and some finishing touches)
• Turkey pen/enclosed breeding pen.
• Raised and slaughted some chicken broilers (qty 15).
• Raised and slaughtered some turkeys (qty 8).
• Leveled and planted seed in the future pasture.

My improvement goals for 2017 are as follows:

• Raise a majority of of our own poultry meat that we consume.
• Put fruit and nut trees in the orchard area.
• Fence in the pasture area.
• Use the pasture for supplement feeding for our poultry.
• Redo the composting area.
• Add grains to the garden area.
• Finish painting the new chicken coop.
• Design and build brooder/grow out/laying coops(qty 2).
• Design and build a chicken tractor for use on the pasture.

I will do better on keeping this updated; hopefully, the updates will be on progress of the 2017 improvement projects.

Chicken Coop Sensor

Well, the soil sensors are taking a little bit of a back seat on this post.  What we did was use some of the guts of the soil sensor to help monitor temperature and humidity inside the chicken coop. The 3D printed enclosure is 3 pieces. The coop side round boss can be changed out to accommodate different wall coup thicknesses, i.e. longer for thicker wall, etc... Of course it is solar powered and I tried to keep the installation of it as simple as possible.

• A Drill
• 2" Hole Saw
• A qty of 4, #6 X 3/4" wood screws

Figure 1:  Sensor and US quarter for scale

Figure 2: Another view

Figure 3: Coop side showing DHT22 sensor

Figure 4: Isometric coop side view

Installation was a breeze..... no running wires. Just use the hole saw to create the hole and screw in the 4 wood screws to attach the unit to the chicken coop.

Figure 5: Attached chicken coop sensor

Figure 6: Coop side 

It is now up on Thingspeak right now, https://thingspeak.com/channels/48131

So, if you get bored take a look.

Improvements to make to the sensor.

• A HTU21d to measure ambient temp and relative humidity OUTSIDE of the coop.
• Enlarge clearence holes to a #6 woodscrew passes easier though it.
• Dust cover to help partially enclose the DHT22 from dust, etc...
• Add ammonia sensor

 I need to give a quick garden update. The peppers did great this year as well as the tomatoes. However, the watermelon did so-so this year. The garlic and the shallots will need to be planted soon. I can't wait; I love planting those.

Mother Node PCB and the Garden

Well,  Mother Node Rev 0C(the gateway for all of the other nodes in the garden) is completed and functional. We are chasing a few bugs but they appear to be minor coding issues.  The picture below shows Rev 0B(breadboard with RTC) on the left and Rev 0C(PCB board) on the right. Next up is the case for the Mother Node.

Figure 1: Mother Node comparison

We are working on getting the Mother Node to talk to Thingspeak to post the gathered garden node data. See www.thingspeak.com for more info about Thingspeak IoT open data platform. 

In the garden the randomized watermelon cultivar trial is going well.  3 varieties were planted:

• Crimson Sweet
• Moon & Stars
• Navajo Winter

Through just simple limited observational data, the Navajo Winter is growing superior to both the Crimson Sweet and Moon & Stars.  The Navajo Winter emerges earlier and is more prolific. 

Figure 2: Navajo Winter

However, there are other factors that go into the overall evaluation. We'll see how the disease resistance and tastes is of the final product. I will do a final write up of the watermelon trial at the end of the season.

On the pepper front. Things are going great for Anaheim, Hungarian Hot Wax, Scottish Bonnet, C5 Purple Lilac, & California Wonder. However, things are not doing well for the Peach Habenero and Ghost Pepper. Those two peppers have minimal flowering and no viable peppers....... so far.  I am still trying to diagnose what is causing the lack of peppers with those cultivars

Figure 3: Anaheim pepper

Some random Anaheim, Hungarian Hot Wax and C5 peppers

The 50ft row of peas did wonderful this year. Over 40lbs of Sugar Snap peas were harvested and consumed. I am definitely going to plant multiple succession rows next year. I will change the trellis system from Jute twine to simple panel fencing next year. The jute twine simply took too long to setup and gave marginal results as a trellis(relaxed more than expected and higher maintenance).

Figure 5: Picking peas

The garlic went well. We had a input to output ratio of 1:6. Meaning for every 1lbf of garlic planted we got 6lbf at the end of harvest. Next, I need to grade(fancy talk for sizing) the garlic. I am wondering if the distribution of sizes will be Gaussian? We will see.

Figure 6: Duganski garlic dried and ready for grading

Well, that is it for now.

SMD and Garlic

The SMD versiom is here and the components populated, see the picture below to show the evolution of the board. From left the 1st prototype with the 2nd generation in the middle with the 3rd and current generation on the far right.

In other news we harvested our 1st garlic, a softneck Susanville variety, from the field. 

I think I am going to let the other Susanville garlic stay in the field a bit longer. The Duganski, a hardneck variety is shooting up scapes and will be harvesting those those today to make some bacon wrapped garlic scapes. With the scapes up the Duganski garlic has about 1 month left until full harvest.

Well that is it for now. The PCBs for the Mother Node should be arriving any day.

Another Node and Garden Update....

I realized I had not posted anything about the OSH Park node boards. So, here are some older pics of the node boards being installed in the nodes.

The next revision of the board should be here tomorrow. It is approximately 25% smaller and using a SMD 328P instead of a DIP version.

The garden is going good and we are enjoying fresh lettuce on a daily basis. It is amazing how well a nice bowl of fresh lettuce tastes with a little turkey,cheese, and some dressing.Here are some random pics from the garden.

Tomatoes and peppers going in.

Overall view