Adding bugs to your backyard

[Iheartmyhens]

What kind of medium do you keep your mealworms in and how large a container?

 

[Mrs. Green Thumbs]

Get yourself a worm bin, you'll be able to compost your scraps from the kitchen, have great casting's for your garden, and lot's of worms for your hungry hen's. I would have bought one if my garden wasn't so chalk full of worm's as it is!

 

[Organics North]

Mrs. Green Thumbs :

Get yourself a worm bin, you'll be able to compost your scraps from the kitchen, have great casting's for your garden, and lot's of worms for your hungry hen's. I would have bought one if my garden wasn't so chalk full of worm's as it is!

One must educate themselves on the possibility of Gape worms and other parasites that have been associated to earthworms/red worms.

I suggest reading up on the subject, by searching the internet, then making an informed decision on using them.

For the record,, I do feed my chickens some of the worms from the worm bins. I avoid using chicken poop as worm food. (Break the parasites cycle...I think..)

Anyway, mine love the red worms when they get them!!

Oh yes on lionsgrip.com they talk about trapping wasps for the chickens..

ON​

 

[shadowbob]

an easy maggot can is to use a can of dogfood drill several 1/4 inch holes in it and hang it over your run in a couple of days maggots will be dripping out of it we used to use these for fishing to lure crappie and bluegill

 

[Iheartmyhens]

Actually, I think I have come up with an easy way to create a maggot bucket with supplies I already have around the house...

We have lots of plastic pots in the unkempt section of our yard-they already have holes in the bottom-if I just put one upright in the chicken yard with a brick in the bottom, then put some of our dog's "leavings" in it after I do some scooping, I should get some goodies the hens can access shortly without extra fuss on my part.

We have 3 hounds that are rawfed, so no extra chemicals are in their "output." They are also not getting any medications as they don't need them-they are African hounds & naturally resistent to fleas!!! They actually have a decreased output because they are fed meat and not a commercial dogfood with grains. Of course, being hounds their prey drive is too strong to be allowed in the chicken yard.

Any thoughts??

 

[Geek2Nurse]

I have well-established worm bins, am getting my chicken coop set up this week, and have discovered the perfect "bug" to complement both the chickens and the worms -- black soldier fly larvae. (http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/galveston/beneficials/beneficial-51_black_soldier_fly.htm) They compost kitchen scraps faster than worms (although apparently the compost then needs to be "finished" by the worms to be complete), don't spread disease, and actually help to keep other pests away. And their larvae are a great protein source for chickens. Sounds win-win to me. There's a DIY bin at http://blacksoldierflyblog.com/bsf-bucket-bio-composter-version-2-0/ that looks easy enough to make, and the mature larvae actually harvest themselves right into a handy container for you to feed from.

 

[HLAC]

Wanted to share these pictures.

This is what the branches of my fruit trees looked like. You can even see the black masses of them on the trees in the background. They pretty much defoliated all the fruit trees.

So... after most of the damage was done, I bought the traps, just for revenge....

They would fill the bags in minutes.... Minutes! So I put soapy water under the traps. I had to empty the barrel and tub twice a day. I ended up with piles of dead beetles. Ugh..

Now I hang a lure in the chicken run. They will eat nothing but the bugs... and it makes the eggs really wonderful... but don't think about it too hard.

I'd need a couple hundred chickens to take care of all the beetles tho'. Darn things.