The Natural Chicken Keeping thread - OTs welcome!

[loanwizard]

X2 - our roo's favorite is also one of my favorites - I couldn't imagine not having her. However, at one time we had too many roos to our hens and she was getting stressed. I simply re-homed a couple roos to places where they could have tons of girls to themselves and all is peaceful again here. But I am just raising for eggs and pets right now - not worried about breeding.

If you get to thinking about breeding, call me

 

[loanwizard]

Spent part of the day in court. Being sued by the guy that sold me his farm. Seems he refused to come in and sign a 2nd mortgage so now I have defrauded him. I have written proof of everything that I have said, but need an attorney to get me through Civil Procedure.... So it will cost me $5,000.00 or so just to defend myself when i did nothing wrong. Rest of the day, closed my mechanic shop and converting it to an Auction house. If I ever come back to this world, I want to come back as a much simpler being with a LOT less stress.

Sorry, not very Loin like, but just venting.
Thanks for listening, reading, skimming, laughing, whatever.

 

[salt and pepper]

I couldn't get a pic of the little critters, but I did find where they were hiding... In the roof! Cleaned the coop today, and saw one crawl away, lifted a shingle of the roof, and there were tons of them! They were white ones, brown ones, reddish ones, and other critters such as spiders, ants, and something that looked like termites.. I sprayed the roof, but I'll see what happens, I don't think I'll get complete rid of them, since they don't harm my birds, they just live with them, lol, my birds have no scabs, feather loss, egg clusters, and I have yet to find one bug on them. The odd one was large enough to study, and I'm pretty sure they have 8 legs, and two body segments, and really long legs too, Maybe they're spiders? They seem to collect in damp areas, and hate the dry

 

[Ashdoes]

SP-check a picture of termites, because I hear they're very attracted to moisture. I have no idea what they look like though, so I'm just guessing here. I would think spiders would be easier to kill then these things.

 

[stonykill]

Spent part of the day in court. Being sued by the guy that sold me his farm. Seems he refused to come in and sign a 2nd mortgage so now I have defrauded him. I have written proof of everything that I have said, but need an attorney to get me through Civil Procedure.... So it will cost me $5,000.00 or so just to defend myself when i did nothing wrong. Rest of the day, closed my mechanic shop and converting it to an Auction house. If I ever come back to this world, I want to come back as a much simpler being with a LOT less stress.

Sorry, not very Loin like, but just venting.
Thanks for listening, reading, skimming, laughing, whatever.

vent away loin.

 

[armorfirelady]

Yesterday I spent the day at the Farmers Tilth again. Sold out my cut flowers, veggie started plants, Romaine, and onions. I had just a little set up with a few things but the best part?....I sold four two month old barn yard pullets! I only have three left and they are at point of lay. A lot of people asked me if I would sell eggs. Next year, when my heritage Rhode Island Red flock are in production. The local store sells free range eggs for fifty cents each! Does anyone else sell at market? The lady in the booth next to me sells alpaca wool and sits at a spindle wheel all day. Lots of people selling produce but I was the only one with live chickens.

Beautiful set up Mumsy & congrats on your productive day ! I don't sell at market but I do sell my eggs for $3 a dozen & if I had more than a dozen a week to sell I would be able to sell to more people. I swear this rain has the girls off their laying. I usually get 3 eggs a day and 2 days ago I got one and today none. Very unusual. They were short last week also, I normally average 22 eggs a week and last week only got 19. This rain can quit anytime !!

You have not offended anyone that I can see, nor has anyone else that has expressed their method and opinion on over-used hens. This kind of wonderful information exchange is exactly what the thread is for!

I quite agree.

x3 No offense on my part! And I have very much enjoyed ALL the posts today. Lots of good stuff!

X4 !! I have enjoyed your posts and have learned a lot, I am thinking of trying to get my dogs to eat garlic to see if it helps with their allergies.

Spent part of the day in court. Being sued by the guy that sold me his farm. Seems he refused to come in and sign a 2nd mortgage so now I have defrauded him. I have written proof of everything that I have said, but need an attorney to get me through Civil Procedure.... So it will cost me $5,000.00 or so just to defend myself when i did nothing wrong. Rest of the day, closed my mechanic shop and converting it to an Auction house. If I ever come back to this world, I want to come back as a much simpler being with a LOT less stress. Sorry, not very Loin like, but just venting. Thanks for listening, reading, skimming, laughing, whatever.

Sorry about your rough day but we are all hear to listen to your venting. Hope things get better

 

[Bulldogma]

If you get to thinking about breeding, call me

And sorry about your sucky day!!!

 

[aoxa]

Yesterday I spent the day at the Farmers Tilth again. Sold out my cut flowers, veggie started plants, Romaine, and onions. I had just a little set up with a few things but the best part?....I sold four two month old barn yard pullets! I only have three left and they are at point of lay.

A lot of people asked me if I would sell eggs. Next year, when my heritage Rhode Island Red flock are in production. The local store sells free range eggs for fifty cents each!

Does anyone else sell at market? The lady in the booth next to me sells alpaca wool and sits at a spindle wheel all day. Lots of people selling produce but I was the only one with live chickens.

Very nice display!

I really want to do the farmers market, but it's put off until next year at least.

 

[maryhysong]

Yesterday I spent the day at the Farmers Tilth again. Sold out my cut flowers, veggie started plants, Romaine, and onions. I had just a little set up with a few things but the best part?....I sold four two month old barn yard pullets! I only have three left and they are at point of lay.

A lot of people asked me if I would sell eggs. Next year, when my heritage Rhode Island Red flock are in production. The local store sells free range eggs for fifty cents each!

Does anyone else sell at market? The lady in the booth next to me sells alpaca wool and sits at a spindle wheel all day. Lots of people selling produce but I was the only one with live chickens.

we have a very small market in our town, on it's third year. But no live animals are allowed ;-( Other than visitors bringing their dogs and such

 

[uglychickens]

I

Regarding the stinky wet deep litter compost, have you tried agricultural lime powder? I'm fairly sure it's hydrated lime. If it's failed and looks too deep to easily 'sow' back to health I'd remove it and start again, but it may pay to use lime and mix it through. It's also good to get some natural leaf mulch from a forest area if you have one on your property or nearby you know isn't poisoned or ecologically delicate or protected. I used shavings a couple of times but overall have stuck to nesting hay. I clean the old hay out of the nests straight onto the floor and scatter it, and just leave it to become part of the litter. Wood ash and charcoal are also useful as treatments for an overabundance of unhealthy bacteria. Of course don't use any ash known to be volatile or from treated wood, I'd guess you know that but some people don't, so just in case...
Depending on what those issues are that your vet is managing, your cat may be able to be healed. I wish you all the best with that. Cats can be such difficult patients, but they're renowned for making miraculous recoveries. My old cat's been paralyzed 5 times now, had an enormous head infection that made her temporarily mad and her head twice the size it should have been; also she's dislocated and smashed a leg and had cat flu minus vet treatment and a host of other problems. Her quality of life is good now despite all that. I wish you the same with yours. Minus the frequent mishaps of course! 

With age, my once-impossible cat has become a lot wiser about letting me apply herbs to her feed and fur for whatever. She would literally do wall and ceiling runs through the house if I tried to make her swallow anything to worm her! By the time she stopped running to beg me to open a door for her to escape, there would be enormous beards of discarded foamed saliva all over the house, and one on her face. I stopped using man made products on her as a year-old cat, and amazingly enough she has lived over a decade since without being wormed once; sometimes she eats tabasco-sauced food or garlic or curry-spiced meats cooked for people, but not often enough or in large enough quantity to be counted as being assured worm removal or protection. I'd been told they must be wormed all the time, but it seems to be another common piece of misinformation. 

I recently used cold-pressed neem seed oil to cure her of an almost-fatal case of blue pigeon lice. (People thought it was late stage aggressive cancer). They'd made her whole face a bleeding scab, and were progressing to other parts of her body. It looked horrific and happened in just a few months while I was living elsewhere and she was staying at my mother's. I don't know if she got the actual infection from a pigeon in the first place but she's sworn off birds now; she used to be a bird-maimer but once caged and riddled with the blue lice, pigeons got into her cage and she would not be near them, didn't even want to look at them. I had to use Levy's book to even identify what was wrong with her. I was sure it wasn't cancer. I've let her endure a lot of sub-par health due to not knowing how to treat her or being too slow to see what is wrong, and it's not easy with her being so difficult. I'm actually pretty new to using natural treatments for cats and dogs, my first dog and this now-old cat were raised to adulthood with man made wormers and flea powders. No good. 

Initially I was skeptical of many of the things I read in Levy's books. (Too simple to be true, surely!) But I tried remedies she recommended and I now vouch for them. I do think however we are moving beyond her general sphere of knowledge and more layers need to be added, if you know what I mean, due to our modern medicines, genetics, the environmental situation, the pharmaceutical influences, and all the changes that have occurred to the genetics of plants, animals, diseases and parasites alike since her time. 

For example it will be of limited use (or even give unpredictable results) to treat animals with genetically modified plants or ornamentally bred herbs. I know the popular and naive argument for genetic modification is that it's 'no different from what farmers have been doing for thousands of years as they selected their breeding stock' but that one's easily shot down because they could only breed what naturally bred together, not mix genes from completely divergent organisms like birds with swine and herbs with poisonous insect genes. No farmer managed to breed a goat into producing human milk proteins, nor did any farmer manage to breed a spring onion into growing an ear of corn. Today we have all these 'wonders'. Combining different organisms is not remotely anything our bodies are able to adapt to. It's literally russian roulette being played beneath the surface. New studies show GM soy proteins remain in your stomach indefinitely, having joined with your cells and replicating 'alien' DNA therein.

Each plant contains the correct balance of properties and compounds that allow the plant to be correctly and beneficially processed; now that's being altered with no restraint except what fails to be commercially viable as the guiding principle. These genetically modified plants are altered beyond trustworthy performance as nutritional and medicinal items by being combined with other plant's and animal's DNA. If it naturally combines, it's a 'coherent' organism and our organism can process it, but the artificially combined organisms we eat and feed to our animals, like most soy or other plants that are spliced with toxic plants and bacteria, are not 'coherent' nor are they able to be safely synthesized by our systems, hence some of the failures of some attempted modern herbal remedies. With the modern state of affairs very much in mind, I attempt to be careful about my plant sources, and if one herb doesn't work to cure what it always has before throughout history, I don't give up on that cure, I source a different strain of the same herb. So far that's been a very successful approach. If anyone tries a herbal cure and gets no result, I urge them to source the same herb from a different place and try again. Cats especially are good at convincing people their treatments are killing them, but they too respond well to natural care.

All the best wishes for the future of your cat and everyone else who has one too. And all the other animals.

I totally agree with you and wanted to add more... Ever heared of a weed spray called "roundup"? Well the company who makes it is called monsoto. They have been behind every genetic modified plant creation sence it started... 30 years ago they started putting "roundup" on their crops, they engineer the crops to withstand the weed control but the weeds/other plants die off...
What's different to these plants using roundup then other commercial pesticides? You can't wash it off! It becomes part of the plant and you consume it! This is in corn,wheat,and sugar... Every staple crop except organic crops has some kind of this product in it, every company you buy from ( General Mills is a big one) has most product coming from these sources just because its cheaper... One more point and probably the biggest one of all... The amount of cases of autism 30 years ago was 1 in 200,000. In that span if thirty years the use of roundup has increased dramatically and hand in hand so has autism, to the point that its now closer to 1 in 50 children to have some form of the disease. Some can be explained just in the awareness of the disease but not all!
Just something to think about