Brooding Pullets

The chicks are now five days old and doing great!

The sixty pullets are ten each of these six breeds:
Dark Rhode Island Reds

Production Reds

Buff Orpington

Black Australorps

Golden Sex Links

Dominique

They live in this brooder. Cost to build: $0

Modest exterior

We have not lost one yet. 

Farmers Market Today!

RAdish 

Healthy soil in the herb garden with mushrooms growing up in the mint.

Newer lettuce planting doing very well. Just need to be thinned this weekend.

New pasture for the hens. We are getting a hundred or so day old chicks next month.  

Water Catchment for Chickens

The layer hens now have a self contained water catchment system.

Even though they are only a hundred feet from our doorstep this is a vast improvement.

Chicken Tractors

 We have five chicken tractors with a total of eighteen layers in them combined.

A chicken tractor is named so because of its ability to replace a traditional tractor by tilling, weeding, mulching, fertilizing and so on. 

Sprouted Grains as Poultry Feed

Wheat berries after 2 days sprouting.

Soaking on day 1

Snake in the Chicken Shack

This snake was making a meal of our eggs.

Pastured Poultry in Drylands

These hens have been getting moved on our native drylands pasture at least twice a day ,,,,sometimes four or five!

Hens on a diet of leafy greens, sprouted wheat berries and barley, and organic scratch, no soy whatsoever. 

These three hen tractors can on a good day produce three eggs each!

Pastured Hens and Cover Crops

Right now we have nine hens pasturing in three of these tractors.

A planting of rye and buckwheat where we grew a bed of greens and carrots last year. This fall we will plant garlic here after the chickens scratch through a few plantings like this.

Moving the Chickens

Mike came out early this morning to load up ten hens and our 10 x 7 ft. tractor to take to a neighboring farm at the Real Food Nation property.

Hens waiting for better pastures.

Just two miles down the road, these ten hens will have plenty of pasture for weeks to come, eating up and tilling 70 sq. feet per day. We are attempting a cooperative relationship with other small farmers in ways like this that can benefit everyone and the land and animals bugs etc.

Farm Work

New three hen tractor. 

 The new smaller design of this tractor is good for getting the birds onto beds in-between other beds in production. It is also easy to move around by yourself and they are drinking out of these handy rabbit water bottles. They're great, no poop in the water and no need to reach in the tractor but for harvesting eggs of feeding grain.

Blue Corn bed #2 

 For sale this week we have:

-Heirloom Italian Flatleaf Parsley
-Red and White Chard
-Baby Red Russian Kale
-Spring Garlic Greens
-Lettuce Cutting Mix (mild Plants of the Southwest blend)
-Pastured/ Farm-fresh eggs
-Email or comment for more info or prices.

Also for sale we have 1 gal. Chinook hop plants. These are a great brewing hop and have been wintered @7200 ft elev. for three or more winters, including last winter's 30 below. Each pot has compost blend and two to three rhizomes in there so it could potentially be three plants this year, or certainly next season.

contact for details on hops for sale.

Pastured Poultry on Salad Greens

We thought we could salvage some seedlings we planted in this bed in Feb. but the aphids were just everywhere...so hens to the rescue!

It is so great to see chickens living in this environment and as farmers we have such great control of what they eat and how they impact the land by being able to move them on and off areas.

Pastured Poultry

We have built our second tractor for pasturing our hens. 

Last season we had built two pastures with four foot fencing and rotated between the two pastures. We also had built a smaller tractor for young pullets or just a couple hens. It worked okay but this new design is excellent. The 10x7 foot structure is moved every morning and the hens scratch thru all the native grasses eating bugs and fertilizing and aerating soil along the way.

 We have eight of our twenty one hens in this prototype, if we build two or three more like this we can have all our hens pasturing on a daily and then raise some new chicks in the shack.

In other news, we have planted two potato beds and built a bed for carrots, basil and tomatoes. We have all  lots growing under cover right now, including but not limited to: lettuces, kales, chards, broccoli, beets, radishes, cilantro, cabbage and mizuna.

New Chicken Tractor

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