Keeping Chickens Newsletter

Jump To Page

1

2

3

4

5

8

9

10

Christina : When I ran out of chick mash this fall, instead of buying the overpriced stuff with the antibiotics added to it, I put a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 mixture of lay crumbles, scratch feed, and very cheap dog food through my industrial blender until it was fine enough for the chicks. The cheap dog food adds the extra needed protein, and if you look at the ingredients it is primarily corn anyway. Viola!, chick mash without the added antibiotics, and in keeping with my organic chickens.

One reader wrote about her pampered indoor chicken who had an overgrown beak. The reader inquired if making a sheet of sandpaper available would help the chicken. I'm quite sure it won't. I have a handicapped peeper who is now five months old. When I put his cohorts outside, in the process called "hardening", Peeper would never venture outside the large lighted brood box. The other chicks kept growing and no longer needed chick mash, but when I turned off the light bulb for good and stored away the brood box, Peeper was viciously attacked by his siblings and the adults. If I hadn't intervened, he would have been killed. I brought him back inside with the brood box and set him up in the bathtub of the guest bathroom.

Peeper has grown a bit of wattle, which makes me think it is a cockerel, but still can't walk normally and is now half the size of his siblings. Two of the pullets have started to lay eggs now, and the cockerels were delicious fried except for the loveliest, best balanced one that took his 7-year old sire's place last month when Jacques Clouseau's eggs all turned out to be infertile. (One reader mentioned her rooster seemed to "wobble", and this is what happened to Jacques last month when he finally failed to do his job. I do not know if this was old age or disease. I had to put him in the pressure cooker for over thirty minutes, but he was very tasty, dark meat.)

Even though I remove the spur bud from the cockerel that is going to become the yard rooster, and Jacques had this done, you can see the vestigial spurs which had grown on his legs over the years.

Next Page