We harvested honey this year! This is our second year managing honeybees and we harvested a bit of honey for our efforts so far. We just finished bottling our haul this year and have about 1.5 gallons of honey. Unfortunately the honey we harvested has already been spoken for, but hopefully next year we’ll reap more and have some extra to sell!
Well, the first round went well and now we’re going to try it again. A little differently this time… We are changing the ration fed to the chickens from the feed mill (using fish meal) to a totally local vegetarian certified organic ration. The feed is from Mr. Alfred Farris at Windy Acres Farm in Orlinda, TN, just 30 miles from us. They are a certified organic grain producing farm and I think we’re lucky to have such an opportunity so close! I picked up the ration on Monday and unloaded it into our little storage shed and it filled the WHOLE thing to the rafters. I now have to find another place to put my layer feed and all the other chicken accoutrements like waterers and lamps and such.
Raising chickens so far is fun and I’m approaching it as an experiment, I am an engineer after all, and we’re trying to change as few variables as possible. So for this next batch we’re changing the feed ration and the weather will be different. I have also changed the pen very slightly to make it a bit easier to move, but I don’t think this will have any bearing on the experiment. The weather this time is MUCH warmer than the last, so it will be an interpretation of results in the end and a challenge to attribute differences to either the weather or the food.
Our next batch of chickens arrives tomorrow or Saturday and we’re ready and excited! Oh, here’s a picture of the feed stacked to the ceiling:
Thanks again for being willing to participate in our focus group and to share your feedback with us. Hopefully by now you have had a chance to try your chicken. If so, here is the link for you to complete a 10 question survey regarding your experience here. If not, please keep this email and complete it once you have.
Thank you, too, for your support and encouragement of our endeavors. It means a lot!
Judith and Jonathan
Yesterday was processing day, the day of truth, if you will and it was a SUCCESS! With the help six other people we were able to process 88 chickens in under 4 hours for a time of about 2.7 minutes a bird. A BIG thank you to all our help, it would not have happened without you! Thanks to our fastidious bagging and labeling help who dutifully recorded the weight of every bird twice, once on the label and once on the record sheet, we were able to calculate some numbers last night and I really do love numbers, especially these numbers. The average weight was 5.1 lbs and using that weight we have calculated that the conversion ratio of grain to pound of dressed bird was 4.1:1, so it took 4.11lbs of grain for every 1lb of dressed bird. Not too bad for our first attempt! We fed exactly 2000lb of feed and the birds were eight weeks and one day old.
We’re looking forward to more customer feedback, but at this point we’re almost certain we’ll do it again in the near future!
On April 26th (yesterday) we got our shipment of 100 cornish rock cross chicks, so it has begun! All the chicks are happy and healthy in the brooder and growing quickly.
So we’re getting some cornish rock cross chicks at the end of this month… In preparation for that, we’re building a pen in which to keep them. The idea is that the pen moves each day to a new patch of grass for hygiene and food supplementation. My dad has helped me build the pen and a dolly that acts as portable wheels for the pen to make it easier to move. Pictures (and chickens) coming soon!
Well, Buffy (our Buff Orpington) went broody on us a couple of weeks ago. Broody is when the chicken wants to sit eggs to hatch them. We don’t have a rooster, so the eggs are never going to hatch, but she was sitting on them anyway. We started kicking her out of the nest and closing off the nest box and after a couple of days she got over it and started acting normal again. She didn’t lay an egg for a little over two weeks. I had a talk with her about those who don’t work end up in the slow-cooker and she seemed to straighten up and is now back in production 🙂
We started three new hives on March 27th of this year! The location has changed due to the possibility of construction traffic and the placement actually lines up with what our landscape architect had drafted on the plan. Since we started with drawn comb from last year, the bees are off to a great start. We did a full inspection yesterday and found brood of all stages in two of the hives, and one hive is just a wee bit behind, but coming on strong. All hives have put up quite a bit of nectar and we added a second box to each hive yesterday. The box that was added to each hive had drawn comb, somewhat ratty, but drawn none the less, so it shouldn’t take the ladies long to get it ship-shape and nectar and brood added. I think we’ll add another box on Thursday since I won’t be in them for over a week after that.
Well, all had been going fine and seemed great the last time I checked on the bees a few weeks ago, just before the really cold snap. Apparently I did not do a good enough job inspecting and keeping a good feel for what was going on because yesterday when I checked on them there was no buzzing or noise of any kind and no response when I rapped gently on the hive. Talk about a sickening feeling. I started taking it apart and discovered that all the bees, save for about 10, were dead. Looking at how many bees there were it seemed like an awful lot. I think I could have filled 3 or 4 shipping packages to the brim with dead ones. They were lots of bees buried in the cells with the little tails sticking out, a classic sign of starvation. After taking it all apart and inventorying what was left there is still a box and a third full of honey, but it wasn’t close enough to the bees for them to eat it without breaking cluster. It is VERY disappointing, dishearting and downright depressing, but I’m going to take it as a lesson and hope for a better year this year.
On a positive note, I’ll have 6 boxes with drawn wax to get the new packages started on this year, so hopefully if the weather is a bit more cooperative this year, we should produce a decent amount of honey. Unfortunately, Matt Taylor is not selling maple syrup or the organic scrap sugar this year, so I’ll have to locate another source. I think I’ll just purchase standard sugar instead of the organic this time due to cost and the fact that there is no food product being made directly from that sugar. Here’s to hoping that the packages coming at the end of March are more successful than the last!
We started off the new year with new animals! I worked a deal with CJ Sentell of Ecotone Farm and purchased four laying hens. We now have two Barred Rocks (not Domineckers), one Rhode Island Red and one Buff Orpington. They are providing us with eggs and we’re all learning each other, chickens learning us and us learning the chickens. I got the coop built at the end of last year and now it is finally occupied. There will be some modificaitions coming to make things a bit easier, but it all works well for now. Hopefully we’ll have pictures up soon.