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Donit

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Everything posted by Donit

  1. I definitely think that it is better not to wash eggs. That said, we wash the ones we sell because most customers prefer it. I also think that eggs keep their quality for a longer period of time if they are refrigerated. If you are worried about cleanliness, just spray down the area you store the eggs in your fridge with bleach water and wipe out daily when you put the new eggs in. Use bleach to deep clean your fridge as well. I use bleach a lot in my farm kitchen. We are constantly in a state of processing milk in some form (cheese, yogurt, kefir, butter, etc.) and eggs, as well as the veggies and fruit, not to mention raw, self-butchered meat. Make friends with bleach. I prefer food grade bleach to clean anything that comes in direct contact with food (milk buckets, etc). This can be purchased at pool supply stores. Our chickens just started laying again after molting. I am going to try to stay on top the eggs this year. It would be one thing if we only had a few chickens. When you have more than a few or if you are going to sell them (or swap them after TEOTWAWKI), it becomes more important to keep the eggs in the best way possible. Eggs are money! I am going to keep eggs no longer than 4 days and whatever we don't eat or sell will be put into freezer bags a dozen at a time. I saw this idea here on Mrs.S and can't wait to implement it. Usually we just eat the oldest ones! Another idea to supplement chicken feed in the cold season is to put nails into the wall of your chicken house at chicken eye-level. Grow extra beets or turnips. Turn the top (leafy part) into the middle of the room and smash them onto a SMALL headed nail until they are almost to the wall (root part next to the wall). There needs to be at least 1-1/2 inches of nail inside the root. These will continue to produce greens for the chickens until they are frozen. In an insulated chicken house they will make greens for months (if the chickens don't eat them all first). One of the lovely things about worm composting is that you can feed your extra worms to the chickens. A home with a worm bin is a chicken's dream come true. If you have room, you can also make a self-serve worm restaurant. Dig a hole, I would say at least a food deep, but the rest sized to what suits you. Seed the hole with a handful of worms from your worm bin (or wherever you get your red wigglers). Then, all you have to do is throw your veggie scraps and peelings, weeds from your garden, anything you would normally put in your compost pile into the hole. Fill the hole up and then slightly water it. Cover it with something to keep the moisture in. Several layers of cabbage leaves work great, or loose straw. Give a little water every so often when it isn't raining regularly. Children love to dig a little ways down into this and find worms to feed the chickens. This idea works well anywhere worms will normally live at the surface level of the ground (not desert). In cold areas, the worms migrate down somewhat to escape the cold. Here the worms die in the Winter. Come Spring, you dig up all the lovely worm compost from the hole, re-seed it with worms and start over. If your freezing level doesn't go down too far, the worms may make it through the Winter. I have also utilized this idea by putting a "worm hole" under my fruit trees. I think a case could be made for a worm hole under every fruit tree, because they are providing excellent nutrition just because of where their house is. Just make sure your worm holes are out at the edge of the canopy of your tree, rather than at the trunk. That might cause cold damage. Also make sure they are out of the way of foot traffic!!! This idea is lots cheaper than a worm bin. Another idea is to feed Japanese beetles to chickens. This is a Joel Salatin idea. First, buy one of those phereemone traps for Japanese Beetles. Cut a hole in the bottom of the sack that catches the bugs. Make the hole big enough to insert a piece of PVC pipe, something fairly thin, so it isn't too heavy. Put a pan of water under the open end of the PVC pipe. The bugs are attracted to the trap, fall into the sack, down the PVC pipe, and into the water. The chickens figure it out and come running when they hear a beetle rattling through the PVC pipe. I don't know about you, but we have LOTS of Japanese beetles. I feel so much better about them when I think of them as free chicken food! Finally, an additional reason to have a functioning root cellar is not only for the benefit of your people, but also for your animals. In a root cellar, there are always things going bad....all Winter long. I have found it a good idea (I'm always working on the daily discipline of this) to get what we are going to eat out of the root cellar in the morning and then have another container to grab anything at least visible to the eye that is going bad. Those things can be cooked on the stove/woodstove at some point during the day and fed to the chickens in the evening, as they are preparing to face the cold night. They will love you for it! I think they lay better through the Winter when they have additional, daily vegetable matter of some sort.
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