Will Holland

steve bossie wrote:i have a small pond/ trough heater i put in a shallow mental feed bowl i got at tractor supply. we get to -30f here occasionally and I've never seen the water freeze in it.

Is it inside our outside, Steve?

What's your experience with heated waterers? Both with products/devices and with use?

My biggest coop has a massive overkill amount of ventilation and a clear roof and deep bedding. It doesn't smell at all. The bedding is always bone dry. I think the dryness helps a lot. The coop is 5'x 6'x 5' and has about 30 chicken in it.

I say if you want the chickens to clean out your garden and fertilize as they go, 2 weeks in the spring before things break dormancy is enough. Longer than that and their effects will be long-lasting as others had mentioned. Giant holes you don't want, beds kicked down to nothing, everything trampled and a mat of poop so thick it'll take all spring to break through.

Thanks for all the suggestions y'all!

I watch a fair amount of youtube, usually whIle cooking/ cleaning/ washing eggs and not a whole lot of permaculture stuff. I watched almost all of the Verge Permaculture youtube channel and would like to watch more stuff.

Which permaculture youtube channels do you like?

Yup, I wear sunscreen.

Miranda Converse wrote:My laying flock is about the same size as yours. I can sell every egg my chickens lay and I just sell them to coworkers for $3/dz. My duck eggs are not so easy to sell, just one coworker gets a dozen a week and another gets 1/2. We use our duck eggs for our personal use because it's so much easier to sell chicken eggs...

Yup, we mostly eat duck eggs due to lack of interest in them from customers. We had one sort of regular duck egg customer but she seems to have dropped off.

We have an honor system self serve stand set up in our front yard for egg sales. It works great. Lots of people still knock on the door to ask questions/ask to see the chickens. It's one of my greatest pleasures to explain to people how we raise our chickens. And it always makes people ask (about having them on pasture and rotating them) why doesn't everyone do it that way? Then once I explain it, they're hooked. Our customers are buying from us because they believe the eggs are better- healthier and better tasting.

Hi y'all, we're in year two of egg sales and it's going miraculously well. Perhaps too well.

Some background: we're located in a small town (5000 people) sandwiched between more highly populated areas. We have lots of frontage on a state highway. When we moved in, we hated the traffic and lack of privacy but now we love it! It's feeding our egg sales. Our chickens are pastured and people can see that as they drive by before they pass the house (where we sell eggs).

We currently have 18 layers and 2 roosters, plus 3 ducks. On a good day, we collect 22 eggs. The problem is we're selling about 6 dozen a week. We had a big backlog from winter when we weren't selling (eggs are in a fridge in front of our house and we don't sell in winter).

So my question is this what are your sales like compared to your flock size?