Kyle Burdick

Don't worry about eggs being fertilized or not. If they aren't warm, then they won't develop. So just keep up on picking them up, and there is nothing to fear.

If you want to hatch chicks, then you need to make sure the hen has her own space, isn't bothered to much, and obviously you don't want to pick those eggs. I think most people seperate a brooding hen from the rest of the flock in this scenario.

As far as multiple chicks under one chicken... I don't know whats "natural" for a mother to do, but you can take other eggs from other chickens that have been fertilized and put them under one brooding chicken. Just make sure she has enough butt to cover them all.

A rooster doesn't care what breed hes penned with. It will try to screw anything. At least that's my take. Some chickens don't breed well because of biology or physical traits. But if you do your research, there is no reason why your basic homesteader breeds won't cross.

Again, don't worry about your layers getting impregnated. Just keep pick your eggs everyday.

R Scott wrote:Or live traps, that way you can choose what to do with the catch.

Be sure you check your local and state laws before transporting live animals. Especially predators like mink and weasel. Most natural environments are already at an equilibrium for the number of predators they can support. Moving them into another animals territory just means they will be pushed out again, or they will fight till one of them is dead. I vote for the tunnel (kill) traps.

Besides trapping, I've had good luck with electric netting.... which lots of folks don't like. No mink or weasel kills so far. We did have two killed by owls though. And its not exactly free range obviously. But I like it.

1.) The pot does sound too small. 5 gallon buckets would have been better, but you really should try to refrain from doing too many transplants. Leaving them in the ground isn't a bad idea, as long as its the FINAL location. The advantage of growing a tree in a pot first is for easy planting in its final location later on.... rather the hacking away at roots the spread through the ground. So ideally they would have been started in 5 gallon buckets, or dug up with the seedling was extremely small. If your not going to have the stump removed until next year, I guess I would put it in a bigger pot, once all the leaves have fallen.

2.) Central Kentucky should be fine to leave them outside, just keep them in a sheltered location out of the wind. Keeping them indoors might "trick" them into thinking is spring already. Which is bad. I had a potted tree in a greenhouse one winter, it "woke up" and went dormant" 2-3 times in one winter. It died the next season. That's a lot of lost energy lost. Make sure you keep the soil moist, but not saturated. It won't really suck up any water all winter, but you still don't want anything to fully dry out.


Ideally you shouldn't transplant hardwoods until the leaves have fallen off in the fall, and the buds are fully set. The later the better, assuming the ground isn't frozen yet. If you dig up trees while they are still active, their roots are extremely vulnerable. (softwoods by the way are the opposite, you should dig them up right before they become active in the spring)

Looks like eco terrorism to me. I think you elongated swath looks more like the result of and herbicide spray. Possibly from a hand pump sprayer on the other side of the fence.

Are you located in a region where black locust is formally, or informally considered invasive? As I'm sure you know some people can be quite passionate about invasive plants. I attended the university of Maine, the night after a guest lectured came to speak about invasive plants, two Norway maple where girdled in front of the Forestry building.

Just a thought.

As a forester, I have never heard of a plant of tree with Allelopathic properties as strong as what your picture is illustrating.

http://www.baileysonline.com/search.asp?SKW=bio&catID=9927

There area a bunch of products out there, but they are all pretty expensive. I've used vegetable oil to oil my tools before, and the only word of cation I would have is that it does "gum up" after awhile. And I'm sure you are probably aware that vegetable oils solidify in cold weather.

Maybe you should mix some of these additives or regular bar oil? Or maybe run a strait batch of commercial product through your saw every so often to flush it out.

I'm currently in the proses of building a light clay straw building for my chickens. I'd post pictures, but there isn't much to see yet... it looks a lot like standard stud construction... except eventually straw with clay slip will fill the voids between the studs.

It doesn't sound like you need a whole lot of insulation though, so I wouldn't worry about temperature too much. Most hearty chickens can do just fine in sub-zero temps, as long as you keep the wind off them. That's what can really kill them.

Hi All,

Thought I would show our chicken setup so far. We have a little over one year under our belts and have already learned a lot.

We have New Hampshire reds for layers, and Cornish roasters for meat. We love the NH reds and the Cornish Roasters don't seem to have any major health problems yet that we were worrying about. Of course, our chickens are rationed on food a little and they get plenty of exercise. Our flock now consists of 11 NH reds, and 24 Cornish roasters.


We have a portable electric netting fence that so far (touch wood) has protected the flock from predators. We haven't lost a single one using it. We did have them truly free range for awhile, but we lost two to a fox. We improved our range shelters this year. We started off with light weight shelters that were very vulnerable to the winter, and were ultimately destroyed in a fall storm after we moved our chickens to a permanent location for the winter. Now they are heavy, maybe too heavy, but surely wont blow away.


We feed them a combination of conventional feed, kitchen scraps, and now broken clams from the local seafood buyer.


We are also in the process of building a chicken coop/wood shed combination. The chicken coop portion will only be 7x7, while the whole building is 14x14. The coop is for the winter months and brooding. It is built, primarily, with harvested and milled by us, on our property.


We sell our extra eggs roadside, and never have any trouble doing so. We might expand the egg laying flock, if for no other reason, than because we feel bad when we have to tell our customers that we our out.

I think the meat birds are defiantly going to pay for themselves, unless you put a price on our time, then I'm not sure. The eggs are probably cutting it a little more closely.

We might expand to two pasture fences some time.

That's it for now! Sorry about the quality of pictures.

Most states have GIS (Geographic information systems) data for anyone to use. It depends on the state though.
http://www.tceq.texas.gov/publications/maps.html
I didn't check through the website much, but assuming you don't have GIS training, a looked for an online map viewer.

Here you go!

http://gis3.tceq.state.tx.us/website/irdrgview1/viewer.htm

I agree that the spread of currents is nearly impossible to stop, but I don't think that's any excuse to help them out. People use the same argument for global warming emissions. Doing whats right doesn't always have good results.

Jan Sebastian Dunkelheit wrote:You can train chickens and geese to eat acorns and you can bring in new elements like currants via scions.
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There is enough good information given in this post for me to add much. But please, please, please do not plant currants. They are the required, alternate host to white pine blister rust. Clearly you care about the forest, so please don't plant anything not native to your area!

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/3000/pdf/3205.pdf

Currants escape into the wild, and you do have white pine in South Carolina.