Chicken-n-Veg

Archive for June, 2009

This weekend, in an effort to make looking after our hens even easier than it already is, we made a droppings ‘tray’ to sit under their perch. It was very easy to make and should be suitable for most henhouses that don’t come with a built in tray.

The hens enjoy kicking up their litter material all over the area around the pop hole, making a real mess in their run, jamming up the horizontal slider for their door. The solution was making a dropping tray by modifying a heavy duty tarpaulin. We had a spare one, but they are very cheap to buy. It was measured and cut for size allowing a 7.5-10cm (3-4 inch) turn up on each edge. It was then just a case of hemming the cut edges and sewing the corners. Handles (from cut off material) were also sewn on the sides.

Time will tell how long lasting or successful it is, but they certainly haven’t been able to kick any bits in the first couple of days of use. It should make cleaning out a breeze. It is waterproof so nothing goes through onto the floor of the henhouse.The handles mean it can be easily lifted out and tipped straight in the compost bins. It’s also easier for us to fill it with the litter material and carry it back to the hen house.

This evening we made up some carrot, radish and lettuce seed tapes. Seed tapes (basically seeds stuck onto paper at regular intervals) are available from quite a few seed retailers, but at quite a high price, which is why we prefer to make our own. I think that seed tapes are a very convenient way of dealing with very small seeds, with very little going to waste and saves lots work on thinning out when the seeds come out. They are extremely quick and easy to use. Simply make a small trench of the required depth, as you would for the seeds and lay the tape in the trench before covering and watering. Hey presto – job done ! Perfectly spaced, straight rows and no seeds blown all over your beds by the wind.

Carrot seed tape is one of the most frequently sold seed tapes. Supposedly a big advantage of carrot seed tape is that not having to thin out the carrots reduces the risk of carrot fly. The very act of thinning the carrot seedlings attracts carrot fly.

For the seed tape paper we used kitchen roll. You can just as easily use old newspapers but we didn’t have any on hand. We use all ours to line the bottom of the hen house. It is just important that the paper will quickly break down in wet soil. Glossy magazine paper would not be suitable. This should be cut into thin strips (say 1.5 cm or 3/4 inch wide). One advantage of the kitchen roll is that it is easily folded, concertina style, to make it quick to cut the strips. It can also be made into longer strips than the newspaper, matching the length of our raised beds.

To stick the seed to the paper we used rice glue. This is often used for traditional Japanese paper crafts and quickly breaks down in wet soil. It is made very simply by wizzing up a small quantity of left-over cooked rice in a food blender with a small quantity of water. You are looking for a consistency similar to PVA adhesive. Don’t make up too much as it really won’t last more than a few days before going off. Alternatively you could make up a flour and water paste, but we find the rice glue is stronger and makes for easier handling of the tapes when they are dry. We put the glue into one of the squeezy, refillable glue pens that you can get from hobby shops. We just made the nozzle slightly larger to stop it from blocking up. You could also use a cheap icing syringe or just a small paint brush. Then it is simply a matter of putting spots of glue at the intervals you want and dropping a seed on each glue spot. A pair of tweezers helps here.

Then leave the tape to dry overnight. Don’t forget to label the tape if you are making several different tapes at the same time.

Today we harvested our first two potato plants. They were Charlotte salad potatoes and we got a little over a kilogram of new potatoes (about two and a half lbs) from the two plants. They tasted absolutely wonderful, boiled with a little mint and eaten with salmon and salad. They were also approved of, as finger food, by our six and a half month old son. He definitely seemed to be purring as he crammed them in his mouth.

We actually planted an area of approximately 6m x 1.2m with potatoes, about (two thirds are Charlotte and the rest are Edzell Blue), so it looks like we will have a very good crop this year.

I think all, or almost all of our younger hens are now laying. It started off a week ago, with one tiny egg in a nest box (see photo above). In the following days we had a number of soft shelled, broken eggs in the perching area and some more smaller eggs outside the henhouse as well in the nest boxes. By the end of the week, however, they seemed to have got the hang of how and where to lay their eggs. For the last few days we have been getting two or three smaller eggs in the nest boxes, along with the larger eggs laid by our ex-battery farm hens. We haven’t had any soft shelled eggs for at least five days.