Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I haven't been around much the last couple of weeks. Been pretty busy at work and haven't really got much done at home. I'm still waiting for a little bit warmer weather before I really start working on the greenhouse again. I still have not hooked in my second fish tank or reconnected the filter, but everything seems to be running OK without it so for now I'm not worried. I've looked in the DWC bed and it is pretty dirty, but I don't think it will be difficult to siphon it out when I decide it is time to clean it. The roots of the plants seem pretty clean in the DWC so for now I'm not going to worry about it.

Harvested some swiss chard and kale the other night. I cut about this much kale again last night because I saw the plants are about to flower so took all the leaves off and will see if I can pull seeds otherwise will pull the kale and start something else.



This was some cilantro that was growing like crazy but got really woody and was done for so I pulled it along with all of the other cilantro that was in DWC.



roots on the cilantro in DWC... seem clean enough to me so not worried about the accumulation in the bed right now.



I picked up some cornish X last weekend so these guys are a little over a week old now. May 21st they'll be ready for butcher.

Hey Rob, are you going to free range them or only feed them pellets?

I keep them in a 6ftx2ftx2ft galvanized trough until they are big enough to not get beat up by my hens (4-5 weeks roughly, by that point they won't fit in the trough very well anyways since there are 31 of them in there...might be earlier, this is the biggest batch I've raised at once). Once they reach that stage I turn them loose in my coop and they have access to go outside when I open the coop for the hens, but they don't go very far from the coop by that point because they are already fat and lazy so mostly just step out of the coop far enough to get a little green grass and plop down where they can quickly waddle back to the coop for protection.

This is my third year raising Cornish X, the first year I started with a batch of 12, then a second batch of 12, then a third batch of 24. Last year I did a batch of 24 Cornish X then a batch of 20 "Freedom Rangers" because my wife doesn't like that the Cornish X are such frankenbirds that get so huge so fast (and we had a few tough ones the first year because I took them to 11 weeks instead of 8 weeks just because I didn't know any better). I wasn't very happy with the Freedom Rangers, they are definitely happier healthier birds for long term growth but seems how mine are mostly on grain with just part time pasture they ate a lot more food and didn't get nearly as large as the Cornish X... so back to Cornish X this year! I've debated about building a chicken tractor to put them out in my field but IDK I have planted 200+ trees on my little 3.77 acres that I think it might be difficult to move the tractor around and not run trees over since I don't have them marked very well.

I need to haul a load of dirt into my coop before I turn them loose because it's been 2 years since I built the coop and the dirt has compacted a lot and have some small gaps around the bottom edge of my rat boards now so need to raise the coop floor a bit because I lost 6 or 7 hens over the winter due to two different times that I had a mink/weasel get in the coop. I have 10 hens left and don't think I'm going to add any more hens this year because eggs just aren't selling so 10 is more than enough for us to get our eggs and sell a few at work and provide some to family etc. but I need to get the coop secured so I don't lose anymore to mink.

Eventually I would like to build a second coop to just keep my meat birds in separate from my hens then the second coop would just be storage during the winter but maybe a chicken tractor would be a better investment to build to make raising them cheaper in the long run.

Hi Rob, how big is your coop and do you do your own butchering (any tips appreciated - feel free to PM me if you'd rather answer offline)? I'm thinking about raising some cornish cross (4 or 5 at a time so 11 birds max (already have 6 layers) either this year or next (I'm limited by what's allowed in the county and don't want to upset the neighbors either).

The only real predators we have are the sneaky foxes but our two dogs have improved the survival rate of the chickens. We free range them from the mid afternoon till the sun goes over the horizon.
I thought about building a mobile coup to give the fixed coup a chance to recuperate (no pun intended) but its just another security issue for the chickens and might confuse them when they head back home.
We throw a couple of inches of saw dust over the dirt to soak up and collect the manure, then twice a year shovel that into the compost or around plants then replace.

I have a coop and attached run and then an outdoor pen. My predator proofing consists of hardware cloth under the enclosed run and on the coop portion hardware cloth out along the sides just under the soil surface a couple of feet so that if animals get near the coop and dig, all they find is the wire blocking their way. the outer pen is about keeping the chickens in and not the predators out. So far no problems but the upfront cost for good 1/2 inch hardware cloth was high. You could also do the cloth inside the coop. Unless I leave the front door open, nothings getting in.

Scotty my coop is an 8ft x 16ft lean-to on the back of my polebarn. It gets pretty cramped in there once the meat birds get bigger (and max I've ever raised at once was 24 meat birds and only had 4 hens at that point, so now I have 10 hens and 31 meat birds I'm probably pushing the limit of what I can keep, but I've also left the brood tank and some straw storage in the coop in the past. Now I have it laid out a little better and don't have straw storage in there and will remove the brood tank once I turn the meat birds loose, so it does gain me several additional square feet might be OK in there).

I usually take half of my birds to a guy that all he does for a living is butcher chickens during the summer and live off his land (and his wife is a school teacher). He charges $3 a bird to pluck and clean them and bag them. There is an amish guy locally that I guess only charges $2 a bird, but doesn't bag them just gives them back to you floating in water in a cooler, and another guy that I've heard charges $2.50 a bird, but I have only taken them to the guy that charges the $3 a bird because I'm happy with his work, no need to try anyplace else and the time it takes to process them is worth $3 a bird to me... I usually drop them off Sunday night and they are ready by Monday afternoon. The other half of the birds I've been processing myself, but when I process them I skin them rather than plucking them because it is easier with the tools I have.

I typically take four or five at a time and hang them upside down in a tree. Once they are hanging upside down and the blood starts to run to their head they will calm down. Once they are all calm I cut their throat one at a time and hold on to them so they don't flail around (they make "kill cones" for this but I haven't invested in them yet) and scare the rest of the birds or break wings etc. flailing. It only takes a few seconds for them to bleed out and stop flailing (other than the occasional nerve twitch) then I move on to the next one. Once I've bled them all out I go back to the first one and start skinning them like I would skin a deer or any other animal. Pull the skin away from the breast slightly and cut it open between breasts. There is just a thin connectivity tissue that holds the skin to the meat that easily slices by just touching a knife to it. Skinning them takes almost all of the feathers off except a few around their legs and I always have to do a little clean up on the wings where the largest feathers go in... I am able to pull them out while skinning but there is a thick gritty looking meat that holds those large feathers in that I go back and trim off the wings after I'm done skinning the rest of the bird. Once that is done I toss them in a cooler full of ice water to let them chill while I finish skinning the rest of the birds that I bled.

Once all of the birds have been skinned and in the ice water I take a cutting board to the back deck and cut the meat off the bird. If you slice around the back legs the meat will pull apart until you can access the joint and just cut down between the joint and the legs pop right off. The wings are about the same just slice around the meat until you can access to joint then they pop apart. Cutting right at the joint makes it so you don't have to cut bone, just tendons that hold it together. Once wings and legs are all off then the breasts are pretty simple, on one side of the breast (the middle between the two breasts) there is a bone that sticks out from their chest cavity. You just run your knife along that bone and slowly pull the meat back like you were filleting a fish. On the other side of the breast there is a distinct line of fat. If you cut on the fat line all the way around the breast you'll find your way to the other side of the chest cavity bone. Once you have the breast cut off you'll see the tenders are attached to the back side of the breast. I take all of the meat inside and wash it then vacuum seal the tenders together, breasts, wings, thigh/legs all in separate bags so I only take out what we want to eat. Most people recommend leaving the meat to sit in the fridge for 24-48 hours before freezing it to allow rigor mortis to leave the body so they don't get tough, but I don't usually, I just toss them in the freezer and the only time I've had tough birds was my first batch that I took to 11 weeks old instead of 8 weeks old. Taking them to 8 weeks old I get an 8-10lb bird (probably 6-7lbs of meat) and haven't noticed them being tough at all.

We like doing this half and half, so half of our birds that I pay to have processed we freeze either whole or half (I use a big knife to split some of the full birds in half so if we don't want to eat chicken for 3 or 4 days in a row we can just take a half out instead). Doing it that way we typically cook them in the crockpot/slow cooker because we've found that cooking them in the oven it seems like it takes a long time to cook the red meat to where it's not all bloody, and by that point you've killed the breasts either burnt or dried out. In the slow cooker on low all day long we come home and the meat is falling off the bones and thoroughly cooked the dark meat without hurting the white meat. We had to buy a larger crockpot because the full bird would not fit in our normal sized crockpot (I think our normal size is 6qt, I think the new one might be 8qt). The other meat that I skinned and took off the bird you can just take whatever pieces you want out instead of having to cook the full bird.

Eventually I will probably buy a large plucker and process everything myself, but they start in the $400 range for what I want.... I will probably wait a couple more years and probably build my second coop first (an 8x12 or another 8x16 lean-to on the side of the polebarn...), then I might build a clean room in it to do all of my processing in (so I would have a nice clean stainless steel room for processing fish in too out of the AP system in case I get to a point to sell processed fish and chickens, although at least with chickens the USDA gives you an out that you don't have to be USDA certified as long as you claim an exclusion that you are selling less than 1000 chickens a year which I'd never get to that point... I have not found similar exclusions for fish though, but I haven't been looking as long either).

Pete, I typically put large pine wood chips/shavings down on the floor of my coop then clean them up and toss them out the window into my compost pile when needed, but last spring I made the mistake of trying to use straw for the floor and it turned in to a nasty slimey mess that I have not completely recovered from... then I sent my wife to the store for wood chips and she came back with the small/fine cut chips which just make a mess, so I have not completely recovered from those mistakes yet. I think adding a new layer of dirt on top to fill in around the bottom of the coop boards will help recover from that mess too. Then going back to pine chips should be OK again.

Scotty, if you don't want more than 11 birds making noise at a time you can probably still overlap the meat birds by a few weeks at least. Like I said earlier I usually keep my meat birds confined to their brooder trough for the first 4 weeks or so, so if you plan out your birds for 8 weeks then you could overlap at least 2-3 weeks of having chicks in a brooder then by the time they are bigger and need turned loose and are making more noise the other meat birds are already in the freezer.

We've been raising about 4 dozen meat birds a year and we probably eat someplace around 24-30 of those birds ourselves, then we give some away to friends and family when they come visit. It is a great feeling not buying any chicken in the store anymore... can't wait to say the same about all of our veggies if we can get the greenhouse to grow year round. It's looking like we can probably go about 2 years between raising hogs, although most of what we have left is bigger stuff (roasts, hams, some steaks/chops), but no longer need to buy pork at the store... my fish projects are coming along so we hopefully won't be buying anymore fish... slowly getting closer to a self sustaining lifestyle (if I could just get out of debt next!).

yesterday was really nice, low 70F's so I decided it was a good day to work on siding the greenhouse. Made a trip to the store in the morning and bought all of the siding stuff I figured I would need, went home and got started on it only to realize I needed to figure out what I was going to do for trim on the door and windows so I could put J's up to the trim... I was thinking I would trim the windows with the same treated deck boards that I used on the front of the greenhouse around the sliding glass door panes, so I decided instead of buying brick molding for the door I would trim it out to match. So I had to go back to the store again to pick up some deck boards. I got one side trimmed out and put J's around it, then got a little more done before I decided to call it quits for the night... It got really windy yesterday afternoon so by 6pm it was starting to blow my siding around so I packed it all in for the night.

I still plan on ripping deck boards in half to cover the bottom of the windows as well as the mid windows that don't open I will finish enclosing them and replace the 1/4 round that I have there now because I think it will look nicer.

Wow, awesome progress! Looking very professional there!

thanks, but only to the untrained eye =) there is a major problem that bugs me at least a little bit, but most people will probably never notice so I will live with it =)

Looking good. You will probably have your sided before I get mine done.

hopefully I'll be able to finish the east side tonight or tomorrow if the weather cooperates, then the west wall I will probably need to pick up some more wood to trim out the windows because I wasn't sure how much I would need and then made a couple cuts that I redid because I wasn't happy with how the corners met up over the door, so I'm not sure if the scraps will be long enough for the other windows or not. The south wall will be pretty easy, but I'm not sure if I will completely finish it yet or not. I still have a leak coming in around a couple of the glass door panes on the south side which is making my plywood stay wet all the time. I was hoping the weather would be nice for a few days and give it a chance to dry out then I am going to take the bottom support out on the inside and try caulking behind it to see if it helps to stop the leak. If not I am still coming up with more ideas on how to seal those windows and stop the leak. The caulking that I put in there already has turned nasty over winter, so even if I managed to get the caulking to stop the leak it probably wouldn't be more than a season or two before it started leaking again... so I might have to wait until its night enough and I have someone to help me pick those glass panes back out so I can put flashing down under them then set them back in place... I need to get that done before I finish siding the south wall. I'm debating about getting more of this wood and putting a beveled cut on the edge and make it sit flat with the cut up tight against the glass because that is probably the biggest issue right now is the wood has rounded edges since it is treated deckboard, so there is a big gap back behind the wood to the glass which I filled with caulking. If I bevel the edge and have it sit tight against the glass then caulking it should be much more effective.

I still need to paint the entire inside before it gets too humid in there. I opened the windows up yesterday because it was low 70's outside and was only mid 70's in the greenhouse (the sun is already high enough that my barrels are in shade already, so I'm wondering if the greenhouse will only get to 75F until the outside temp is above 75F... I guess it might get warmer if I get the foundation sealed so I'm not losing as much heat at night) so I figured I would at least circulate some air through it while I had the chance. I also still need to figure out what I'm going to do for long term ventilation. I can probably put the auto openers on my upper windows like what you have to help in the summer time, but winter time I'm still not sure what to do to dry it out in there. It would have probably been a lot easier if I had just planned on putting a wood burner in there from the beginning (well actually I did, then I started reading on passive solar so got rid of the wood burner idea) as it would help dry the air so mold wouldn't be as big of a concern.

some pics inside the greenhouse...





broccoli that I let go... going to try and grab seeds from it once flowers start disappearing.


lettuce is getting big in the DWC


DWC rafts getting close to being completely hidden by plants

Very nice Rob!

Could you take a few pics turning 360 so we can see the entire greenhouse inside?

Cheers - Jens