Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Most hens need 14 hours of light or they stop laying. If you put a light in the coop, near where they eat, it's supposed to help.

We have been eating our own chooks for a little while now with mixed reactions from the kids

the main thing is they were a bit too fat free.... free ranging them seems to keep them a bit lean at our place so we have started to confine a bunch of roosters to a 3m x 3m cage for a few weeks of fattening up. Check out this roast chook from last week. Juicy, tender, and drumsticks the size of turkeys lol.

The difference between confining them for the last few weeks and not was amazing... we now no longer have to buy any more chook meat from the shop... one more step closer to our self sufficiency goal.

Nice one Stu, they are huge drumsticks... So how long did it take to get to that size? And why is it's but smoking?

Nice..


Are these the light Sussex or something else?
We recently culled out one of our silver laced wyandotte hens, she came in at 1.7 kg dressed and managed to get three meals from her plus stock.
The roosters are even bigger...

H.

this one dressed at 1.9 kg's... fed the five of us nicely.
Was a heavy sussex cross.
About 20 weeks? approx. certainly not a young chick

nice work stu.
Wish I could say the same for mine.

F@#$%!ing, dirty, stinking, vermin fox beat me to it.

I've been locking them away almost every night for years. Went away for a few days and came back to a backyard full of feathers, decapitated chooks and ducks.

Next project......chicken chopper. aka.... automatic chook'n door

I got a Australorp rooster to 2kg dressed weight in about 20 weeks also, very impressive.

bugger...

Now this kind of annoys me. Why does everybody blame the fox? It's doing only what it naturally does. In my younger days we kept chickens, ducks and geese and never lost a one to a fox. Even now we have a fox (actually about three) that visit our place... and I live in the centre of London. Rather than chase them off, we've fed them to make them divert from their normal hunting grounds (our bins) to along side the house. Funnily enough we used to have a rat problem along there. Now our bins are untouched, and we haven't had trace of a rat for over 6 months.

Sad for your loss, but there is only one thing to blame here... and it's not the fox.

I don't think he was blaming the fox.
The fact that he called the fox "F@#$%!ing, dirty, stinking, vermin" is simply that they are an introduced pest species in this country and get treated as such.

I take full responsibility for the death of my domesticated birds from a feral animal.

Having said that, I'm not a big fan a Basil Brush and the damage that introduced species inflict on our native fauna.

OK, I'll stand by that. My apologies.

And I too am annoyed by introduced fauna. Don't know how things stand in Australia as I have never have the joy of travelling there, but here in the UK we have a severe problem with an introduced species in our waterways. The American Signal Crayfish has non-native and has decimated our natural ones. Same goes for the introduced Grey Squirrel which has forced our native Red ones into small enclosures in North Wales (where WelshDragon lives) and into Scotland.

But anyway, to drag this thread back on topic, I am also a resident of a UK forum that deals with Green Issues here. One such thread I've been reading with interest is how one forum member obtained some ex-battery farm chickens. Even in a couple of weeks their lives have improved immensely. So whether you call them Cooks or Chickens, with a little care and attention, animals of all sorts can benefit. Even the human ones.

Here's another use for aquariums:

I found 2 clutches of 32 eggs a while back. The next day half were gone so I put the rest under my broody hens in the coop. A few weeks later I found a dead chick, then another, and another. They were hatching and the other hens were killing the babies (nature is cruel). I picked up 2 of the eggs to candle them and heard peeping! I tried to move them & a broody hen during the day but the hen wouldn't stay. Then I stapled chicken wire to the nesting box to protect any newly born chicks but it didn't work. I came back to find a dead chick which had been pulled through the chicken wire. So I hatched the rest inside.

Below are 15 turkeys that arrived safe and sound despite being shipped on the 2 hottest days of the year. They do need to be kept at 100 for the first week so I had to put on a heat lamp despite our current heat wave.

A friend is taking 5. I'm not sure if any will be big enough by Thanksgiving but I plan on keeping at least 1 breeding pair. They are Royal Palms.

I recieved my "day old" bronze turkeys around June 1st. Now they are 18 inches tall. I tried feeding them on laying pellets, 18% protien, one died so I went to the recommended turkey/game feed which is more protien.
You shoull have a tom large enough for thankgiving dinner. I keep mine caged to keep them out of the garden and away from preditors. That limits their exercise and they are nice and tender. I wont do the broad breasted again because they get over 30 pounds (14 kg) in 6 months. The Toms are to large to mount the hens and need artifiacal insemination to reproduce.

Hmmm. Maybe I'll keep 2 in the turkey tank my husband made a few years ago (too heavy to move alone).

What concerns me is that I bought organic "poultry feed" (organic was 18% protein vs 16% non-organic). I've been grinding it up for the poults. It's not layer pellets for sure so I wonder if it'll be OK.

I've been thinking about supplementing with milk. One of those out of print books (http://books.google.com/) said skim milk was perfect for raising turkeys.