eggs&tea

Ben is giving a talk about chickens today at NHERC (North Hawaii Education and Research Center) down in Honokaa tonight. I’m assembling some photogenic shots of our hens for his slideshow. You might wonder what breeds of hens do we have? It’s time I posted about our flock numbers!

• buff orpington, 8
• barred plymouth rock, 5
• black australorp, 4
• white plymouth rock, 6
• silver laced wyandotte, 7
• black sex-linked hybrids, 5
• dark indian game, 1
• light brahma, 1
• red turken, 1

That’s 38 in all.  They are all brown egg layers; some are more friendly than others. My personal favorites are the Buff Orpingtons because they are gentle, friendly and best of all, most of them cuddle up with me. My allergy test shows I’m allergic to a gamut of furry creatures (cats, dogs, horses, goat, rabbits, rodents, etc.). Because I’m not allergic to my hens, I am so happy to they choose to cuddle up with me.

[I'm not supposed to play favorites as a chicken keeper, am I?]

The red turken also know as naked neck because the breed has a single gene that affects the arrangement of feather-growing tracts over the chicken’s body.

I was surprised how much I enjoy “The Natural History of the Chicken” directed by Mark Lewis (VII) each time I watch it. Tonight I watched the video for the third time. (The DVD is available to borrow at the Thelma Parker Memorial Public and School Library in Waimea.)

I am entertained and educated by the many human & chicken stories, especially about the city silkie rooster and the country silkie hen.

Cotton is a white Japanese bantam silkie rooster who is Karin Estrada’s soulmate. (Silkie feathers looks and feels like long rabbit fur.) They live in West Palm Beach, Florida. Cotton is one spoiled rooster! He gets pampered by shampoo & blowdry; he has a special rooster perch in the passenger side of Karin’s car, he gets to watch TV, especially Pavarotti. And he has a teeny tiny little red diaper to catch all the poop. Karin thinks Cotton thinks he’s human. I think she’s right.

Liza, also a white silkie, is a courageous hen who lives in a minature hen house built by Pastor L. Joseph Tauer. He was inspired by Liza self-sacrifice to protect her 6 chicks when a hawk soared in the sky looking for food. He wrote “Call Me Chicken” which he narrates in the video. I shed a couple tears towards the end of his story. <sniff>

I definitely want to raise several bantam silkies in the near future. <sigh>

There were 50 tables at yesterday’s agricultural fair - local farmers, producers, restaurants, school gardens.  We were there with a informational table, telling people about chickens and tea, and sharing what i’ve learned about how to feed chickens locally.  Mostly we answered a lot of backyard chicken questions.

Our fellow tea growers were there again this year, from Onomea Tea and Mauna Kea Tea Garden:

After adding the plastic sheet over the structure, as expected, both temperature and humidity have gone WAY up:

Compared with before, humidity range has gone from 40%-90% to nearly 98% almost all the time, only dipping slightly on hot days.  The dew point is now exactly the same as temperature, which can spike hotter, over 40ºC on some days.  I have no idea how this will be for the tea, but it certainly looks happy in there, the tender green shoots are not wilting, despite the heat.  One day, i also discovered a toad happily lounging in a square pot, i guess a moist place to hide during the day is perfect:

Last Saturday (10/18) in Holualoa, Deb and i attended this workshop.  I gave a half-hour talk on Local Chicken Feed, basically summarizing what’s in my chicken notes.  It was great fun, people really liked my talk and i learned a lot also, about fruit and low-maintenance perennial food crops.  It was a sold-out crowd of around 80 people:

We got cuttings from 7 perennial crops (Cassava, Chaya, Katuk, Moringa, Okinawan Spinach, Pacific Spinach aka Edible Hibiscus, Sissoo (Brazilian) Spinach).  I planted them in my garden to see if any will grow here.

More info: Leaves to Live By: Perennial Leaf Vegetables, PerennialVegetables.org, ECHO Tropical Vegetables

Scott Johnson of Waimea writes:

We have a coop that fits 25 nice and snug with plenty of acreage for them to roam.  However, when they were big enough to be let out, but not full grown yet, we had mongoose issues.  A mongoose made repeated attacks on the young chickens (6-8 wks old) and killed most of them.  We thought at first it was a dog, but couldn’t figure out how a dog was able to get into the small “yard” around the coop.  We were finally able to trap and dispose of the mongoose, which stopped the killing.  Then when the chickens are full grown, the mongooses end up going for the eggs instead of the chickens, leaving few for us.  My first question is how do you deal with the mongooses on your farm?

The short answer is, i believe we’ve been lucky, but also a bit prepared.
We have a chicken run fence, enclosing a roughly 40′x60′ area.  It is chicken wire, buried a few inches into the ground.  It surrounds and includes the coop.  The chicken stay in their run all night and morning; we let them out to totally free range in the afternoon, and they put themselves back in, in the evening, then we go down and shut the door.
There are definitely mongoose living around here - we see them - but they have never attacked either chicken or eggs.  Some factors that might explain why we haven’t been attacked:

1. Much of the chicken’s time, especially at night, is inside a fence.
2. The run is not far from our garden and greenhouse, so the presence of humans might be scaring away mongoose.
3. We are frequently going down to the chickens to gather eggs and spend time with them.

Next Q:

What do you do with your chickens after two-three years?  We actually don’t eat meat, and we are not the type to kill them ourselves.  We would be happy to give them away to someone who will use them for stewing, but have not been able to find that person.

We are still on our first time with such a large flock, so, like many people, we’re not quite sure!  The options seem to be:

1. Process and eat them ourselves (too much work for all 40 hens).
2. Kill them and bury them in planting hole as fertilizer for tree crops.
3. Find homes for them, families that want mature docile hens and don’t mind the low egg output of a 3-year-old hen.
4. Find some local folks with intact traditions, who will happily take them for eating.

The only thing i don’t recommend is to just set them free, as some people do.  They are likely to die of starvation or dog attack.  Any of the above options seems more humane.

Here is the results after one month, the percentage of each test case that still appears alive:

Overview:

1. Every single cutting in the soil/manure mix died.
2. The dip’n'grow vs. peroxide cuttings are doing about the same.
3. The potting soil is keeping the cuttings green and alive looking, but i think they aren’t actually rooting.

I bought a small temperature/humidity logger, and clipped it inside the tent.  Here is a typical 11-day period in September, while the cuttings were being misted a few times each day to keep them moist:

As you can see, temperature can dip down to 11ºC at night or spike up to 35ºC on hot days. Humidity it pretty much the inverse of temperature, around 92% at night, dropping as low at 40% on hot days. But the article on the HTS website says: “Propagation of tea plants needs a facility where constant temperature 23-29ºC and humidity (80%) are maintained.”  Daytime temperature seems OK, but nighttime is way outside this range, and humidity is almost never close to 80%.

Today i bought a 8×20′ piece of plastic to cover the tent, following Mealani’s shade tent instructures.  They said to add this cover for the second month, so that’s what i’m going to try.

I saw this blurb on the Onion recently which made me laugh.  I am putting a lot of work and passion into our tea field.  Why are we, as highly educated members of a developed nation, so eager to do the sort of work which is relegated to peasants in poor parts of the world? I do hope that some day our tea makes the world a better place, in a small way.  True, you can’t (really) eat tea.  But good tea, the kind we hope to make, is more than about what the Onion blurb says, growing caffeine or antioxidants.  The way i am beginning to see things, tea can be a holistic experience, the fulfillment it brings may be beyond scientific analysis.

Last time i wrote about cuttings, i concluded that there are many other ideas to try, which might have a better success rate.  Today, i finished setting up a major new test, with 6 different combinations, in a shade structure very much like the Mealani paper describes.

I made the structure out of scrap metal, some bamboo from the land, a bit of hog wire, twist ties, and shade cloth.  It is around 10 feet long.  Mealani said 80% shade cloth, i had 55%, so i added a stripe of solid ground cloth to the top, to get the necessary darkness.  I didn’t go through the trouble of buying and installing mist-irrigation tubing, so for now it will have be misted by hand, every day.

Going out into the tea field, i found that a hundred plants needed major pruning, so there was lots of branches for cutting material.  There was even two buckets left over, and more plants in the field that still need more pruning.

Three different media: oasis cubes, potting mix, and a topsoil/manure/potting combo. Two different dips: Dip’n'Grow, and hydrogen peroxide. That’s 6 different combinations, times 2 cultivars (Beni/Bohea, Yabu/YM) is 12 trays, a total of 424 cuttings.  Deb helped to dip and stick the cuttings, all together it took around 5 hours to prune, clip, dip and stick.

I also bought a small gadget which records and logs temperature and humidity.  You then bring it to a computer with USB and see the data.  I’m curious what the conditions are going to be like inside the shade structure, especially in the hot afternoon and cold night.

It hasn’t been widely publicised, so i want to help: If you are in Hamakua, check this out. HHCDC’s Agriculture & Sustainability classes:

PRACTICAL AGRICULTURE FOR HAMAKUA 2008
Supporting local agriculture through classroom instruction, field operations and farm tours from specialists and local farmers who support sustainable agriculture in Hamakua

There are classes on soil, planting, monitoring, harvesting, value add, irrigation, aquponics, biodynamics, alternative energy, food security - and a class on Poultry taught by me (Ben) on Nov. 13, followed by a farm tour here on Nov. 15.  You can sign up for the whole thing, or just drop in on the events that interest you.