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Protect Your Chickens From Predators

There's nothing worse than having your chickens or other poultry attacked by a predator - and it seems that nearly every wild creature, and many domestic ones, can appreciate a delicious chicken dinner. So, how do you protect your flock so you don't have to worry about losing hens to raccoons, dogs, weasels, hawks, and more?

Potential Poultry Predators
If you're new to raising chickens, you might not even be aware of just what predators are around. Or you may think that since you live in the surburbs or within city limits, you don't have to worry about predators. But domestic animals can be chicken killers, too.
So, who are you worried about?
Here are the most common chicken predators:

neighborhood dogs
chicken hawks
weasels/ermine/minks
foxes
raccoons
coyotes
feral and domestic cats
bobcats
owls
snakes (chicks)
rats
fisher cats
Some predators, like snakes and rats, are only likely to eat baby chicks or half-grown pullets, not full-grown birds. Others, such as skunks, will just eat chicken eggs, leaving the hens alone.

Coop Security
There are some simple steps you can take to protect your precious hens from predation. The first order of business is to have a secure coop with a door that shuts securely at night. Some other tips:

Dig a trench 12 inches deep around the entire coop and bury hardware cloth there. This will prevent digging predators.

Elevate the coop off the ground to help prevent mice, rats and weasels from getting into the coop.

Inspect the bottom of the coop and patch any holes where predators could gain entry.

Put lights around the coop at night; motion-sensor lights work well.

Keep your compost pile far away from the coop and don't allow food scraps to linger - clean up any food scraps that the chickens don't eat before nightfall.

Keep the area around the coop mowed and clear - an open field without cover is a deterrent to predators.

If you have serious problems with hawks and owls, consider covering the chicken run with hawk netting.

Poultry Protectors

There are other ways to protect poultry and some of them will work for any animal on the farm. Dogs are great protectors of the small farm or homestead, and will keep everything from sheep to cattle to baby chicks safe from marauding predators - usually including other dogs.

Still, there's a catch: some dogs just love to chase and tease chickens. They will often kill them without even realizing or intending it. If you get a livestock guardian puppy, be sure to supervise its interactions with your chickens when it is young, and deliver a correction any time it gives chase to your feathered farm animals.

If you're not up for getting a dog, guinea fowl are also great guardians of the flock. They will chase off everything from the mailman to coyotes - but beware, their protection comes with a noisy price. Guineas are not quiet animals, and you can't just train them to pipe down like you can with (some) dogs. Still, they have an added benefit: they'll eat every bug you can imagine that might plague the garden and barnyard, from ticks to flies.

TomTato: 'mutant' plant that grows tomatoes and potatoes unleashed

A bizarre plant which produces both tomatoes and potatoes, providing a 'veg plot in a pot', has been launched in the UK.

The ‘TomTato’ can grow more than 500 sweet cherry tomatoes above ground, while beneath the soil it produces white potatoes that are suitable for boiling, roasting or turning into chips.

Horticultural mail order company Thompson & Morgan, which is selling the plants for £14.99 each, described their new product as a “veg plot in a pot”.

The hybrid plants are not a product of genetic engineering, but are each individually hand-grafted. Like potatoes, tomatoes are members of the nightshade family (Solanaceae), which makes them compatible for grafting.

Grafted potato/tomato plants have been around for decades, including from some small British nurseries, but Thompson & Morgan say this is the first time the plants have been widely produced commercially in the UK.

Top 10 Reasons to Keep a Jersey Cow

1.  Personality.  They don’t know they are cows.  Picture a giant milk giving dog who will lick you from fingertips to armpit if it thinks you have a treat.

2.  Ease of Milking.  I milk goats and a cow.  Amazingly, the cow is easier to milk than any of the goats.

3.  The Milk is Amazing.  Just amazing.  It is so sweet and delicious and unlike anything you will ever find in the grocery store.

4.  Cream:  Jersey cows give amazing quantities of the good stuff.  (Note:  they don’t give as much as Holsteins, but their milk is much richer!)

5.  Fertilizer for the Garden:  The other thing cows produce in quantity is manure.  Luckily it enriches the garden and pasture!

6.  Calves!  So precious!

7.  Save on chicken feed (part 1.)  Chickens love the milk and whey we give them.  Feeding it to our feathered friends is certainly preferable to wasting it!

8.  Save on chicken feed (part 2.)  This one may be a bit much for the non-homesteader to handle, but chickens are huge fans of cow manure.  It sounds gross, but it keeps the pasture clean, because they spread out the cow-pies while searching for loose grains and fly larvae.  This is part of nature’s plan for sanitation!

9.  Butter!  Imagine the butter you can make when you get inches of cream in each jar!  Spectacular!

10.  Cheese!  Cheese making ranges from seriously simple to extremely complex.  Either way, I’m all for a hobby I can eat!

So there you have it!  Equal treatment for the dairy cow.  She may be bigger than you, and that can be intimidating at first, but she’s a great asset to family farms and homesteads!

All About Growing Peppers

Peppers present some of the summer gardens biggest flavors and brightest hues, and these striking fruits are simple to store and have a wealth of delicious uses in the kitchen. Plus, sweet and specialty peppers are among the most expensive produce at the grocery store, so growing peppers of your own can be a money-saving move.

Pepper Types to Try

Sweet bell peppers come in various sizes and colors, and the fruits’ colors change as they mature. They grow best where summers are long and warm.

Specialty sweet peppers include pimentos, frying peppers, and other sizes, shapes and flavors. Small-fruited varieties are among the easiest peppers to grow.

Southwestern chile peppers have complex flavors with varying degrees of heat. Many varieties bear late and all at once, so they can be a challenge to grow in climates with short summers.

Specialty hot peppers range from moderately spicy jalapeños to hotter cayennes to hottest-of-all habaneros. Most are easy to grow.

Ornamental peppers may feature spicy, brightly colored fruits, purple or variegated foliage, or both.


When to Plant Peppers

Start seeds indoors under bright fluorescent lights in early spring, eight to 10 weeks before your last spring frost date. If possible, provide bottom heat to keep the plants’ containers near 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure the seeds stay slightly moist. Seeds should sprout within three weeks. Transfer seedlings to larger containers when they are about six weeks old. Don’t set peppers outside until at least two weeks after your average last frost date, during a period of warm weather.Always harden off seedlings by gradually exposing them to outdoor weather a few hours each day for at least a week before transplanting them outdoors.

How to Plant Peppers

All peppers grow best under warm conditions, but gardeners in cool climates can keep peppers happy by using row covers. Choose a sunny site that has fertile, well-drained soil with a pH between 6.0 and 6.5. Loosen the planting bed to 12 inches deep, and thoroughly mix in a 1-inch layer of mature compost. Dig planting holes 12 inches deep and at least 18 inches apart, and enrich each with a spadeful of additional compost. Partially refill the holes, and situate plants so they are planted slightly deeper than they were in their containers. Water well.

Harvesting and Storing Peppers

You can eat peppers when they are mature yet still green (green peppers), although the flavor and the vitamin content of peppers improve as they ripen to red, yellow or orange. Use pruning shears to snip ripe peppers from the plant, leaving a small stub of stem attached. Bumper crops can be briefly steam-blanched or roasted and then frozen, either whole (for stuffing) or chopped. Peppers are also easy to dry. Dried peppers quickly plump if soaked in hot water, or you can grind them into powders for your spice shelf.

How to Save Cucumber Seeds from Your Garden

Saving seeds from heirloom or open-pollinated cucumber varieties is a wonderful way to ensure that you can keep growing your favorite varieties year after year. Even better, you can select seeds from those fruits with the best qualities, tailoring the variety to conditions in your own garden over the years.

Saving cucumber seeds is not as straightforward as saving bean seeds, or even tomato seeds. Unlike beans and tomatoes, cucumber blossoms are not perfect -- they need to be pollinated by insects (or by the gardener) to set fruit. And, to complicate things further, cucumbers cross easily with other cucumber varieties. Professional seed savers recommend isolating cucumber varieties by 1/2 mile to prevent crossing. Since most of us do not have that type of space to work with, we have to handle isolation and pollination another way.

Isolating Plants

The first step to take if you plan on saving seeds from your cucumbers is to isolate the plants you want to save seed from. You can bag individual female blossoms (these are the ones that look like they have a tiny cucumber at the base) before they open in spun polyester or cotton bags to prevent insects from pollinating them. Do the same with a male flower. Then, tag the branch with that female blossom so you know later that this cucumber should be saved for the seeds. The other way to isolate your cucumbers is to build a cage that will enclose the entire plant or plants -- wood or PVC with spun polyester or screen over it will work.

Hand-Pollinating Cucumber Flowers

Since we can't allow those haphazard bees to pollinate the cucumbers, we have to take that task on ourselves. Use a small brush to dab some of the pollen from a male cucumber flower onto the stigma (center) of the female flower. Then bag the female blossom again, and let the waiting begin. Once a fruit forms, you'll know that your hand-pollination worked. You can then remove the bag, but make sure you keep this fruit tagged or otherwise labeled so it doesn't end up in a salad by mistake.

When to Harvest Cucumber Seeds

Cucumbers that you are growing to save seed from must be grown to full maturity, much past the point where they are no longer edible. The cucumber will be larger than usual harvest size, and will start to soften. It will also change color from green to whitish.

Harvest the fruits, then cut them in half lengthwise. Over a bowl, scoop out the seeds from the center of each half. Add about as much water t the bowl as the amount of seeds, and set aside in a warm, sheltered spot to ferment, much as you would if you were saving tomato seeds. Fermentation of cucumber seeds can occur in as little as one to three days; once most of the seeds have sunk to the bottom of the container, they are finished fermenting. Add more water to the bowl at this point to clean your seeds. Debris and bad seeds will float to the top, where you can discard them easily. The good seeds will be at the bottom. Rinse them a few more times, then strain them out and place them on paper towels or uncoated paper plates to dry. Once they are completely dry, label your seeds and store them in a cool, dry place.

Stored properly, cucumber seeds will remain viable for ten years. A refrigerator is the ideal place to store your seeds.

How Much to Feed Pregnant and Lactating Goats

If you're raising goats as part of a green lifestyle, you need an overall feeding program to keep your goats at maximal performance, but at times you need to make exceptions for certain goats or categories of goats. Pregnant goats, milking does, kids, and senior goats need special attention and modified diets.

Pregnant does
Pregnant does don't have increased nutritional needs until the last two months of gestation, when the kids do 70 percent of their growing. They also need additional water throughout pregnancy. A feeding program for pregnant goats includes:

Early pregnancy (first 3 months): Feed does to maintain their body condition or to improve their body condition if they are thin. You can meet their nutritional requirements with good hay or pasture, or some added grain for thin does. Unless they're lactating, does don't need grain in early pregnancy. Do not overfeed. Overfeeding can lead to complications such as hypocalcemia and ketosis.

Throughout pregnancy: Monitor and compensate for pregnant does' increased water consumption. Pregnant goats can drink up to four gallons a day. Monitor body condition and adjust feed and water accordingly.

Late pregnancy (last two months): Does' nutritional requirements increase greatly during this time because the unborn kids are growing rapidly. Start grain gradually (just a handful a day) until your does are eating up to a half-pound of grain a day (depending on the goat size and breed) or half to two-thirds of their normal milking ration by the time they kid, in addition to hay. Gradually replace their hay with alfalfa so they get the proper balance of calcium and phosphorus. Continue to monitor their body condition and adjust feed accordingly; does carrying multiple kids need even more calories and nutrients.

Make sure not to overfeed grain during pregnancy to avoid the risk of having the kids grow so large that the doe has birthing difficulties.

Milking does
Milking does, or does that are nursing their kids, have higher nutritional needs than other goats. You will have started your pregnant goats on grain and gotten them used to eating a substantial amount of grain during the last two months of pregnancy. Continue this feeding, even increasing it to several pounds a day, according to the doe's body condition and the number of kids she is feeding or the amount of milk she is producing. Also, make sure that she is drinking plenty of fresh, clean water.