At Home With Dad

Worms… Yeah, I like composting with worms. The downside to the worm – even the 5 tray worm factory I use – is it is pretty darn slow. It can take months to turn food scraps into compost. So I looked for an alternative and found the black soldier fly!

These little black soldier flies – or more specifically their grubs – can break down food scraps in just days! Right now I’m adding a large salad bowl of scraps each day to these little guys and they are eating it all!

The BioPod houses the little guys and makes life a little easier for me. Before my BioPod, I built a house for my little friends and it worked pretty well, but I wasn’t able to catch them when they would make a run for it. See, these little dudes are much like humans. Once they hit puberty, they sneak out of the house to procreate. It is at this time – much like the father of a teenager – that I want to catch ‘em.

Why?

Well… I feed them to my chickens. The little grubs make a perfect protein for the chickens. Besides, at this stage of their life they are ready to morph into a fly, mate, and die. Then, their short little life cycle is compete. As for me, I let some escape to sow their royal oats and keep the life cycle going. And, others become chicken food.

I love these little guys so much I’m thinking of letting my worm factory go completely. The black soldier fly composts so much faster and easier – not to mention my chickens love ‘em. Sorry worms. It was a good run.

Learn more about the black soldier fly at Black Soldier Fly Blog and Wikipedia.

Yesterday morning, I noticed something odd when looking into the backyard. Apparently some of our neighbors are very excited about the chickens’ arrival.

This *$&(*&#%^)(* chicken coop has taken twice as much money and time as we expected. BUT, we love the way that it is turning out. We have thought about adding a shelf as well that would house their nest boxes (where they lay their eggs). It has been fun planning and building the coop to be honest, but much more work than we thought.

We also have continued our efforts  to tame the birds by hand feeding them. The kids love these little peeps.

These chicks grow really fast! We are a little over a week into their little lives and they are clearly planning some type of take over. They eat more than the us! They poop far more than we do! And, they are doubling in size almost every other day.

Everyone seems healthy and happy in the brooder. Pretty easy to keep as well. We are trying to feed them out of our hands to further domestic them, but they are still a little nervous about us. Can’t imagine why the tiny creatures are terrified of four little kids trying to hold them like Lennie Small would.

When having chickens, we’ve learned that the coop presents one of the most important decisions you have to make. There are countless options when considering your chickens’ future residence. We considered many options:

We looked at chicken tractors…

We looked at wooden coops…

And, then we found the hoop coop…

After a trip to Home Depot… Ok, who are we kidding? After a few trips to Home Depot, we constructed the following coop, which is a PVC hoop coop.

As you can see from the pictures, we still need put the chicken wire over the frame.

We have some new ladies in our lives… Chicks!

Yep, we’ve been kicking around getting backyard chickens for some time now, but we finally decided to take the plunge this weekend. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been talking about our chicken options. Personally, I wanted to get a bird that is already laying eggs or darn close. Unfortunately, both Dylan and Nicole were terrified of the larger  chickens. As a result, we showed them chicks, which of course they loved.

So our theory is if we start with chicks, the little children would grow to love the chicks and then be comfortable as the chicks grew into egg laying chickens.

After reading a couple of books and driving all over the metroplex to learn about chickens, Sunday we headed out to Dan Probst’s Bageniece Farms to find our new friends. We picked out two Buff Orpingtons, two Australorps, and one Americana.  We picked a couple more than we really want in case of one or two end up being roosters, the cat/dog finds one or two of them, or we just do something wrong. Everyone over this direction is pretty excited. Now we just pray the neighbors are ok with the idea as well.