Mother Earth News has picked up another of my blog postings to carry on their site: Brooding Chicks in Winter. I must say that I admire their taste!

Everyone knows that the brooding period is by far the most critical time of a chicken's life. And it's important that they do more than stay alive -- they have to thrive, or they'll have problems later in life.

Imagine how heartbreaking it is to not only have baby chicks die during the brooding period, but for the survivors to do poorly later on. Or, even worse, for children to have this experience. I wrote my book, Success With Baby Chicks, so that imagining this heartbreak is as close as you'll ever get. What you'll experience is success, with frisky chickens living the happy chicken life and all the good feelings and enjoyment that this will bring.

I do this in a clear, easy-to-follow, unpadded 150-page book. Major publishers think that consumers want bulk, and pad out their books with filler, but I respect your time and stick to the point -- ensuring your success and enjoyment. Because you're sitting at your computer right now and reading my chicken-oriented blog, you know that the book is a good match for you -- and you want to read it before you get your first chicks of the season, so you'll be ready.

You want it on your reference shelf, too. I reread the book from time to time myself, since I sometimes forget the fine points and need to refresh my memory.

And then that faint feeling of dread that some people feel when they order baby chicks -- will they be all right? -- will be replaced with well-founded confidence. Or so my fan mail claims. So order your copy today -- it can't help you until you read it.

I upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 7, which I'm very happy with, but it gave me more grief than it should have. I've owned computers since 1980, when I got my first Apple II, and I'm a bona fide computer wizard, so it should have been easy, right?

Well, not quite. The first hurdle was dealing with Windows 7's insistence on wiping out your "Documents and Settings" -- the only indispensable things on most PCs! Do you have any idea how much data I've accumulated over the years? Messing around with backing it up and restoring it was Not Fun. It was just as hard as if I were transferring my stuff to a brand-new computer, which I wasn't.

The other hurdle was with mirrored drives. The more spendy versions of Windows 7 allow you to do disk mirroring, so all your data lives on two drives simultaneously. If one dies, the other keeps going, and you can slap in a replacement drive and get back to mirroring. No prob. And it doubles the speed of disk reads, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Disk mirroring is also called "RAID 1." Don't ask.)

But it's amazingly difficult to figure out how to set it up. Why, Microsoft, didn't you provide step-by-step instructions?

Some motherboards have the same capability in hardware, but they, too are always incredibly ill-documented.

But I'm up and running again, and Windows 7 seems quite a bit snappier than XP, though it seems to have some teething troubles, with the occasional odd bit of behavior.

A while back I bought a bargain-basement computer for under $300 at Staples to use as a secondary computer, and even el cheapo machines are pretty usable these days. So you might want to do it the easy way and get a new computer when you decide to switch to Windows 7. That's called a "forklift upgrade" in the biz.

These two videos document the "Chicken of the Future" contest from 1948, showing what, for the time, were the best chickens and the best practices for raising them (some of which most of us would envy, even today!)

They're worth watching just for the glimpses they give of good chicken-raising technique, but be careful to take a good hard look at the butchered carcasses! They look just like rubber chickens. And the chickens of 60 years ago grew more slowly, had higher mortality, and were less productive than modern hybrids.

This contest was very well run. Earlier egg-laying contests were easy to game, and the results of the contests had nothing in common with what you'd get if you bought baby chicks from the contestants. They were basically an accidental scam.

For the Chicken of the Future test, they started with a large number of hatching eggs -- too many to cherry-pick the ones from the best hens -- which were all incubated together. The day-old chicks were brooded in identical pens, then moved into different identical pens after the brooding period. When the cockerels were 12 weeks old, they were all butchered at the same time (with winning pens giving a dressed carcass weighing probably a little more than two pounds!) subjected to USDA inspection and grading, and generally compared with one another.

Feed consumption and overall profitability were kept track of. Profitability was affected by chick mortality, carcass value of the cockerels, rate of lay and size of eggs of the pullets, mortality among the pullets, and feed consumption. Careful records were kept. In the Forties, dual-purpose breeds like New Hampshire Reds usually won in total profitability -- so much so that no one seems to have bothered entering any White Leghorns!

Another interesting point was that the contest flocks had outbreaks of disease, which was considered routine at the time. Up until the Twenties, when small farm flocks were the rule, sickness in poultry flocks was uncommon, but it got worse and worse as flock sizes increased, reaching its peak in the Forties and Fifties, in spite of the introduction of antibiotics. Gradually, better biosecurity methods were introduces and the amount of disease plummeted. An outbreak of disease in a contest flock would not be considered routine today.

When the economy started nose-diving, I told myself, "During bad times, you want more irons in the fire. This is a great time to expand my publishing business." So I went from four titles to thirteen in about eight months.

I had it all planned out. During bad times, people start yearning for simplicity and more control over their lives, and there's always a back-to-the-land movement. So I published three classic back-to-the-land books: Gold in the Grass, Ten Acres Enough, and We Wanted a Farm. These, I figured, would do very well. I also republished a motley collection of books just because I loved them, though in many cases I felt that maybe no one else would.

So what happened? A couple of my labor-of-love books became mainstays of my publishing business, while the back-to-the-land books have been relatively disappointing. Only Ten Acres Enough was anything to write home about, but even its modest success was eclipsed by Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, which instantly became my #1 seller, and A Thousand Miles up the Nile, which has nothing whatever to do with any of my other books!

So it just goes to show, you never can tell. You have to swing at the ball a lot more times than you hit it, so you should give yourself a lot of at-bats, rather than counting on a home run on the first swing. Heck, I almost didn't publish Fresh-Air Poultry Houses because it's sort of eccentric, but I told myself that it's eccentric in a good way -- charming and thought-provoking, and in touch with natural thinking -- and it's a good thing I did.

Seth Godin has an interesting blog post where he shows a chart by Tim Burton of all his failed projects -- lots and lots and LOTS of them. Even now, only a fraction of his projects actually get released.

So keep swinging, and don't bet the farm on any one venture. Most of 'em won't get very far, but some will.

The Corvallis Indoor Winter Market starts today, and runs every Saturday from 9 AM - 1 PM at the Benton County Fairgrounds. It's in a heated building and everything!

Karen will be there with grass-fed chicken and eggs. Plenty of other farms will be there too, along with farm-themed crafts. You'll be amazed at the variety of produce grown in the off-season in our part of Oregon.

If you've got a stack of empty egg cartons that's getting in your way, bring 'em in. We'll reuse them.

With plenty of smiling vendors and swarms of cheerful customers, stopping in at the indoor winter market sets the tone for your laid-back Saturday.

We'll see you there!

Last year, in a fit of self-indulgence, I reprinted my first book, Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers' Handbook, which I wrote in college and was published by Reston Publishing in 1982.

Rather to my surprise, it has been selling briskly, and in spite of being a straight reprint, without a single word having been changed in 28 years, I'm getting testimonials like this one:

Robert,

Just a note to wish you and yours a happy holiday, and to tell you how much I enjoy "Through Dungeons Deep" (the reprinted edition). Although I'm a DM with many years of experience, I still find new and insightful ideas in every chapter. The bits about your personal gaming group and characters are especially fun to read as well. I look forward to recommending it to my friends, who will undoubtedly enjoy it every bit as much as I have.

Best wishes,

Todd Rooks
Barberton, OH

I'm grateful to be living in the Internet age, where self-publishing allows works that have long been out of print to find new audiences. I hope to bring many more books to light, delighting people with both their nostalgia value and their timelessness.

The only cell phone tower near my farm is slowly getting masked by trees as the forest next door grows up, and the cell phone reception in my house is dreadful.

I just bought a Verizon Network Extender and couldn't be happier. This is a device that looks like a wireless access point but acts like a miniature cell phone tower, using your DSL or cable modem to reach the cellular network. Our phones went from zero bars to four! Woo-hoo!

This is a zero-config device: I plugged it in and it self-configured within about 20 minutes. I didn't have to set a single parameter.

And it not only covers the whole house, but extends quite a way beyond it, even to the mailbox on the other side of the road. Generally speaking, reception in the house is worse than anywhere else, so it completely covers the problem area.

The retail price of this technological wonder (called a "femtocell" in the biz) is a wince-inducing $250, but I found a "$50 off All Accessories" coupon online, and, much to my surprise, found a $50 rebate form inside the box that's good through most of January, so it really cost me only $150. There is no monthly fee.

It doesn't handle 3G traffic (though your 3G devices will fall back to the "1X" standard, which it does handle, though slowly). and I don't know if non-Verizon subscribers can roam through it or not. But sure solved my problem!

There are similar devices out there that work with other carriers, plus a wide variety of cellular signal boosters that use an outdoor antenna to talk to the cell phone tower, and an amplifier and an indoor antenna to talk to your cell phones. The main difference is that boosters don't work in areas where you have no signal at all, while network extenders that use your cable or DSL links do.

These devices will probably turn out to be a must-have for rural residents everywhere.

Brooding baby chicks in cold weather -- how low can you go?

As it turns out, cold-weather brooding can go very low indeed. Back in the Fifties, when the electric companies were promoting electric brooding as safer, more reliable, and more convenient that the coal and kerosene brooders that folks used to use, one group did a demonstration:

They suspended four heat lamps in a walk-in freezer at a constant -20 F, and brooded a dozen or so chicks there. It was so cold that ice formed on the waterers on the sides away from the heat lamps, but within the circle of light the chicks were snug and comfy and did just fine.

The rule of thumb for overhead heat-lamp brooders is that one 250-watt heat lamp can handle 75 chicks at 50 F. If temperatures are lower than that, subtract one chick for every degree below 50 F. For example, -20 F is 70 degrees lower than 50 F, so you would be able to brood five chicks (75-70=5) per heat lamp. With four lamps, the freezer demonstration could handle 20 chicks!

Stop for a second and realize how much more confidence you have in all-weather chick brooding, now that you've grasped this little-known fact. And that's just a tiny fraction of the chick-raising lore I've collected in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. Don't forget that we all brood chicks in the late winter or early spring, when it's still cold! Baby chick season is upon us, so you need to buy the book now, before the chicks arrive.

I always check my youngest chickens first, then work my way up to the oldest ones.

One reason is that baby chicks are more fragile than older birds, so they need to be watched and cared for without fail. As the chickens get older, they need less and less attention, since they're sturdier and know the ropes. By checking the youngest chickens first, you ensure that they'll be taken care of before you discover any crises or distractions with the more rugged birds. This helps make sure the youngest chickens don't get lost in the shuffle.

Then there's the issue of disease. If you buy only from reputable hatcheries (which I recommend), then the odds of your youngest chickens arriving on the farm with any new diseases are small. This means that it's not a disaster if you carry material from the brooder house into the henhouse on your boots or gloves. But your older chickens have had the chance to be exposed to various diseases and parasites from wild birds, to the reverse isn't true. Baby chicks start out with a weak immune system, which gets stronger day by day, so keeping them separated from the older birds really helps. For a while, anyway.

So remember: always take care of your youngest chickens first, and then move on up in reverse order of age.

I'll be attending the M.E.W. multi-genre science fiction/fantasy/anime/role-playing/whatever convention at the Red Lion in Vancouver, Washington this weekend.

I'm sharing a table in Artist's Alley with Beth McBeth -- I'll be pitching my Heinlein-esque SF novel One Survivor and my role-playing handbook Through Dungeons Deep, and Beth will be displaying her artwork. I'll also be offering free writing and publishing advice to anyone who's interested.

I'm also giving three panel/workshop sessions:

1. Self-Publishing for Fun and Profit (12/31, 5 PM)
2. Turn Your Hobbies Into a Career (1/1, 11:00 PM)
3. Role-Playing Without Rules (1/2, 1 PM)

M.E.W. con is only in its second year, with a projected attendance of just 500 people, so it should be pretty intimate. Anime fandom appears to be the dominant theme, and plenty of people will be attending in costume.

Hope to see you there!

Admission is $40 at the door for all three days (12/31 - 1/2) or $15-$20 for a single day. For more information see the Mewcon Web site.