When I went to the Corvallis Indoor Market this Saturday, there were some young people out front with "FREE HUGS" signs. Their product quality was excellent, considering the price, and they reported that they were getting an 85% success rate.

It's nice to see that Oregon is still Oregon!

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.

Suppose you don't know which of two brands of chicken feed is the best. What do you do?

Here's a very simple test: set out two identical feeders, right next to each other, one filled with Feed A and one filled with Feed B. Note which feed the chickens prefer. Keep it up for a while (say, a week), so that any initial hesitancy the chickens might have had because of some trivial difference in texture or flavor has been overcome. Buy the feed that the chickens like best.

The idea here is that chickens, like people, can detect small differences in feed quality through their various senses -- sight, smell, taste, and how they feel after eating. Discriminating between good food and bad is something that creatures are very good at.

There are large differences between different brands of livestock feed. Some vendors bulk up their feeds with cheap filler ingredients, while others use semi-spoiled ingredients because they're cheap. Chicken feed made with moldy corn or rancid soybean oil meal is not going to work as well as feed made with quality ingredients. Fortunately, the chickens can tell the difference.

(See also my other blog posting on feed quality.

My December newsletter is out, covering how to keep your chickens' water from freezing and other wintry topics. Check it out!

See also an Older blog posting on the same subject.

Karen has been after me to set up hen lights this year, after a hiatus of several years. Hens normally don't like to lay except when the day length is increasing or reasonably long or both, and neither holds true at the end of the year. Lights have been used since the 1880s to deal with this.

There's a lot of superstition about hen lights, ranging from the idea that it somehow uses up the hens, to the idea that hens are kept under brilliant 24-hour light as a form of torture.

Lights may have been hard on the hens in the 1880s, which was before anyone knew anything about nutrition, and flocks were generally malnourished during the winter. But the bright-light idea is just silly. Hens respond to very low levels of light, and electricity costs money. Light stimulation works at levels so dim that the hens can't see to move around. The real problem with traditional hen lights is that they're so dim that it's hard for the farmer to work by them. The hens have no difficulty sleeping with the lights on.

The main purpose of the lights is to shift some of the egg laying out of the spring and into the fall and winter. At best, it increases overall egg production by 15%, which is welcome but isn't really the point. The point is to get the kind of steady, year-round production that occurs naturally in the tropics, but not in regions as far north as I am. I'm at 45 degrees latitude, and daylight lasts only eight hours on Christmas week.

My lighting system is distinctly retro. Because I use portable pasture houses, the main feature of my lighting system is a thousand feet of outdoor extension cord going from house to house. I use a single 40-watt incandescent bulb per house. The whole thing is on a timer set to remain on from 6 AM to 8 PM, which is in series with a dusk-to-dawn sensor to turn the lights off when it's light out. This gives the hens 14 hours of light per day, which is the traditional amount to use. Traditionally, lights are used between September 1 and March 31. I'm off to a very late start.

I will post pictures later, after everything's up and running.

We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We're replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

• We're using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even "once in a while" is way too often.
• We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
• The three windows wouldn't provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
• A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
• It's as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It's good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
• We'll be insulating the roof. This isn't strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here's a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

When we started out at the Farmer's Market in 1996, a customer asked, "Do you accept checks?"

I thought about it for about a second and said, "Sure!"

My reasoning was this: I'd accept checks until one bounced, then I'd think about what my policy really ought to be.

That was thirteen years ago. Still no bounced checks. Are farmer's market customers great, or what?

All this confirms my policy of "intentional innocence," where I try things and see what happens, rather than fretting about all the things that might go wrong. Of course, sometimes things blow up in my face this way, but usually they don't, and you discover that the people around you have been fretting over nothing.

Don't use this approach when betting the farm, but it works in any situation where you can afford to take it on the chin and write it off as a learning experience.

I'm going to spill the big secret to producing better-tasting eggs: it's the grass, man!

No, not that kind of grass! Ordinary grass, clover and other pasture plants, I mean.

Happy outdoor chickens that are allowed to run around on a grassy area will eat a lot of grass and other succulent plants. These plants don't have many calories, but they're loaded with vitamins, minerals, and flavor.

The eggs of such hens are bigger, have darker yolks, are more nutritious, and taste better. They taste like "real farm eggs," which is not something you can say of the eggs in the store. The chickens are eating their veggies, and it makes all the difference.

This doesn't seem like a difficult concept, but farmers, consumers, and even certifying agencies get it wrong every day. They think that "free range" is all about "outdoor access," and that a barren yard is in the same league as a grassy field. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Right on cue, we've run short of eggs to sell. This is harvest season, so the farmers' markets are jammed with customers. That's part of it. And we're in the long, slow decline in egg output that starts at the end of May and continues through December. This happens every year.

Next year, we'll try starting an unusually large number of pullet chicks in January and February, to fill the production gaps with young hens who are just starting to lay. Maybe we can delay the day of reckoning until October that way, after the harvest-season crowds start to slacken and the problem starts to solve itself.

That's the problem with doing the "real outdoor hens" gig -- it's harder to fool Mother Nature. Eggs are more seasonal than with confined hens.

So if you're one of our egg customers, show up at the farmers' market early to avoid disappointment!

Packaging costs more than you might think. We're paying about $0.30 per egg carton these days, and we buy 'em 1,000 at a time!

The economy has not been kind to our egg-carton supply. Pactiv closed the Northern California plant that made our egg cartons, so our egg cartons are coming up from Mexico, adding a lot of shipping/energy cost into the mix.

Fortunately for us, we live in God's Country, Western Oregon, where lots of people are eager recyclers and the state regulations aren't all written by compulsive hand-washers. Not yet, anyway. It's perfectly legal to use clean, used egg cartons in Oregon, so we do. And not just ours -- anybody's. We'll stick our labels on top of whatever was there before, and that makes 'em ours.

So we're in a pretty good position where cartons are concerned. Our customers bring us huge stacks of cartons and give them to us free, gratis, and for nothing, glad to see they aren't wasted. We use 'em until they get dirty or start falling apart.

This isn't legal everywhere. I swear that, in some states, the food-safety rules were written by Howard Hughes. I can find no mention of used-egg-carton-borne illness having ever happened anywhere, even once, but that doesn't prevent some states from banning it. Oddly, some of the midwestern states seem to be particularly anti-farmer. That's just plain weird.

Anyway, if you go the used-carton route for your own flock, here are a few tips for you:

• If you sell any eggs in grocery stores, use new cartons for these. The same people who will happily accept a used carton when you're selling face-to-face won't touch anything that's the least bit shopworn in a retail store. Strange but true.
• Always put a rubber band around the egg carton, especially if it's used. Used cartons are floppier than new ones and may not stay closed on the trip home. For marginal cartons, use two rubber bands.
• When cartons get too dirty or wrecked, into the wood stove with them! Fires are a lot easier to start if you use heavy stuff like cardboard or egg cartons in addition to paper and kindling. Get one last use out of them this way. (Two, if you have a good use for the ashes, which we do.)
• Egg cartons are all the same except for Jumbos, which are bigger. So you can mix or match all your cartons except the Jumbos.