You know how it goes: you move into a four-bedroom farmhouse with an immense barn and a seven-bay vehicle shed, and after a few years, all of it is bulging with stuff. Where did it all come from? What's it doing here? And why can't I find anything anymore?

So for the first time ever, I've rented a huge commercial dumpster (30 cubic yards). It showed up in late afternoon, so I didn't put much into it today -- a couple of broken-down wheelbarrows, the kids' childhood little red wagon, sadly and irreparably rusted, a tractor gas tank with a hole in it, several decrepit office chairs and other defunct furniture. Soon the balance will shift as more farm stuff gets put in -- rusted-out feeders and the like.

In case you're wondering, it's going to cost me roughly $300 to have the dumpster delivered empty and then taken away full, more or less depending on how long I keep it, since there's a $16 daily rental fee on top of everything else. I'm sure I can fill it, so the issue is, "How fast can I fill it?" If I can fill it fast, I save on rent.

The driver who delivered it, interestingly enough, used to live here on Norton Creek Road when he was in high school. I keep running into people like that. Seems a little strange, since there really aren't many houses here, but it seems as if everyone lived here once upon a time!

A lot of our clutter is recyclable. I'm pretty sure that Allied Waste will separate out all the iron and steel with an electromagnet, so I may not go to the trouble of recycling it myself -- not if the price of scrap metal is as low as I think it is. It's a long drive to the scrap metal dealer, and I don't see the point of burning lots of gas to recycle scrap metal unless it's a money-maker! I can recycle cardboard and such locally. Other stuff can go to Goodwill and other local nonprofits.

The dumpster has metal doors at one end, so you can carry stuff inside -- you don't have to heave it over the top the way you do on a smaller dumpster. It's ideal for the kind of large objects that you'd never fit into a regular trash can -- things like mattresses, water heaters, or twisted metal roofing from chicken houses that did a tumbleweed imitation during a storm.

And I've already found some missing treasures!

When picking a date for the first day of the farmer's market season, could you find a better choice than Earth Day?

(Okay, technically Earth Day isn't until Thursday, but the big blow-out was Saturday, and it was great!)

The market opened in beautiful spring weather and attracted swarms of happy customers. It was like being hit by a cheerfulness bomb! You should have been there.

As usual, the other vendors outdid themselves. Imagine the kinds of produce that ought to be ripe by mid-April, and the quality you'd expect for such early produce. Then multiply it by ten. That's the Corvallis farmer's market. All the aging hippies who've been in the organic produce biz since the Seventies have gotten really good at it! Competition for quality, variety, and earliness is intense. There were even some local strawberries -- six weeks before the regular season.

I sold out of chicken in about ten seconds. Customers know we're the best! Once we're in full production, supplies ought to last longer. The eggs held out better, and I sold about 60 dozen, which is excellent for an opening day.

The day was enlivened by the Procession of the Species, a parade that's always held on Earth Day in Corvallis, featuring kids and adults in animal costumers. That was great!

The Corvallis farmers' markets are something special. Wish you were here!

Not so long ago, springtime was a difficult time on the farm. You had spent a lot of your cash during the winter, but harvest time was many months away. Spring faced you with your biggest expenses of the year: getting equipment back into shape, hiring extra labor, plowing, and planting.

On top of that, meat is hard to come by, since you thinned your herds in late fall to match the level of fodder you could store over the winter, and all the animals that you could spare are already gone. And you're even worse off where vegetables are concerned. Anything that doesn't keep for five or six months is gone.

So there you are: strapped for cash and with an inadequate diet. You can't even plant a garden yet, let alone harvest from it. What's a farmer to do?

But do not despair! A miracle is at hand to rescue you from your plight! It's called -- the egg!

Well before planting season, the hens perk up and start laying eggs like crazy. They have to start laying early so that the baby chicks will hatch during a season where the living is easy. And this means that your flock of chickens transforms your farm from an operation where you make money only once a year, at harvest time, to one where you have something to sell every day. And peak production happens right when you need cash the most!

On top of this, eggs are nature's perfect food, and provide your family with nutrition that was sadly lacking once the cow dried up and the last of the greens were gone. Imagine going from the lassitude of empty pockets and borderline malnutrition to the vitality of cash flow and health! Eggs did that.

And, as if that weren't enough, in a typical farm family, eggs provided a degree of social equity. Field crops and large-animal operations were considered to be a manly business, while the chicken flock was usually the wife's domain. She'd tend the flock, market the eggs, and spend the money. Every general store and feed store bought eggs, so eggs were as easy to spend as cash. The humble hen built a lot of equality into a system that didn't have much otherwise.

You've probably guessed already that Easter is associated with eggs because that's what's plentiful during the Easter season. It's impossible to overstate the importance of spring eggs in the old-time farm economy.

You have to make a choice: Do you want the truth or your comfortable illusions?

Frankly, I think most people prefer illusions, because of their comfort value, but there's a lot to be said for truth, especially when the future is riding on it! One of the most useful ways of getting at the truth is the side-by-side test, which has lots of applications in everyday life. I'll talk about farm-related ones here.

I frequently tell people that I have "the best eggs ever." Is this true? Well, so far it is! But I don't just rest on my laurels. Once in a while, I go out and buy other people's eggs, then cook them up in exactly the same way and do a taste test. Ideally, this would be literally a blind taste test, since my eggs tend to have very dark yolks compared to other people's. In a blind test, you don't know whose eggs you're tasting, so your preconceptions and wishful thinking are kept in check.

So far, the results have been very encouraging -- nobody's eggs taste better than mine -- though as a side effect I discovered that many of the bad things that people say about supermarket eggs just aren't true. I've heard a lot of claims that supermarket eggs are old and have weak yolks, so I was surprised by the results of my first test, where the el cheapo eggs from the supermarket were just as fresh as mine and had really strong yolks, too. So don't believe what you hear from others. Test, test, test!

With broilers, the results have been more mixed. Our non-irrigated pasture browns off in the late summer, and in one late-summer taste test, our broilers were not as good as another pastured poultry outfit's, one which I suspect grows their birds on irrigated pasture. And some of the faux free-range chicken from California was surprisingly flavorful, considering that their "outdoor access" was more or less mythical. Normally I expect that it's green pasture plants that give the chickens their flavor, but I suspect that there's another way of doing it...

One interesting side-by-side experiment we made happened when Karen took a Poultry Science class at Oregon State University. One lab involved butchering chickens from the university's broiler barn. Karen butchered the chicken using methods that were equivalent to what she uses at home, but this well-cared-for confinement broiler tasted far blander than a grass-fed broiler of the same age that we tested at the same time, and the confinement broiler had an unpleasant manure-y aftertaste that could only be blamed on growing conditions, not processing. Ewww!

The reason people don't do more side-by-side testing is that it raises the possibility that their cherished beliefs will be proven false. Of course, this is exactly why you should do it! Great ideas only get you into the ballpark. You're probably up in the bleachers somewhere, not on base at all. But it's a start. You get on base when you get the details right and drop some of the baggage that we all bring to a new venture. You're going to lose your illusions one way or another, either by refining your ideas until they actually work, or by failing. Using denial is the more natural and comfortable option, but it sends you straight down the road to failure. Testing and refining are less comfortable at first, but they reveal the path to success -- reliable, ongoing success -- the path that leads to a reality that's far better than any illusion.

If you look around, you'll see many opportunities to use side-by-side testing. The experiments are often very easy. For example, it took me less than half an hour to test half a dozen kinds of coffee, from which I discovered (to my surprise) that I don't appreciate fresh-ground, gourmet coffee -- something that has saved me a lot of money over the years.

Go forth and test! This is the Age of Science!

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.]