Wheat Grass Success and a Plague of Flies

After mixed results with my first attempt to grow wheat grass for my poultry, I decided to follow the experts' recommendations to the letter. The result has been amazing. If you have enough space for several trays at once, you can easily grow enough wheat grass to form the core of your poultry's diet. But I'm getting ahead of myself just a bit. Here's how I did it.

Supplies:

• Something with good drainage to plant the wheat grass in. I bought a set of nursery flats like these to use, plus some additional flats without drain holes to nest them in (keeping the water from spilling all over my counter). You'll need two sets of the flats with holes because you'll use one as a cover when your grass is getting started. 
• Potting soil or vermiculite. I keep vermiculite on hand, so that's what I used. 
• Liquid kelp or other organic liquid fertilizer. This is optional, but useful, especially if you are going to get multiple cuttings of your wheat grass.
• Sprouting seeds. I experimented using both hard white wheat from my food storage as well as a mix Sprout People sells called "Kat Grass". 
• A spray bottle 

Step One: Soak the wheat

Soaking the wheat

Measure out enough wheat to densely cover the bottom of your sprouting tray. Then place the wheat in a jar of cool water, stir, and allow to soak for 8-12 hours.

Step Two: Pre-sprout

See the tiny roots? This wheat is ready to plant. 

Drain and thoroughly rinse the soaked wheat. Then, put the wheat back in the jar you soaked it in or in a sprouter. I used my handy, dandy Victorio 4-Tray Kitchen Seed Sprouter. Keep the wheat in a cool location out of direct light. Rinse and drain the wheat every 8-12 hours until you see tiny roots on your wheat. It only took 12 hours before I was ready to proceed to the next step.

Step Three: Plant

Wheat seed planted

I poured in enough vermiculite to create an 1" layer in the bottom of the nursery flat. Then I added water, stirred, and added more water until the vermiculite was uniformly damp. I also added a little organic liquid kelp fertilizer to this initial watering. Next, I spread the sprouted wheat evenly across the top and spritzed the seeds with water from the spray bottle.

Important detail: After you spray the seeds, take the extra nursery flat and place it upside down to form a tent over the top of the tray. You want the wheat to grow tall quickly and the darkness is the way to do it. The drain holes in the bottom of the the nursery flat also provide ventilation to avoid mold problems.

Step Four: Water twice daily and watch in amazement

It won't take long before the seeds shoot up. And, unlike my previous attempt, there was absolutely no boozy smell associated with it. All I did was spray the tray evenly with water twice a day.

Day  One

Day Two

Day Three

I kept the tray inverted over the wheat grass until day four when the grass was about two inches tall. Now it is time to give the wheat grass a sunny place to grow. I also began watering from the bottom, pouring enough water into the bottom holding tray to last a full 24 hours.

Day Four

Day Five: Greening and growing!

Day Seven: First harvest

After seven days' worth of growth, I cut the wheat grass back to about 1". I could have just given the entire tray to my birds and let them have at it, but I wanted to see if I could coax additional growth out of the same planting. I was indeed able to get two more cuttings before I threw the remaining mass of roots and vermiculite (and fruit flies, but more about that in a bit) out into our garden.

And what was the verdict on wheat grass from the feathered community?  

Chickens love wheat grass

So do ducks

They adored it. Both the ducks and chickens chomped it down with gusto.

There's just one problem I encountered during this little experiment: a massive infestation of fruit flies! I'm talking giant, biblical plague-proportion of fruit flies. Every time I would open the lid to spritz the grass, a cloud of flies launched into my face. By the end of the first week, I had generations of flies living in the wheat grass. Even covering my kitchen counters with multiple tried and true apple cider vinegar traps only put a slight dent in the population. It's been a week since I removed the wheat grass trays (as well as all fruit and other food sources) from my kitchen and I'm just now noticing a sharp decline in the numbers of fruit flies.

I've promised my incredibly patient (albeit slightly frustrated) Hubby Dear that I'll wait a bit before I try sprouting wheat again, but you can bet that I'll do it. Growing wheat grass is only slightly more complicated than alfalfa sprouts, but you get so much bang for your buck. I'm really looking forward to having a continual supply of fresh greens for my birds.... if I can keep those darn fruit flies away, that is.

The Perfect Survival Chicken: Selecting a Chicken Breed

This is part two of my chicken keeping series. Those of you who have been keeping chickens for years will have to excuse the new girl's giddy excitement. And please chime in with your own opinions in the comments!

If you missed part one, check it out here:
Part I: Peeps or Pullets? Ways to Get Started in Chicken Keeping

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Once I coerced Hubby Dear into the whole chicken keeping business and decided to start with chicks ordered through the mail, it was time to decide on a chicken breed. If you've never paid much attention to chickens before, it might surprise you to find out just how many breeds there are out there. The hatchery I settled on as the source for my chicks, Meyer Hatchery, carries literally dozens of breeds.

What should you buy? That depends on your answer to the following question: Why are you keeping chickens?

• Are you mostly interested in eggs? There are breeds out there that will reliably pump out 300 eggs a year. 
• Do you envision your chickens mostly as a meat source? You'll want to raise chickens that dress out into plump carcasses and put on weight quickly. 
• Would you like chickens for both their meat and eggs? There are breeds that are good for both, though they will not produce as many eggs as the best layers or put on weight as fast as the dedicated meat birds. 

From a preparedness standpoint, it makes sense to choose a breed from the last category, the so-called dual purpose breeds. If you were facing a crisis of some kind that would definitely be the type of bird you would be interested in because they are so versatile. Here are some other considerations for those of us of the preparedness mindset:

• Some breeds are better at foraging for their food than others. In the event that you have to completely free-range your chickens, it is important to select a breed that is active and does well outside of complete confinement. 
• You'd want a breed that would go broody (attempt to hatch chicks on their own). We humans have removed broodiness from the genetic makeup of many poultry breeds. That's great if you want to create birds that lay continuously (broody birds stop laying and focus completely on their clutch of eggs), but that is not so good if you want to expand your flock naturally (ie. without an incubator or a hatchery order). It goes without saying that you'll need a rooster if you want fertile eggs. Chickens will lay eggs without a rooster, but it still takes a rooster strutting around the chicken yard to make babies. 
• You would want a breed that agrees with your climate. Some chickens tolerate heat well; others are perky even in bitter cold. In a grid down situation, you're not going to be able to heat or cool your hen house artificially. And who wants to do that, anyway? Why not pick a breed that is suited to your climate and make it easy on everyone?

A last consideration has less to do with survival and more to do with you. What kind of personality do you feel comfortable working around? Some breeds are more flighty or have a history of aggression. Others are usually calm. Some breeds tend to be friendly and personable with their human caretakers while others couldn't care less about you.

After sifting through all these factors, we decided to select a dual-purpose breed that had known broody tendencies, does well free-ranging, handles cold weather and is generally docile. That still left me with many, many chicken breeds to pick from. In the end, I couldn't pick just one breed. I selected nine! We may decide later that a certain breed is our favorite and stick with it, but for now I can't help but smile in anticipation of the multi-colored display that will soon be pecking around my chicken moat.

These are the breeds we selected for our seventeen chickens:

Buff Orpington
Image from backyardchickens.com

Buff Orpington is the breed we ordered the most of. We want a rooster for our little flock and decided to purchase a Buff Orpington cockerel, too.

Black Australorp
Image from backyardchickens.com

Columbian Wyandotte
Image from http://chicksnchillens.blogspot.com

Golden Laced Wyandotte. Could they be any more spectacular?
Image from http://www.freewebs.com/djchooks/goldlacedwyandotte.htm

Silver Laced Wyandotte - too pretty to resist!
Image from mypetchicken.com

Easter Eggers
Image from redtractorranch.com

Easter Eggers are kind of an interesting breed. They are a bit of a mongrel breed that is kept primarily because they lay eggs in shades of green, blue, or pink. From what I've read, they vary on the outside just as much as the color of their eggs. Who knows if my girls will resemble the pullets pictured above?

Delaware - The Thinker's pick for prettiest chicken
Image from http://www.hobbyfarmliving.com/chicken-breeds-backyard-flock/

Speckled Sussex
Image from washingtonfeatherfanciers.webs.com

Barred Plymouth Rock
Image from Wikipedia

Any good book about chickens will have charts detailing the attributes of the various breeds. My favorite chicken reference for this purpose is  Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens. I found the hatchery websites to be very helpful, too.

If you raise chickens, what breeds do you have? Do you raise them primarily for eggs, meat, or both? If you don't have chickens but wish you did, what do you think you would do?