Chicken Ebooks
Are you
thinking of
jumping on the backyard chickens bandwagon? Chickens are easy, fun,
and tasty, but their care can seem a bit daunting to the
uninitiated.
Our chicken ebooks (99 cents on Amazon) teach you everything you
need to know to keep
your chickens happy, then to put them in your belly.
The raw beginner will enjoy The
Working Chicken, which presents just the basics in about 27
paperback-sized pages. The companion book, Eating
the Working Chicken, covers butchering your backyard birds.
Both books come free, along
with a companion video, with every order of our POOP-free chicken waterer, or
you can download them from Amazon for 99 cents.
The more advanced reader will
enjoy the chapters on chickens in my Weekend Homesteader
series. The January
volume presents ideas for building a coop, tractor, or pasture that
works with your homestead while the February
volume helps you find chickens and understand their daily care.
My more advanced
readers
told me that they are itching to find out ways to make backyard
chickens self-sufficient, cheaper, less smelly, and more fun. So
I've starting a more advanced series of ebooks --- The Permaculture
Chicken saga --- to delve deeper into integrating chickens into your
homestead. Subscribe to the RSS feed below (or email anna@kitenet.net and ask to be added to my
email list) to find out when new chicken ebooks launch.
The Permaculture
Chicken Incubation Handbook is now available for 99
cents on Amazon!
The boook walks
beginners through
perfecting the incubating and hatching process so they can enjoy the
exhilaration of the hatch without the angst of dead chicks. 92 full
color photos bring incubation to life, while charts, diagrams, and
tables provide the hard data you need to accomplish a hatch rate of 85%
or more.
Topics include:
- How chickens fit into a permaculture system
- Reasons to incubate your own eggs
- The mother hen option
Choosing the best eggs, with information on
seasons, parentage, egg shape, and shell quality- Storing and marking eggs
- What to expect when buying mail order eggs
- Choosing the best incubator
- The basics of incubation: time, temperature, humidity, turning, etc.
- Pros and cons of dry incubation, including ways to calculate egg weight loss
- Candling eggs
- What to do during temperature spikes and power outages
Preparing for the hatch,
hatching, and dry off period- When and how to help chicks out of the shell
- How to tell whether unhatched eggs are alive
- Calculating percent viable eggs, hatch rate, and survivability
- Troubleshooting incubation problems, including tips on autopsying eggs and a dichotomous key to pinpoint causes
- Diagnosing, preventing, and dealing with hatch-related ailments like wry neck, spraddle leg, and more
Caring for sick chicks and
knowing when and how to euthanize- Basic needs of chicks after hatching: temperature, food, and water
- Housing chicks, with information on outdoor brooders
- Pasturing very young birds
Since
it's chick-starting season, I shouldn't be surprised that the first
facet of the Permaculture Chicken that I
wanted to write about was ways to incubate and hatch homegrown chicks
successfully.
I've learned a lot over
the last couple of years about how to get better hatch rates (and feel
less stressed during the process) and I thought I'd share my tips to
help others achieve the same skill set faster than I did.
Stay tuned to this space
for an announcement when the Incubation Handbook is ready to go
live. I expect a launch date of late March or early April.
Right about the same time our second set of eggs hatches....
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