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Chicken Ebooks

The Working Chicken ebook coverAre 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.

Permaculture Chicken: Incubation HandbookThe 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
  • Unfertilized eggChoosing 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
  • Newly hatched chickPreparing 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
  • Chicks on pastureCaring 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

Posted Sun Apr 1 18:37:09 2012 Tags:

Permaculture Chicken: Incubation HandbookSince 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....

Posted Fri Mar 16 21:22:37 2012 Tags:


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I had chickens growing up, (somehow I managed to persuade my parents into a small farm), 5 horses, chickens, ducks etc. Now I'm all grown up and want some chickens. I called the local town hall and they said zoning laws state 1 acre per 2-3 chickens! Granted I am not exactly in a rural area but it certainly isn't citified either. My husband and I own roughly .75 of an acre. Any suggestions?
Comment by Kristin Thu Jun 16 15:56:03 2011
A lot of urban dwellers are currently working to change laws like that, which is probably your best bet. If you get your neighbors on board and look up the cities that allow more chickens in town, you might have enough information to get the city council to consider a change.
Comment by anna Mon Jun 20 11:26:44 2011

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