Chickens!

Taking care of the chickens doesn't take much time, but it's a big part of our routine on the farm. There are about 25 chickens living in four chicken tractors. As we mentioned in a previous post, chicken tractors are like hen houses on wheels. We move them around the farm which allows them to be free-range without having to dedicate a huge amount of land solely to chickens. They also do the farm the service of eating potential predator bugs from around the trees and leaving behind their “fertilizer.”

The chicken tractors are moved twice a day, once in the morning and afternoon. The chickens eat three times a day. In the morning, they get feed (like dog food, for chickens! and mixed with oyster shells – the calcium makes the eggs hard) and slugs that we picked out of the garden the previous night. It's probably the strangest job here: evening slugging. Every night, one of us on that farm spends about an hour poking around the garden collecting any slugs. It's a win-win: we get to eat slug-free greens, and the chickens get to eat theirs chock-full of sluggy goodness. These are Cuban slugs, which much larger than the slugs we've encountered on the mainland - 2" in length average.

In the afternoon, the chickens are fed the mango, papayas and avocados that are not good for human consumption (full of ants or beetles). In the evening, they get more chicken feed and greens (kitchen scraps or collards).

They produce about a dozen eggs a day, usually more. These are the best eggs we've ever tasted in our lives. Must be the slugs.