Using lablab beans for chicken feed is one of those happy coincidences of production and need that perfectly fits a subtropical smallholding. In this post I will outline how lablab beans neatly fit the season and can nudge chickens back into egg production. This year I tried the strategy out properly, and the hens have started laying a month earlier.
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We have five new Marans chicks! Marans are a specialty breed which lay brown eggs, and I was given my first lot of fertile eggs last year by a local friend. This lot are from my own rooster and hens, which I started last year from fertile eggs. There’s a bit involved in raising chicks, but who doesn’t love to see little fluff balls every now and then?
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I’ve got into a routine for turning hay into compost, after trialling a few alternatives. It involves using it as bedding in the chicken house. Now that the warm wet weather has returned, it’s time to start the process again.
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What to do when the trickle of eggs you waited and waited for finally turns into a steady flow and the full cartons begin to collect? Mum is of course always a good source of knowhow, and mine sent me a recipe for pickling eggs. They are not something I think I’d even tried before, although I’m sure I’ve seen them in jars in Yorkshire pubs. So I at least had to give them a go. And then I saw the tweak of adding beetroot to the pickling mix. Pink…
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In your home flock you can choose from a wide variety of chicken breeds. The easiest to buy are the standard layer types, but if as you probably aren’t keeping them just for maximum egg production, you might find heritage breed chickens are more attractive and interesting option.
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I’ve just opened the fence to let the chickens in to one of the chicken forage yards. There are three fenced yards next to the chicken run, one has the beginnings of a citrus orchard and grass for grazing, but the other two I have been using to experiment with chicken forage crops. My first Winter crops have been rewarding; particularly the linseed (flaxseed) and wheat. Fenugreek hasn’t done well with any of my sowings over a full year now, and the mustard I sowed there was also a fizzer this season,…
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Lablab, dolichos, hyacinth bean, this bean has a multitude of names, which indicate how widely grown it is. Lablab beans grow on a sprawling vine and will be handy here for covering slopes productively. The foliage is good fodder, and apparently will come again if you slash it back to use as a green manure. It gets the name hyacinth bean from the pink flower spikes, which are edible and good in a salad.
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This morning I was worried I had a bee swarm under the house, there was so much buzzing going on. Turns out the bees are crazy for the flowers on our mugwort and are buzzing round in big numbers with full pollen sacs. They are mainly european honey bees, but also our tiny sugar bag bees and some tiny flies, so a real pollinator feast.
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Here’s a plant that I’m growing for the first time but I think I will be growing chia continually, as it’s not only attractive and useful, but hardy. Chia (Salvia hispanica) burst onto the stage not many years ago in Australia as a new wonder food, and it’s still expensive in the shops compared to other seeds like sesame or linseed. I wanted to give it a go as a potential chicken feed, in the line of trying a wide range and seeing what grows easily. Growing chia I grew mine from chia seed from the…
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This morning I had an idea for bonus chicken feed. We have many types of grass here, but there is one that grows in shady spots on the forest edge, and lately it has been shedding a lot of seed as you pass it, so much that you can hear it scatter. I know that the chickens forage keenly for grass seeds, so thought I’d see how well collecting it for them works. Ideally they would forage themselves, but the grass is outside the chickens’ range. I took down a…
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