Robert Plamondon's Rural Life

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Robert Plamondon’s Poultry and Rural Living

I began writing up practical poultry tips on this website in 1997. Somebody had to!

When we moved back to Oregon in 1995, we soon started raising free-range chickens. There was little information on free-range poultry back then, and most of it was wrong. I embarked on a literature survey of the past 100 years, to find out what ideas and techniques worked and what didn’t. We put the more likely ones into practice, and also wrote them up here. You can’t find this stuff anywhere else.

I also wrote up related rural-living topics, such as living with a low-yield well and controlling rats and mice.

Day-old Black Sex-Link chicks and an Ohio heat-lamp brooder.

We raised grass-fed chickens, eggs, turkey, and pork on the farm using the same techniques shown here. My former sort-of monthly newsletter archives give some news about the what was going on and to-do lists for every month of the year.

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The Research Trick, or How Not to Be a Sucker

Stack of books. — *Courtesy of ellen.w. Licensed under Creative Commons.*

The world is full of earnestly stated and widely repeated advice that doesn’t work. At all. There are different reasons for this, but the main thing is that I’ve worked out a system that can separate the wheat from the chaff. Not always, but often.

We used these practices on our free-range egg farm, and it’s the reason why we became bona fide experts instead of increasingly broke and unsuccessful enthusiasts. For example, it’s how I zeroed in on the techniques I wrote about in my book, Success With Baby Chicks.

Believers and Practitioners

“Neither a sucker nor a charlatan be.” —Polonius, probably.

Suppose we divide the world into two camps: the believers and the practitioners. There’s overlap, of course, but my main insight is this:

When they talk about things they’ve done themselves, practitioners know what they’re talking about, especially when they’ve done them repeatedly. The believers are more of a mixed bag.

Those who are more believers than practitioners can be dead wrong and not even know it. The same is true of journalists. Worse, when they put their beliefs into practice and it blows up in their faces, their devotion to orthodoxy can tempt them into minimize or even conceal their failures instead of earnestly warning others.

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Watch Out for Roost Mites

Are your chickens suffering from mite infestations? Roost mites (also called red mites, nest mites, chicken mites, or even dermanyssus gallinae) are a problem that can happen to any flock, especially a free-range flock, since the mites are spread by wild birds. If left unchecked, they can cause a lot of suffering.

Because the mites are so tiny and have such a high reproductive rate, they’re hard to notice until things are getting out of hand. Knowing what to look for and what to do will make control a lot easier.

Does Your Flock Have Roost Mites?

How can you tell if your chickens have a mite infestation? Some indicators:

A roost mite. Eww!

If you pull out a handful of nesting material, it exposes a mass of little reddish moving thing, you have roost mites. Ditto for when you lift a roost and look at its underside. (Roost mites mostly hide during the day, preferring dark little cracks and crevices.)
If you have a crawly sensation in your arms or legs after visiting the chicken coop, you have roost mites. Eww! (They only mostly hide during the day. When a potential victim comes near, they jump aboard.)
If some eggs have reddish-brown spots or smears, you probably have roost mites. Though some eggs have reddish-brown speckles naturally. (Mites drink blood from chickens and swell up like balloons, then wander off. If they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, they’ll be squashed by a newly laid egg, and the stolen blood marks the eggshell.)

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Dad’s Advice About Politics and the News

Sometime in the late Forties, my Dad realized that was worrying about the Mideast Crisis. But why? The odds that Harry Truman was going to call to ask his advice were zero. Nor does the US have a system of national referendum that would allow him to vote “Yes” or “No” on the Mideast Crisis. Dad was not actually on the hook for having a well-thought-out opinion. Where was his concern coming from?

My father, Dan Plamondon, grinning because he doesn’t have to be a political consultant.

Sure, there are Congressional elections every two years and Presidential elections every four years, but that doesn’t mean you have to worry about the Mideast Crisis every single day. And both parties seemed, on the whole, to be in agreement on Mideast Crises.

Then he realized what the problem was! The pushbuttons on his radio were tuned to news-and-music stations. By talking every day about the Mideast crisis, the radio news had fooled him into thinking that he should think about it every day. He reset them all to music-only stations, and his quality of life improved immediately, as you can see in the picture below:

He offered this as a piece of wisdom for me to follow, and now I offer it to you.

(And it turned out he was right: Harry Truman never did call him. Neither did Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, or Reagan. A far-seeing man, my dad.)

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How to Get Rid of Rats and Mice

Some rat control methods are just fairy tales If you look on the Internet or ask your neighbors, you’re likely to hear a lot of nonsense about rodent control, stuff in the Pied Piper class of implausibility. What really works?

Successful Rodent Control: A Personal Example

What works best for me, on my farm? Rat poison (or rodenticides, if you’re feeling fancy). Do I like using poison? No, I do not. (Posions are deeply unpleasant.) But I found it necessary, and you probably will, too. I’ll talk about how I used it just recently. Later on, I’ll talk about alternatives, both real and fake.

First, a caution: Don’t mess around with home-made or customized poisons. That’s idiotic and unnecessary. I use standard products in standard ways, and they work great.

Oh, and by the way: mostly I talk about rats here, not mice. Why? Because products designed for rats also work on mice, but not vice versa. Mousetraps and mouse bait stations are just too small for rats. So I recommend buying products that are labeled for both rats and mice and benefit from the twofer.

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Using Amazon Boxes Instead of Newspaper to Start a Fire in Your Fireplace or Wood Stove

Kindling a fire used to be done with newspaper. After all, everyone has tons of old newspapers lying around, right? Not anymore! I don’t, anyway. We stopped taking a daily paper a while ago. You know what we have tons of? Amazon Prime boxes!

I once read an extension service report from … somewhere … that claimed that using strips of cardboard was the key to easy fire starting, and it’s true!

I used to use a lot of newspaper and just a little cardboard, but as my house became more and more of a paper-free zone, I stopped hunting around for suitable scraps of newsprint and went to 100% cardboard.

Building a Fire Without Newspaper

The task is very simple:

You’re going to make the fire the way you always do, but with cardboard instead of paper.
Take an old shipping box (for example, an Amazon Prime box) and rip it into small pieces: say, a couple of inches wide and as long as you like. I just use my bare hands. Ripping the pieces by hand leaves some feathery edges that are easier to light.
Pile in these strips as if they were kindling.
Add some kindling, too, unless the wood is very dry.
You can use some paper, too, if you want to. I’m doing this less and less.
Light the cardboard with a match. While the cardboard lights more slowly than paper, I’ve been using book matches with good results. Wooden kitchen matches would work even better.

So far, the supply of smallish Amazon Prime boxes coming into my house has been more than sufficient for my fire-starting needs.

Used egg cartons that are too broken-down or stained to recycle also make good fire starter.