RAISING YOUNG CHICKENS
Model chicken coop—open on pleasant days
It is poor practice to set your hens in the chicken house. Prepare as many fresh nests as you expect to need. Put them in the cellar, unused shed, under the porch, or any convenient and protected place. Doors of wire netting or slats are a great convenience. When a hen is broody, take her off the nest the first night and put her into the new place with an artificial egg or two. Ten to one she will stay all right. If not, do not waste time with her. When assured that her mind is unalterably made up, give her thirteen eggs and close the door on her again. Set two or three the same day and later combine the flocks under one hen. Select the eggs with reference to their shape, size, and quality of shell. Misshapen, very large, or very small eggs or those with thin shells are worthless for setting. Set the eggs of the best layers. Every morning take sitters off nests, leave food and water for them, and return in half an hour. Usually they are all back in their places in less time than that. If not, you can replace and shut them in again. In eighteen to twenty-one days the eggs will hatch.
Probably more little chicks die from lice than from any other cause. Preventive measures must begin early. Get fresh, dry insect powder and treat the nest and hen about the third, the ninth, and the fifteenth day of incubation. Rub the powder all through the feathers. Fine dust obstructs the breathing pores of the lice and kills them. When you take the chicks from the nest examine the head, neck, and vent regions of every one. If lice are present a drop of melted lard will put an end to them. Constant vigilance and nothing short of it, will prevent death from lice.
Prop the door open, thus, in rain, wind, or too hot sun
A good home-made lice powder, costing only about four cents a pound, may be made as follows: Mix together one quarter pint crude carbolic acid (90 per cent. pure), and three quarters of a pint of gasolene. Stir into this enough plaster of Paris to take up the liquid, (about two and one half pounds). Mix thoroughly and rub through a wire mosquito screen to break the lumps. This can be used to dust through the feathers, the day after it is made. Keep in a tight jar or box. This powder is the invention of an expert in poultry husbandry.
The coops for hen and chicks need not be ponderous, but they should be rain proof. A coop two and one half feet square with removable roof and floor is not too heavy to handle and answers every purpose. A wire netting run three or four feet long attached to each coop is necessary and this combination will house a hen and from fifteen to twenty chickens.
Closed for the night. Vermin-proof, weather-proof. Screen-covered ventilator on one side
Bottom of model coop can be cleaned by lifting up the coop
All the food a young chick needs the first twenty-four hours is provided by nature. After that it is "up to you." Their first meal may be hard-boiled eggs minced finely, shells and all, and mixed with oatmeal or custard made of milk and eggs baked hard, or it may be baked and crumbled corn bread. By the third day they will be ready for raw broken grain. There are many good commercial kinds: less trouble than making your own mixtures. The chicks will learn to scratch for this in a week or two. The hen is their teacher. Fine grit, charcoal, and clean water must be kept where they can get what they want. Soft food should not be fed in unlimited quantities; give what they will eat in five or ten minutes, then take it away. They are likely to over-eat of wet mashes, but what they have to work for is not likely to give them indigestion.
When chickens are two months old they no longer need wet mash. They should now have access to food whenever they want it. A mixture of cracked corn, wheat, beef scrap, bone, grit, shell, and other grains, with dry middlings and bran, may be put into a slatted self-feeder, like the illustration, easily constructed by yourself. It is not much trouble to see that this is never empty. If fed only at intervals they rush at you, bolt the biggest grains, stuff their crops, crowd away weak or modest ones; result, some are under-fed, others are over-fed. If food is kept where they can get it whenever they happen to think of it they take a reasonable amount, then visit the growing clover or grass, pick up a casual pebble, take a drink of water, scratch out a worm, and return to the feed tray, all in natural course of the day's work.
You will want to get rid of most of your young cockerels as soon as they are marketable. Broilers bring highest prices. To put them in tip-top condition they should be fattened for about two to three weeks when they are four months old. There is nothing better for fattening than a mash made of equal parts finely ground corn meal and wheat middlings with one fourth the quantity of meat meal. This should be wet with sour skim-milk or buttermilk and fed in a semi-liquid condition, about the consistency of pancake batter. Ground oats may be added. The product is known in the highest priced city hotels as "milk fed" or even "cream fed" chicken. If you can get skim-milk cheap why not buy a bunch of young cockerels and stuff them for market? They have been known to put on a pound for every five pounds of this mixture eaten.