6-17-2008
New Pan Under Feeder and Turkish Egg Recipe
This is the week of long days, and coincidentally right now it is also the full moon. It gets light here at a little after 5am, and by 9pm you can still see well outside courtesy of moonlight. I haven't been sleeping much, what with watering and picking and tending the gardens. On the menu right now are green beans, cherries and blackberries, along with lettuce.
One ongoing problem in my chicken yard is rodents. Rats. Mice. Mainly nocturnal, these critters come in to steal spilled food and leave behind droppings that aren't good for my hens.To discourage these pests, I have always put a pan under my chicken feeder to catch the feed birds peck out as they eat. Every night I put the feed away in a rodent-proof container.
This only worked poorly, because the flat pans spilled feed, collected dirt -- and the hens would stand on it and poo. Bleah.
In the past week I had an inspiration. I took an old red plastic tub that was broken around the handles and cut it down with a jigg saw so it was only about six inches deep. I put that under my hens' feeder.
Presto! The girls can still reach their feed, peck it out of the feeder as always but it stays clean and collects in my new red pan. At the end of each day when I put their feeder into a sealed metal garbage can it's easy to remove the rocks and straw bits and dump the clean feed back into their feeder.
It's funny how these small things make such a difference.
Here's a great Turkish egg recipe from Charles Perry.
Cilbir (pronounced chuhl-buhr).
Squeeze some 1 clove garlic into 1 cup plain yogurt and stir it well.Poach or softboil 2 eggs, preferably to the point that the yolks are just set.
Cut eggs up and mix them with the yogurt. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to
taste.Then melt a tablespoon of butter in a pan, stir in enough hot
paprika to give it a good color and drizzle this on top of the whole thing.Yumm....
