GRIT blogger Michelle Hernandez is so passionate about backyard chickens that she and a team of really smart folks have created a breed selection iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad app in conjunction the folks at Mother Earth News. I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of this backyard chicken breed picking app and found it so engaging that I've spent way too much time playing with it on my iPhone -- and I already have a large laying flock! The new Pickin' Chicken app was put together with expert breed advice from the American Livestock Breeds Association and the APA, so you know the information is eggscelent.

The new Pickin Chickens iPhone/iPad app from Mother Earth News describes 75 chicken breeds with pictures and helps you select the breeds that are just right for you.  

Would you like brown egg layers that are also good for meat production? Pickin' Chicken offers 25 choices to select from. If you’re looking for an excellent layer in that group, the selector can narrow the field to seven choices. After you’ve seen the options, you can select either “heritage” or “endangered” breeds from the list by tapping a button.  

One touch of your screen will take you to a more detailed description of each breed or hybrid. Descriptions include free-range foraging ability, purpose (eggs, meat or both), egg size, growth rate, mothering ability, place of origin, conservation status and more.   

In “eggspert” mode, the Pickin' Chicken app can help you select chicken breeds by even more specific traits, so if you want calm birds that are good foragers but can thrive in smaller spaces, too, the app will guide you to the right breeds. Select purpose, group (standard or bantam), egg size, egg color, lay rate, growth rate, temperament, climate and other traits that you want, and the app will show you which breeds are the best match. If you’re not looking for specific characteristics, you can simply browse pictures of the 75 breeds in the alphabetical listing.  

After you’ve selected the chickens you want each year, the app provides information on caring for them, a glossary of poultry terms and links to other useful resources. Pickin' Chicken features 250 photos of 75 breeds and hybrids. Breed descriptions include information on bantams when available. 

Whether you’re planning to buy chicks for the first time or just want to try new breeds of this fascinating bird, the new Mother Earth News Pickin' Chicken app can help make breed selection a breeze. Go to www.MotherEarthNews.com/PickinChicken for more information and to download the app for your iPad or iPhone. The app is designed for iPhones, so it’s small format, but you can increase the size for an iPad. 

Don't have an iPhone or an iPad? Check out similar information in our Perfect Chickens article here on GRIT.com or at the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

Campfires are quite simply part of my culture – so much so that I've been on an eternal quest for a foolproof fire starter, and I may have found it in a recent product from Coghlan. When you want to light a recreational campfire on a whim or a life-saving, warming, cooking or signal fire in the wilderness, you need a foolproof fire starter or the experience will be fraught with frustration, hypothermia, exposure, or worse. Sure, we all know about collecting sufficient duff and tinder, dry twigs, and a collection of ever-larger chunks of fuel for making a hot and lasting fire, but even with the best of fuel, when the wind is howling and the rain is pouring, getting the fire lit can be more than problematic.  

I’ve ignited my share of fires in the wilderness, but these days I tend to light casual and therapeutic campfires at the farm. I have plenty of tinder and kindling around and lots of lovely hardwood splits and billets to bring on a marvelous glow, but there are times when the Kansas wind is howling at 26 miles per hour, which is sufficient to snuff most lighters, matches and render friction techniques pretty useless. Grilling at our farm carries the same concerns – when we're hungry for grilled grassfed loin of lamb, we need something to set off the charcoal chimney in spite of the rain and wind.

Last weekend, when my Partner in Culinary Crime wondered aloud whether we mightn’t have a campfire about 2 minutes before dark, I sprang into action. I had plenty of tinder and kindling from the woodworking shop and had brought in a couple of tractor bucket loads of nicely seasoned black walnut and Osage orange firewood – but the wind was positively blasting. So after some failed attempts at setting off the tinder with my trusty “strike anywhere” matches, I remembered that my survival stash included some Coghlan's #1170 Storm Matches. Once I located them, it took only one strike and one match to get the fire going – foolproof if you ask me. The #1170 Storm Matches work in the wind and when wet, and they burn sufficiently long and hot to graduate any fire builder to the “one match” club.

Our sheep have a stubborn streak in them that makes it tough to move them to greener pastures without a fight, especially when the pasture gates aren't tough and tight. Last Saturday about half the flock discovered that an old homemade barb wire and batten  pasture gate was easy to skinny beneath. Since that old homemade pasture gate stretched across an opening between our backyard and a wooded area of their east pasture, it was time to come up with a new plan. Much as we like sheep, we don't like them in the yard, unless we put them there to mow. As I was contemplating a trip to town to shell out more than 100 hard earned bucks for a 14-foot gate, my Partner In Culinary Crime wondered aloud why I didn't just make one, and a rustic one at that. 

After a bit of measuring and figuring, it was off to the woodlot for the two of us where we cut sufficient (and mostly straight) Osage Orange and Hackberry saplings (young trees more like) to make a pair of 5-bar pasture gates that would meet in the middle. Much as we love hand tools, we used the Echo chain saw with the 12-inch long bar to grub out the wood. We chose Osage Orange for the gate's standards and top and bottom rails because it is especially decay resistant. The Hackberry was chosen to make our homemade gates a little lighter and because we have many more Hackberry saplings in the woods than Osage Orange.

The first step was to cut a pair of standards for each gate -- one about a foot longer at the bottom than the other. Our standards approximated 5.5-feet long for the hinge edge and 4.5-feet long for the latch edge. Next I trimmed the Osage Orange top and bottom rails to length, flattened one surface on their ends with a sculptors adze and nailed them to the standards with 16-penny nails. Since the Osage Orange is so dense, I bent several nails, which were so difficult to pull out that I finally resorted to drilling pilot holes before nailing, which I should have done in the first place; the drill bit was about half the the nail's diameter.

Once the homemade pasture gate's frame was cobbled together, we wracked them until diagonal measurements were within 0.25 inch of one another, called them square and cut, fit and nailed Osage Orange diagonal braces on place. The braces land on the hinge standard toward the bottom and at the intersection of the latch standard and the top rail. Once that exercise was completed, we peeled the bark from several Hackberry poles using a drawknife (Hackberry rots away fast if you leave the bark on) and shaped and nailed them to the frame as before. Once we got two Hackberry rails installed on the homemade gates, my Partner In Culinary Crime noted that the gates were likely to be "awfully heavy." Much as I knew she was right, I grumbled around for a spell regardless before agreeing that for sheep the bottom three rails might be sufficient.

Since we were making these gates on a shoestring, I decided to hang them using an old fashioned method where the hinge standard is planted in a hole next to the fence post (we lined our hinge holes with pieces of red brick) and some cleverly twisted smooth wire is used as the top hinge. With Osage Orange standards in the holes, no worries about rotting for about 30 years, at which point we can install proper hinges if we wish. Since the gates are indeed heavy, we also set a nice flat piece of native limestone on the ground at the point where the two gates meet in the middle. You have to lift the ends about a half inch to set them on the stone. After admiring our handiwork for a bit, I could envision our horned Highland cattle poking their heads through the top and second rail of the four-rail gate and basically tearing the homemade gates apart. So I took a barb wire remnant and looped it lengthwise around each gate where the fourth rail was initially supposed to be located and twisted them tight with a light Osage Orange stick. I found a piece of ancient implement drive chain in the barn and fashioned a temporary gate latch pending a better design.

Shortly after hanging the second gate, the sheep saw us working and came bleating up to check out our handiwork. I don't know whether it was the heavy-duty look of the gate or that the spaces between the rails really seemed too narrow, but they turned around and went back to grazing without even giving our homemade pasture gate a test. And that's just fine with me.

Photos Courtesy Karen Keb