Me and a couple friends were just drinking and talking, and we got into what ifs. One of the questions that came up was “If you had to live on a deserted island and could only take one plant and one animal with you what would you bring?”
I said Potatoes,(Grow in uneven soil, easy to grow, hidden from birds and hailstorms, non-labourious harvest. etc) and Chicken. Chicken because they don’t take that much space, can eat many grains and plants, and if it comes down to it they can survive on wandering bugs. You would get eggs most days, and meat at decent intervals, without needing to have detailed preservation techniques to hold down waste.
Everybody agreed I won with my answers, but I felt like a bit of a fraud. I don’t actually know how to get chickens laying unfertilized eggs. Is it automatic for them if virginal or do you have to kick off the making eggs process somehow without getting a sperm reservoir?
A pullet ( young female) will begin laying eggs at about 4 months . At first the eggs be very soft shelled almost like a water balloon , at about 6 months the eggs will start being ‘normal’. A healthy hen will lay one egg a day starting after the last freeze up until the first freeze Some hens will continue laying all winter but thats not the norm. . Unless there is a rooster all you will get is eggs . You should have 1 rooster for every 15 hens.
My grandmother raised poultry and I was her ‘helper’ . Which means I got to do the cleaning and egg gathering.
Your answer is pretty good but, if you mean your comments literally, potatoes won’t grow everywhere and dessert islands will be harder places to grow them than most because the smaller ones tend to be fairly infertile. Chickens are fairly easy to raise but, you have to keep them in some type of enclosure, or else provide feed for them around and that is a missing piece. I am sure that you could come up with something though.
If you just mean that you need to pick one plant and one animal to live on for the rest of your life given favorable conditions then those are good (but boring) choices. I assume you can supplement these with whatever else you can round up because you are going to develop malnutrition otherwise.
You would have meat exactly once . . . when you got tired of eating eggs, and killed the chicken. Unless, of course, you started dismembering it while it was still alive.
Hehe the question assumed a breeding pair. And that’s what I wasn’t sure of. How to turn a breeding pair into egg layers, but it sounds like it is automatic for hens, so I think I’m good.
Chickens will start laying eggs whether they’re fertilized or not, but they’ll only be duds unless Mr Rapist the Rooster is around. Seriously, there’s no lovin in the chicken world, it’s all beak biting and grabbing the scruff of the neck for mounting.
During extreme heat chickens don’t lay eggs. They also drop dead from heat. I hope your island isn’t too hot.
On a hot island you’d do better with a yam,or sweet potato. The vines will cover the ground and root at the leaf nodes where new tubers will form. The plants never need to die. They do better in an arid environment and higher heat than potatoes.