Help, I need kelp!

Okay, so our chickens are not laying very well lately and we cannot figure out why. No sudden trauma or change, nobody is molting, they are eating the same diet they have always had, they are not too old, it is not especially cold, they are getting lots of light and they seem normal except that for the 17 chickens we are keeping (to be fair five are male or chicks and two are recent moms leaving 10 to lay eggs), we are only getting 1 to 4 eggs per day.

One of the cures for this I have run across a couple of times is powdered kelp. Oh, thought I, "I live near the beach where I have seen lots of kelp, this will be easy". Husband and I discussed going down and getting some kelp and while we were at it, we may as well fetch some seaweed for the garden. Sounded like a great idea. Well, after weeks of waiting for a nice day to go down on the beach we decided to pick a day, stick to it, weather be damned! It just so happened we had company that weekend and they didn't know what they were in for. We woke up in the morning to sunshine and minus ten degree, windy weather but we were all game and I was committed to getting these chickens laying.

We layered on splash pants, coats, hats, scarves and boots and headed in the van to the beach about five minutes away. We got there and the beach, which is usually covered in swathes of seaweed, had almost none. I got closer and realized that a recent storm had ground up all of the seaweed into tiny pieces and strewn it about making it useless for my purposes. Luckily near the rocks we found a stray piece of kelp here and there and as we treasure hunted, we froze in the wind. A little further along we finally found some seaweed for the garden. We took a full shopping bag of kelp home as that was all we could pick out of the rocks. I proceeded to rinse a bit of the sand and salt from it, put it on an old cookie sheet and dried it for two days by the fire.

First I tried to scrunch it by hand but that did very little to bring it to powder form. Next I put it in the blender but after nearing the limits of my blender's motor, I was left with flakes of kelp. Yes closer but still useless for mixing into the chicken feed. Someone mentioned using a mortar and pestle so I dumped the kelp in and went at that. It was hours into the operation and I had very little powder to show. The flakes were large, hard and flat. Trying to grind them was like trying to grind fingernail clippings into powder. Someone suggested using my coffee grinder to get to powdered kelp but being pretty sure I would not be partial to fish flavoured coffee I chose to pass.

I suppose if I bought a smaller grinder, a spice mill, that may work well. Anyway, by the time I had ground my shopping bag of kelp down, all of our work translated into approximately three tablespoons of powder, or about enough for one week's worth of kelp. I do not recommend making this yourself, as I am pretty sure I can buy it at the Health food market for about $7.00 a jar. Sometimes it is worth it to make it yourself, and sometimes you are just an idiot standing in freezing winter conditions on a beach with your family picking up old sandy, slimy, fishy seaweed for no reason at all!