Allotment and Vegetable Gardening

Flubenvet does kill gape worm.

Cheapest supplier? Try a local feed merchant then you will not have to pay for postage.

http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=Flubenvet+&hl=en

Never heard of a mixers license are you sure such a thing exists?   I've always bought the gamekeepers 240gram tub which has a 2.5% concentration of the active ingredient.  I now see that there's a 60gram premix tub with 1% active ingredient aimed at us poor suckers who just keep a few hens.  It seems to be about half the cost which as it contains a tenth of the active ingredient means it's 5 times more expensive than the 2.5% which is a pretty good mark up premium for Janssen the manufacturers.

The 2.5% is a little difficult to use if you are mixing less than about 5Kg of feed as you are dealing with such a tiny amount of medication.  I usually work in volume rather than weight.  5ml of the 2.5% weighs approx 5.5grams and will medicate 4.5kg of feed enough for 5 chx for a week.  When mixing always do enough for the week working on 900grams of feed per chicken per week (unless you have a better figure for your chx) and adjust the amount of medication proportionally to the weight of feed you are medicating.  There's little danger from over medicating as the medication has been tested wth no ill effects too over twice the recommended dosage but obviously try to be accurate and mix well.  If you use the 1% premix you will need 2.5 times the amount of Flubenvet I've indicated above.  I've heard of people putting a pinch in a grape to worm individual birds which seems an awfully crude measure and not what I'd recommend.  Also it's important that ALL the feed gets medicated not just some as the idea is to provide a continuously poisonous environment for the worms so they can't escape ingesting it, not just a high concentration every now and then.

If there's feed left over after 7 days you can let it run on a couple of days but don't add unmedicated feed to it as feeding a weak concentration can expose worms to a non lethal dose and breed resistance.  Discard what isn't used after 9 days.

If you use pellets add a small amount of corn oil to just colour the pellets and make the powder stick and not fall to the bottom.  Mix well well and then sprinkle the powder thinly on the top surface while mixing.  You need to medicate their feed for a week and feed NO other food other than the prepared medicated feed so that they can't avoid the medication by picking out the unmedicated feed.  I've seen people recommend mixing oats as a marker to check how well it's mixed but don't do this as you don't want them just picking out the oats which might not be uniformly medicated.

The less often you move your chx to clean ground the more attention you need to pay to worming regularly.  6 weeks in summer and I usually do 5 wormings per year.

There is more in heaven and earth Horatio 

http://www.petmeds.co.uk/p-3359-flubenvet-medicated-premixture-240g.aspx

The evil eye of commercialism backed up by the Nannie state 

does remind me though that I need to worm my ducks soon.

Deep breathing in a brown paper bag for you Kate.


Or the wine 

Why thank thank you Aunty and its Thirsty Thursday as well.