Backyard Chickens

One of our favorite homesteading accomplishments is raising our chickens. We have about 30 laying hens, a few roosters, and this past year we raised 50 meat birds.We consider them a "farming staple," if you will, but that is not a universal sentiment!

 There has been a lot of controversy surrounding chickens in the past few years, concentrating in city's where folks want to raise chickens within the city limits. Some consider them as a nuisance, a pest perhaps, creating excess noise and waste within their close quartered neighborhoods. While I understand how this is a problem for some, I wouldn't have it any other way here on our little plot of land.

Chickens happen to be one of the most sustainable resources a homesteader can invest in! Let us start in the kitchen for instance. Consider the organic waste we produce on a daily basis. I don't mean FDA approved, stamped organic, but organic as in can be put back into the earth. All of our produce scraps, and our egg shells go out to the chickens. Seems a little cannibalistic with the egg shells, I know, but they are a great source of calcium and minerals for the chickens, and will in turn make their eggshells stronger. So, there is that. We take them our kitchen trash, which they recycle and
in turn, give us nutritious, protein filled butt fruit hehe! Or in the case of a meat bird, a substantial meal.

In addition to feeding them the kitchen scraps, we also set them loose in the garden each spring. This is an excellent adventure for the chickens, fresh sprouts to eat up, and worms to DIG up! They think it is an all you can eat buffet, meanwhile, they are digging up the garden, getting rid of baby weeds and tilling up the soil. Throw your compost pile and the old bedding from the coop on top and they incorporate all of those nutrients into your soil by scratching and pecking and digging.

Back to sustainability, they eat the grass and bugs in your yard, which is doing you a big favor. They are getting rid of pesky insects such as Mosquito's, and that all has to go somewhere.....like out the other end. A messy situation indeed, but what is fertilizer made of? So they eat the grass, but are fertilizing it at the same time. A great situation if you can free range! We however live in an area with many predators, and cannot free range, so we have chicken tractors instead. Not the kind they  can drive around in, but a portable fence that we can move to fresh grass once they have eaten and re-fertilized the ground.

So while our roosters like to sing the song of their people first thing in the morning (their internal clocks must be set wrong because last I checked, morning did not start at 4 a.m.) and cleaning the coop is not the most fun chore in the world, raising chickens is one of my favorite parts of homesteading. They are entertaining to watch, full of character (and sometimes attitude), and provide us with 2 of our biggest food staples. It is an extremely comforting feeling to have a freezer full of meat at the beginning of winter, and an even better feeling to know I can go out to the back yard each day and get one of the most versatile foods ever used in my kitchen! I can see why many people are hoping to raise them within city limits, I don't know that we could ever be without them!

Garden Progress!

Well friends, this is our third year with a vegetable garden, and let me tell you, there is no better feeling than sowing seeds, nurturing and watching them grow, and harvesting the product of all your hard work! No food tastes as good as that which you grow yourself!

Now we are by no means experts, but every year we learn a little more and the garden gets bigger and better than the last year! The biggest thing I have learned over the past three years is the importance of weeding. I know that seems obvious but until put into practice I hadn't realized how big of a difference it makes. :) This year I am weeding more than ever and we added straw to the aisles and around some of the plants to help cut back on the weeds. It isn't a complete barricade against the weeds, but every little bit helps!

Also this year we created a tripod support system for our climbing plants. We tied three posts together and wound cord around them to give the peas and other climbers some support and room to grow!

We also used the waste from our chicken coop as a fertilizer around the plants. While adding nutrients it also helps hold moisture into the soil underneath it.

We have many different varieties of plants, some we have grown before, and some we have never tried.  We run on the philosophy that if we don't know what we are doing, now is the perfect time to learn!

This year we are growing 2 different types of tomatoes, cabbage, brussel sprouts, 4 varieties of lettuce, onions, snap peas, shelling peas, wax beans, purple beans, green beans, broccoli,  cauliflower,  parsnips, carrots, corn, peppers, cucumbers, cantaloupe,  watermelons and pumpkins!

It is certainly a lot of work but it is absolutely worth it in the end. We love producing our own food and not having to rely on someone else for it, such as a grocery store. In addition to feeding us for the summer I also preserve as much as I can for the winter. It is nice having a full pantry as the harsh weather sets in!

We love our garden and I have even come to love going out to weed it hehe! :) Tell us about your favorite thing to grow and harvest from your garden!

Spring Has (Almost) Sprung!

Well, we have been getting ready for Spring this week on the homestead. We have ordered our seeds, measured the garden, and constructed our cold frame. Last year when we started our seeds, we started them in the house. This worked out ok, however they didn't receive enough sunlight, and they were in constant danger of being eaten by Bob (the cat). So this year we realized we needed to do something different, and decided to build a cold frame.

                                                  Here is a picture of the finished product:

The frame will work like a miniature green house, the sun shines through the plastic and heats everything up and is trapped. Plants thrive in a warm, bright place so it will be perfect for starting them when it still is too early to put them in the ground. A huge benefit to having a cold frame in a colder climate like we live in is that it will extend our growing period. It is hard to judge when the last frost will be here in Michigan, so we will be able to start our plants early without having to worry about losing them to frost.

We took a trip to our nearest Menard's to purchase supplies. After a lot of research we found that Menard's was the most cost efficient place to get twin-wall polycarbonate (a.k.a.: greenhouse plastic). We considered using old windows as a substitute for the Polycarbonate, however since we built it onto the side of the house, we risk losing them to the icicles in the winter. If you were to build one independent from your house however, using old windows is a popular choice, and a great way to recycle.

Our materials included:
Polycarbonate
Plywood
2x4's
2x8's
2x2's
Hinges
Insulation
And a few miscellaneous hardware items. (Nuts, bolts, screws, etc.)

We (and when I say we, I mean Cody) built the frame on the side of the house as we are going to use it as a passive solar air exchanger in the winter, so we really only built 3 sides. We did have to remove the siding from that part of the house, but we are going to reuse that siding to cover the area that we added the pantry to.

                                          Cody pulling off the siding where the frame will be:

Cody didn't have any sort of blueprint for the frame, so he just built it to fit our needs. It only took about 2 days, and the whole project cost us about $200. First he built the frame and added the plywood to seal the ends. Then Erin painted the frames to match the house. Once the paint was dry Cody insulated the ends and stapled foil insulation around the entire inside. Next he added the Polycarbonate sheets to the top, attaching them with the hinges so we can easily access the inside. Lifting the sheets will also work as ventilation for the plants later in the spring when it gets warm enough. It provides us with approximately 48 square feet of growing space. We built it on the South side of the house for maximum sun exposure.

                                                       Another view of the finished frame:

Now that we got this project done we are really looking forward to starting out plants! Since our season will be extended and it will protect them from frost we will be able to start them soon!

Vermicomposting.....As Beginners

Well friends, we have worms!! That's right, we have 2 pounds of worms(about 2,000 worms) in our house right now! In an attempt to cut back on our waste production, and with the desire to improve our soil quality we have decided to begin Vermicomposting(composting with worms)!

After much research we built our worm house out of two plastic totes. The inner tote has about 15 holes 1/2 an inch in diameter drilled into the bottom, with window screen covering them, allowing for moisture to seep into the bottom tote, a catch bin. We also drilled holes into the lid with another screen attached in order to allow ventilation.

Once we built our worm house we ordered our wiggly friends! We ordered our two pounds of worms from: Uncle Jim's Worm Farm. unclejimswormfarm.com It cost $39.95 plus shipping/handling for our worms to be shipped to our door. We learned in our research that it is best to use red wigglers because they can "stand the heat" better, literally they are the best to stand the heat produced by the composting material. Our worms arrived a little on the skinny side, as they got a little hungry and thirsty on their trip, but the packaging included instructions on how to perk them up a bit. The worms once acclimated, produce their entire mass in casting a day (worm poop, the good stuff for composting), and adjust their numbers based the size of their container and quantity of food.

We collect our kitchen scraps in a recycled ice cream container(the gallon size) and freeze them for 3 days. We actually have 2 containers so we can rotate between collecting and freezing (well and cause we like ice cream!) The reason, I found out in my research, that you want to freeze the scraps is because it kills the gnat eggs that may be present in the food, and it helps keep down the odor. We have not had a problem with any smell though!

To get started we added a bag of top soil for the worms to get comfy in, and some shredded paper to regulate moisture and as worm food. Then we added the first of the kitchen scraps and our hungry and thirsty worms. After we added the worms we added a few cups of water to moisten everything. It was a pretty simple process all together!

After all that, we wait a few months and we will have nutrient rich compost to feed our garden!

A few sources that helped us get going:

http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/10/4-vermicomposting-tips.html

=http://lifehacker.com/5882478/diy-worm-compost-bin

http://greatbasinpermaculture.org/blog?mode=PostView&bmi=816534