The duck house is nearly finished. I started building it a couple weeks ago because it suddenly dawned on me that a) winter is coming and the old duck coop had no shelter, and b) winter vacations are coming up and the ducks really need to be somewhere more secure than under a single flimsy layer of […]
In the past two blog posts I’ve gone over the methods with which to figure out not only what is needed by your soil to attain the ideal ratios between its minerals, but also how to apply that information to real life and find fertilizers you can actually buy in a store. So that’s great – […]
The chickens love getting into the garden every Fall once the main harvest is over. So many leftover greens to eat, and by that time it’s usually just full of little beetles and caterpillars for them to eat, too. While I regularly feed them alfalfa and omega 3 supplements, the yolks are never quite as bright […]
The ducks and their chicken friends seem happy in the duckyard. Every night I tuck them into the old chicken tractor (which never will be mobile again, sadly) and check their feed and water. Which inevitably need refilling, which means I get to crouch down to chicken-tractor height and squelch through all that …not so […]
The little ducklings are now a bit more than 6 weeks old, and already they look like plain old full-grown ducks! I’ve finished fencing their pen in the swampiest, muckiest quadrant of the garden…. just in time for us to begin experiencing an early drought. Sorry, ducks, only tiny ponds for you. (I’m trying to […]
We had a sweet little surprise this weekend: Three fluffy chicks under our first broody australorp. It’s a long story – there were some problems at the beginning with her not keeping her eggs under her – she kept kicking them out by accident as she turned around, some broke and made the nest dirty… eventually […]
My black australorp hen went broody about a week ago. Only a few days before, I had been lamenting that probably it would never happen – but when she did and I checked my garden notes, it was only 3 days later than last year. See her bridling her hackles at me? A broody hen is a […]
The ducklings are finally here! I went and picked them up from the wonderful Dana of Moose Manor Farms (she led the chicken processing lesson I attended at Green Hill Farm‘s Homesteading Days workshops last year so we knew each other already, though I actually found her farm through someone else!) She breeds some really unusual and heritage breeds […]
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. For 6 years I’ve had a compost pile by the kitchen for all our compostable things, dinner scraps, paper towels, veggie tops, etc., which gradually fills up the bin every year until I take out the finished stuff in the spring. I’ve already talked about how I also […]
As you can see from the photo below, as big as my garden seems to me sometimes, it still only takes up about a quarter of our unused land. Maybe less. I really hate waste. Wasted energy, wasted potential, wasted resources. I’m not too fond of paying property taxes on a piece of land […]