Each spring I’m taken aback by the prices that seed companies are charging for their seeds nowadays. I mean I’m pretty young, but I can still remember when seed packets were like $3 instead of $6-8, and had twice the number of seeds in them. I was really miffed this year when I dropped $8.50 on […]
Keeping the birds supplied with fresh water in the winter has always been a problem. In past years I’ve only had chickens, so I didn’t need all that much water. I tried putting various pond and tank heaters into a hanging bucket, but those heaters inevitably broke after about a month. Besides, it made me really […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
One of my very first harvests every Spring is black, not green. I deliberately set my coop’s run directly on the soil in order to be able to use the deep bedding method. The method is simple: every time the bedding starts to look gross, you add another deep layer of organic material on top. It’s that simple. […]
What is it Paul Wheaton is famous for saying: that permaculture lets him be as lazy as he really is? Meaning that people can go to extraordinary lengths to find easier methods for doing tasks they dislike. He was referring to avoiding weeding, fertilizing, and planting through the use of guilds and perennial food crops; […]
So, I haven’t written for a while. …It’s complicated, let’s leave it at that. But in the mean time, things have been trundling on over here, and I’m ready to start a brand new year. Complete with all the frozen mud, snowmelt, and endless spring rains that the change of seasons brings every year. If […]