Homestead and Folly

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 kn...

For awhile now I have wanted to grow sprouts but for some reason couldn't get around to it. I bought a nifty little kit that contained seeds and a small canvass bag but then when I went to make it, I couldn't think of a good place to hang the bag after each rinse, imagining the endless dripping if I were to somehow manage to suspend the bag over the sink. Frankly I could see struggling with that bag just to produce a few sprouts which I couldn't see growing, having to wash that bag out and really I don't need a dingy, wet, brown sack to cheer me up in the middle of winter, so I used the bag for something else (see "Self-Inefficiency" August 2013 ). Other people poke holes in lids or buy specialty jars produced for the purpose of growing sprouts but guess what, they are just holes in a lid on a jar. This sad sack will not work for us Recently my son tried some sprouts on a sandwich and loved them! Well that was the impetus we needed. So w...

I know it is gross but this homesteading thing can't all be cute bunnies, precious chicks and charming moments. Some of it is practical solutions and yes, gross bugs. My husband has worms. Wait, that didn't sound good at all. We have decided after years of not feeling quite right about feeding our laying hens commercial grade layer ration to find alternative sources of feed for them. Why? When it comes down too it, why would we feed our chickens something which is formulated especially for factory chickens whom are neither free ranged, allowed to procreate or to socialize. In the summertime, our chickens free range and we hardly feed them anything but table scraps and a bit of grain at night of which they leave most in their tray. In the hard winter when the ground is frozen or covered in a layer of snow we must feed them some grain. We have been feeding them commercial layer pellets because it is cheap and seems more or less to agree with them. Also when we did a sear...

I recently read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I was shocked at just how relevant it is to my current lifestyle. It provides such an interesting and informative look at the beginnings of Big Agriculture in the United States which of course has lead us to our current model of food as an industry. While this is of course a work of fiction, it is also a great look at our past and provides a way to look at that history in a touching, personal way. For that reason I am putting it on my list of books about small farms and food sovereignty. There aren't always other homesteaders I can talk to about my experiences or ask questions and share stories with so I often find myself reading homesteading memoirs. I usually get my books from the library or on loan from kind friends as a part of my quest for self-sufficiency but there are a few on my Christmas list this year, those I have read and re-read and want to own. I am rarely without a homesteading or "how-to" far...

As the weather grows colder and the days shorter, it is the end of my summer garden. I pulled the last of the tomato plants and hung them in the kitchen to ripen. They look festive, like tomato garland. I continue to chop wood everyday and it will feel strange when there is no more wood to chop. The real excitement right now is all about the rabbits. Chopping Wood Tomato Garland Our rabbit had kits! I haven't actually seen them yet but I felt one. Having read many "how to" books about gardening, home improvement and  raising animals I am struck with how usual it is for my own experience to fall short of what the books say. However, with getting this Doe, mating her to the buck and having her babies it has all been exact and matches the book perfectly. When she grew restless and and started rubbing her face on everything like a cat, we put her in the Buck's cage. As per our book's description, he chased her,...

Chicken stored for the winter The meat chickens were processed this week. I was sad to cart my meat chickens off but the weather is getting colder, they were getting so heavy they were sitting down to eat and they were becoming a bit harder to look after requiring me to re-fill their water three or four times a day and hunting anyone and anything for food. Also the day before they were to be taken to be processed,  a hawk was flying right over our yard, hunting them. My mom spotted the hawk and her and I rounded up the meat chicks and put them safely in their tractor, then shooed the layers to semi-safety. It was tiring and about the last thing I wanted to be doing in that moment but a hawk will swoop down and carry off even the heaviest of chickens so we had to act. After the cost of feed, processing and gas to get there, we ended up saving about $2.50 per pound. We ended up with 69 lbs of meat in the freezer. All in all, worth it but that isn't the most valuable thing...

This week we are reminded of our inexperience. We think our Doe rabbit is pregnant and now we are scrambling around to find another tractor for her daughter as apparently you can't leave them together after her new babies come because she may either attack her eldest daughter or eat her babies. I don't know, something like that. We had read you could just put a screen between the two but now we are thinking it will be too tight in their current accommodations. Their current hutch/tractor is leaking a bit and I am wondering if we need to make serious modifications as you aren't supposed to let the rabbits get wet. We are left scrambling. She is due in a few weeks. We are also supposed to build/buy a box for the pregnant doe to kindle in. We are in the learning curve stage where we begin to wonder if this was such a good idea. I remember it with the first layer chickens but eventually we worked out all of the kinks, redesigned their coop many times and now have a great sys...