Animals
- The Egg-less Chicken Days Of Summer
The girls are on strike! It's that time of year again...egg production is suffering. Where we used to pick up 4 or 5 or even 6 dozen eggs a day,we are lucky now to even find two dozen. Why this drop in production? Heat may be the answer... as...
- Scraps....
It's what's for dinner! It's sad but true that our dear chickens eat better than some humans do...but that's a subject for another day.We give our chickens kitchen scraps...peelings, leftovers...anything that a human can eat... a chicken...
- Everyone Loves A Treat!
There's an incredible amount of excitement around the compost pile. A new shipment of kitchen waste arrived yesterday,and the chickens are just ecstatic! Every week or two, I bring home five gallon pails full of kitchen scrapsfrom our favorite local...
- Manure And Other Fun Stuff
Living on the farm has given us many skills...some we are good at,and some at which we excel. We grow our own food, grow hay for our horses,keep bees and many animals...but the thing we just may be the best at is making great compost! We have an endless...
- Winter Survival The Sustainable Way
Sustainability is something we strive for here on the farm.We want to leave this land a little better than we found it...that is, we want to keep our footprint as small and as lightweight as possible. As a way of achieving that goal, we try not to waste...
Animals
The Pleasures of Recycling
A damp, gloomy, drizzly day this close to Christmas is definitely just what I needed!
And yesterday was just that.
Farm chores, taking recyclables to the recycling center, and picking up our weekly
pastured milk order from the local coffee shop
were my reasons for going outside.
The rest of my day was spent finishing up a knitting project that needs to be done for Christmas.
Weather like this prevents the guilt that would ordinarily accompany a day spent indoors
knitting.
Excuse me, I've digressed.
While picking up our milk order, I also picked up about a dozen 5 gallon buckets of
kitchen scraps from our local café.
This is mutually beneficial to the café and to us.
We recycle their kitchen scraps into our compost pile, adding valuable nutrients that
will eventually be recycled back into the earth.
I get excited about this process of recycling...
but not quite as excited as the chickens get when they see me dumping scraps.
About 20 chickens come running...
their little beaky heads leading their bodies down the muddy lane with such glee...
anticipating the yummiest of snacks to pick through.
The café owner refrigerates the scraps in the summertime so that they don't rot.
And in the winter, they sit outside in the cold.
So, even though they are scraps...they are quite edible for the chickens.
What the chickens eat becomes chicken manure which goes back to the earth;
and what they don't eat decomposes in the compost pile which also goes back to the earth
via the manure spreader as it rolls across our hay field.
It's a WIN-WIN-WIN!!
You see, everyone on the farm gets treats of one sort or another.
The equines love their peppermints.
The pigs love apples or carrots.
The goats...Ritz crackers... and only Ritz crackers.
The chickens...not picky, anything has the potential of reaching "treat" status.
The dogs...everyone else's manure (that's not my choice...it's theirs!)
Before I end, I wanted to share a photo that I found in the blog archives...
It's Ginger and MaryAnn when they first came to live at the farm
with our dear, dear Maddie (our newfie that passed last winter).
Can you believe how tiny the girls were?
Oh, how Maddie loved her piggies.
Oh, how I love a trip down memory lane.
- The Egg-less Chicken Days Of Summer
The girls are on strike! It's that time of year again...egg production is suffering. Where we used to pick up 4 or 5 or even 6 dozen eggs a day,we are lucky now to even find two dozen. Why this drop in production? Heat may be the answer... as...
- Scraps....
It's what's for dinner! It's sad but true that our dear chickens eat better than some humans do...but that's a subject for another day.We give our chickens kitchen scraps...peelings, leftovers...anything that a human can eat... a chicken...
- Everyone Loves A Treat!
There's an incredible amount of excitement around the compost pile. A new shipment of kitchen waste arrived yesterday,and the chickens are just ecstatic! Every week or two, I bring home five gallon pails full of kitchen scrapsfrom our favorite local...
- Manure And Other Fun Stuff
Living on the farm has given us many skills...some we are good at,and some at which we excel. We grow our own food, grow hay for our horses,keep bees and many animals...but the thing we just may be the best at is making great compost! We have an endless...
- Winter Survival The Sustainable Way
Sustainability is something we strive for here on the farm.We want to leave this land a little better than we found it...that is, we want to keep our footprint as small and as lightweight as possible. As a way of achieving that goal, we try not to waste...