Habitats and Hens

Hello friends.  It's been awhile since I've done a post here aside from that little article I linked to yesterday.  While I have some exciting developments to report, the truth is that I've felt a bit overwhelmed, embarrassed, and depressed about how my gardening efforts are going.  I spent a week in Minnesota at the end of June visiting family.  My parents and my siblings are extraordinary gardeners.   Their gardens were very inspiring, but also very humbling.   Their plants were much further along than mine, as so are the gardens of my friends in Beacon.   Here I've been studying so hard, working hard, and blogging - hoping that I'll  inspire people with what I'm doing.  But my plants are so behind.  How embarrassing.   

There are some reasons why my stuff is behind, and I find them encouraging.  1.) I haven't even been here a year yet.  I'm still learning the patterns here, as I will be for years to come.  2.) The sheet mulch beds that I've done are supposed to take some time to get good.  Plus I made the mistake of using whole leaves as my main organic material.  If I had shredded the leaves, I think I'd be seeing better results.  I won't forget  that next time.  3.) I've been filling my head with a ton a new information.  Things will take time to sink in.  I'm aware of a pattern of mine:  I study theory and concepts like crazy and end up with inflated ideas that might not be the most realistic.  I've done this in music, in yoga, in eating, and I'm finally learning from that tendency.   Seeing my families' gardens and learning from them was a great lesson in practicality, and the real world.  

I'm trying to remember that this blog is not an expert advice column, as I stated in the beginning.  I'm just figuring it out and learning as I go, and I'm sharing that experience with you.  

I didn't take many photos in MN, but here's one of my parents front yard.  The place is popping!  

Now onto the developments!  We've been doing some habitat creation here, starting with human habitat.  We needed outdoor eating habitat, so we built a classic picnic table!  We've been eating most every meal at it since its completion.   

Akiko sanding.  

Akiko's paint job.  We painted it before assembly to protect the wood at the joints.  

Assembly

The finished product!

We also built some Adirondack chairs.  In desiring some good outdoor hanging habitat, we were on the lookout for some chairs.  You see these plastic Adirondack chairs all over.  They're cheap, and tempting.  Wooden ones are harder to come by and expensive, so I thought I'd try building some.  I'm very happy with how they turned out.   I've been sitting in these chairs playing banjo, and I'm sitting in one right now writing this very post.  

Akiko painting the first chair

Akiko and Minnie trying them out.  We went with subtle colors as you can see.  

Learning to play my new birthday present in a homemade chair.  Not too bad.  

Picnic table and chairs are essential to the design of the property.  I have all sorts of big ideas about all pollinator habitats, fruit trees, annual vegetables, solar panels, and everything that we're going to have here in the future.  But it's important not to design ourselves out of the picture.  Some lawn space and hangout banjo space is important.  

The other major habitat I've been working on is for chickens.  Our friends Sara and Justin bought a house in Beacon in December.  Their house had a coop in the back yard.  They didn't want to raise chickens, so they offered it to us.  I disassembled it in April, moved it with the help of a neighbor, and it sat in the garage for a couple months.  What prevented me from erecting the coop right away was location consideration.  I had a few ideas:

My first instinct.  Coop is under a maple, but farther from the backdoor and really far from the vegetable patch.  

Coop is closer to the vegetable patches, and partially shaded. 

Similar to number 2, except oriented in a different direction.  

Farther away from the house, close to the empty lot next door (which probably won't be empty forever)

Finally I settled on number 3.  The idea is to give the chickens some shade, have the egg boxes fairly close to the back door, and have the hens in proximity to two annual vegetable patches.  The concept is called “Dueling Gardens”.  I read about it in a book by Harvey Ussery called “The Small Scale Poultry Flock”.  The idea is that you alternate planting between the two patches, and the chickens forage on the one that isn’t planted.  I really love this idea.  The chickens eat bugs, weed seeds, and leftover veggies.  They stir it up, add their manure, and are happy as can be.    It also gives the soil a period of rest and rejuvenation every other year.  It seems like a win win situation.  Another benefit of location #3 is the potential to collect some tree fall through off of the coop roof.  Rain that falls through a tree hasn't been studied much.  But apparently, the rain picks up all sorts of minerals and all sorts of other goodies as it falls through the tree.  It might be a good fertilizer to water with.  I plan to get a gutter and a rain barrel for the coop eventually  

I managed to put her back together!

I had so many scratches all over myself from that hardware cloth.  The design on the end is of two sliding doors.  One will lead to one veggie patch, and one to the other.  I rigged them with ropes and latches.  

I built the roosts out of some branches I trimmed off the maple to make room for the coop.  They use them.  

Predator proofing.  This wasn't the easiest job.  

I was able to go a foot down on this end because it was farthest from the tree.  

Around the rest I had to go flat against the ground because of all the tree roots.  

I put the sod back on top, although most of it didn't survive.  

By the time I had the coop reoriented, erected, and secured with 1/2 inch hardware cloth it was mid June, just days before my aforementioned trip to MN.  So I waited until I got back to seek out some hens.  Plus we had to the get the coop inspected by the city of Beacon, and I wanted to do that before getting the birds, so that I could make any necessary modifications with ease,  Happily, we passed the inspection without any problems.  

Via a post on the Beacon Hen Keepers Association Facebook page, I got connected with someone who was selling some Speckled Sussex hens that just started laying eggs.  Perfect!  I picked them up on the evening of June 30, and just like that we were chicken keepers!  

They were pretty afraid of me the first couple days.  But they’ve warmed up quite a bit to me, especially because I’m tossing them watermelon rinds every day (I love summer!).  They go nuts for them.  I spend the first few days fencing in the run, which will be the second vegetable patch.  I managed to get it up after a few days, and boy were they happy to get out and stretch and eat wild stuff.  Later I moved the strawberry patch and some perennial flowers out of the run so they wouldn’t get eaten.  The chickens immediately scattered the mulch that I had around those flowers.  They love some bare dirt for dust bathing.  

Their first night in their new home.  Pretty freaked out, as you can imagine.  

 Minnie and the hens are getting used to one another.  

The run / future annual garden bed fenced in.  

Hens in the run.  Digging up that mulch, finding stuff to eat.  

One permaculture concept is the idea of “stacking functions”.  That means seeing the multiple functions and benefits of a particular design element, and placing it so to maximize those benefits.  So here are some of the benefits of having a backyard flock of hens:

1.) Manure.  The person I bought the hens from said each one produces three cubic feet of manure a year.  Now that is a lot of shit.  This, if managed properly, is great for the soil.  I'm attempting a deep litter method of manure management.  Basically I add a lot of carbon rich material to the coop floor and eventually to the run.  As the chickens shit in it, I add more carbon material little by little and and eventually it becomes a nice compost to use on the garden.  The original vegetable patch has deep mulch on it already.  For the new patch, I'll let them work on the grass.  If it starts getting stinky in there I'll start adding some carbon material.  But I'll plan on sheet mulching the new bed (I think I'll do a better job) after harvesting everything we can out of the original patch and moving the hens onto it.  

2.) Weed eating.  Speaks for itself.

3.) Bug eating.  Chickens are supposed to eat a lot of harmful insects, including tics.  I’ve really enjoyed watching them chase the occasional flying insect.  

4.) Tilling.  Chickens are used to create new planting spaces.  Put them on a small patch of land, and they’ll scratch it all up, removing the vegetation, fluffing up the soil and adding some manure in the process.  

5.) Composting.  Chickens can speed up a pile by mixing it up for you, and eating kitchen scraps and turning them into manure.  Just today I came across some leaves a neighbor had set out by the curb.  Finally some brown material!  So I built a pile in the run inside a cardboard box without a bottom.  I’ll remove the box after the materials have broken down a bit.  If I didn’t have a box, it would probably still work, but I thought the chickens would spread it all out before it broke down.  Maybe they’ll just peck through the box too.  We’ll see.  

6.) Eggs.  Many hen keepers are only thinking of fresh eggs.  But the eggs are more of a bonus for us.  I’m thinking about all the above benefits before the eggs.  However, I’ve been enjoying them for sure, as have been many of my friends.  Eating eggs from your backyard is a good way of connecting to the local ecosystem.  The chickens are taking things that I don’t want to eat and don’t digest so well: worms, insects, weeds and their seeds, grass, etcetera, and converting them into a highly energy dense, nutritious, and delicious thing that I do enjoy eating.  I’m connecting to, and benefitting from, the existence of all those worms, insects, etcetera, in a way that I wasn’t before.  

7.) Warning.  If there’s an animal that wants to eat my garden veggies or the hens themselves, they will probably start squawking when it shows up.  I haven’t experienced this, but it’s something I’ve read about.  We’ll see.  They do get noisy if Minnie gets too interested in them, that's for sure!  

8.) Entertainment.  I’ve spent quite a lot of time just watching these hens do their thing in the run.  It’s fascinating.  Better than TV.  They pretty funny animals.  

Am I leaving anything out?  Can you think of any other functions of these chickens?  

There is a lot said about the environmental harm of eating animal foods.  However all of that is based on the industrial feed lot operation model.  Those are unquestionably the saddest, most polluting, most backward, sinful, awful, ridiculous systems ever.  Please do not buy that food.  Do not order it at restaurants.  Ever.  Please.  Those operations are the  opposite of a balanced ecosystem.  There the manure is pollution.  The shit that made our soils fertile is now polluting it!  How heartbreaking.  I could go on and on, but you get the picture.  Eating eggs out of your back yard is animal food intervention.  The two dozen eggs I've given away since my hens arrived are two dozen less that are potentially being purchased from an unbalanced, unethical food production operation.   

Now let's consider a natural balanced ecosystem.  You won't find a natural system in which manure is a pollution.  If you do, it's a temporary imbalance that will correct itself, unless it's human doings that caused the imbalance, in which case we might need to go in and fix it.   Harvey Ussery says, "Waste is not a concept that nature recognizes."  Everything is reused and recycled.  In nature, you won't find chickens crowded into a confined space with only two square feet of personal space each.   Can you imagine the damage they would do, and how they would starve?  In nature you find a population of birds that is supported by the available food, shelter, and predation.  Their population density is far from being a problem - it can't be until something, usually some kind of human related phenomenon, causes conditions for that population to explode.  We have done a lot of damage to the ecosystems of the earth.  If we were to suddenly disappear, some places would regenerate into a balanced ecosystem.  But some places would not.  In either place we can be a regenerating force right now.  With our daily habits and choices we can support natural, sustainable, regenerative systems.  We're trying to model our systems after nature, only tweaking them slightly one way or another for our benefit.  It's better that many of are here on this planet, because we need many of us to fix things.  Happily there is a growing movement of us, trying to do just that, which is very exciting.  

Got a little preachy there at the end.  Sorry.  I'm feeling better after writing this post.  I'm excited for what's to come in our yard and beyond.  Come on over and sit in some home made adirondack chairs and watch some happy hens work, and go home with some fresh eggs.  We have many to spare!