Humble Garden

Meet one of our Old English Game roosters (we have two) and one of the hens (other types of chickens shown = Rhode Island Red and a Minorca). We adopted these chickens from a teenager my oldest daughter met on a chicken board. He had bred and incubated these chickens himself but the town he lived in caught on to his chicken hobby and so he had to get rid of them. Its been interesting watching them grow because we were not sure what this kid had bred!

Turned out looking pretty good.

Meet Flax, our new boy LaMancha goat and the new sire to our future kid goats. He looks a bit odd because he was shorn, shampoo’d, trimmed, powdered, and I am not sure what else!

He is a really sweet little boy and is in his own area right now as all the girls sniff him through the fence. He has a big job ahead of him!

Arriving

Sharon Astyk over at Casaubon’s Book wrote a really cute post about being potentially perceived as a “Sustainable Martha Stewart”

I hope that she NEVER has the nightmare interview that she parodies.

She refers to being called a “Sustainable Martha” – that is too darn funny. Martha actually does a lot to grow food on her property and she seems to love to blog about her efforts (tho she has an army of people who help do it and administer it so she too isn’t the perfect “Sustainable Martha”)

If you do a bit of reading on permaculture you will see that integrating animals into the garden is very beneficial. You do have to be careful about allowing them access to tender delicious plants.

The nitrogen from the chickens, goats, and llama, all goes into the compost. The chickens convert weeds, bugs, MICE, other unknown things, into eggs. We have seen our chickens attack live running mice and eat them almost whole. Before this batch of chickens, I had no idea they were such hunters.