Humble Garden

Enjoy a few shots in and around our humble homestead – silent raised beds, munching truculent goats and hesitant chickens as well as an aloof and rather disgusted llama.

Going out to feed the goats, chickens, and llama.

Snowy llama – her name is Misty but we are calling her Snowy right now.

Goats eating hay.

Maisy the goat, eating hay and saying hello to me.

The milking stanchion frozen over – so glad we are not milking right now.

This fall and this winter I have been thinking about a greenhouse I would love to build. It integrates the heat of slowly decomposing hay bales, chickens, and two 2 foot deep, 16 foot long raised beds. I have to admit that for now, its a dream as I do not have the financial means to put this together for now.

I recently made an arrangement with a local grocery store (owned in MA but a BIG chain) to get some of their produce scraps for our chickens and goats.

The majority of their scraps go to pig farmers who drop off big oil barrels for the lettuce remnants that the pig food trader/merchant/dude picks them up later.

I love that we can take something considered waste and give it to our animals.

They LOVE these fresh greens!

I love it all because it fits in with the permacultural ethic by using a resource effectively and in a humane holistic way – Free inputs.

[I have cross posted this to Peaknix]

As a proponent of the global Transition Initiative and having been “Trained for Transition” in November 2008 in Cambridge, MA I have a certain worldview. (see Food for Hope: DeGlobalizing – ReLocalizing)

Transition is really about bringing permacultural principles to bear on the current and coming crises around the decreasing natural resources that are in our future. This includes Peak Oil and pretty much peak everything as wealth and societal energies go towards the resource wars and skirmishes and agonies as governments jostle for position in the bread lines for energy, water, food, and diminishing rare materials.