Search Results for: label/chicken

174 results

Mistakes we have made . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
...erials and Applications, a neighborhood landscape architecture firm that runs an amazing outdoor gallery, has stopped designing water features unless they are supplied by rainwater. Sounds like a good idea to us! And with the chickens we did not want to provide habitat for raccoons. 2. Mixing Chicken Breeds Speaking of chickens, a friend of ours who grew up on a farm confirmed that “chickens are racists”. Like talk radio hosts, hens w...

Continue reading…

What Are Your Favorite Compost Materials?

Mr. Homegrown
Composting
20 Comments
Root Simple’s new composting game for your Xbox! I wish I could source compost pile materials from our yard. But lead and zinc contamination in our soil make that a dodgy proposition without doing a lot of expensive lab tests. And I never seem to have enough materials even for our modest vegetable garden. So in the past I’ve used: horse bedding chicken manure from our own chickens alfalfa hay (kinda spendy these days) str...

Continue reading…

Barefoot Running: No Shoes, No Problem

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
22 Comments
...ur muscles, cause plantar fasciitis? Could the ever more massive cushioning of running shoes cause biomechanical changes that damage knees? For several years I’d been fascinated with barefoot running, but was always too chicken to try it. Two videos, done as part of a research project on barefoot running at Harvard, convinced me. The first shows a runner in shoes with a graph of the impact forces. When you run in shoes you tend to slam down...

Continue reading…

My mental glitch: hay vs. straw

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
21 Comments
Photo by David Shankbone Mrs. Homegrown here: So I went to the feed store to get some stuff for the chickens and at the counter I made a mistake. When the clerk said, “Anything else?” I said, “Oh yes. One bale of hay, please.”  She rang me up. The bill seemed more than usual, but being in my usual fog, I didn’t pay that much attention. The heavy lifting guys bring the hay bale to my car. It’s green an...

Continue reading…

How To Manage a Compost Pile Using Temperature

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, How-to
5 Comments
.... The technique is simple–all you do is take the temperature once a day with a compost thermometer and write down the result on a calendar. The graph above is the result that I got from a pile made out of horse bedding, chicken manure from our hens, plant materials, straw and brew waste from a local brewery. The red area on the chart is the thermophilic temperature range (135° -160° Fahrenheit). The dip you see at day 15 is the one time I t...

Continue reading…

Nutria Trappin’ by Bike!

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Pests
7 Comments
I like to keep up on all the “urban homesteading” trends, but bikesnobnyc beat me to this one: nutria (Myocastor coypus) trapping via bike. “We then returned with our catch and skinned them, prepared the hides for tanning and butchered the carcass and cooked up a bit of the meat. Most folks seemed pleasantly surprised at the “chicken- like” taste of the meat.” Read more about it at dellerdesigns.blogspot.co...

Continue reading…

Radical Homemakers

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
...id not see their homes as a refuge from the world. Rather, each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone.” Now I have an excuse not to clean up the chicken poo I track into the kitchen! But seriously, I highly recommend Radical Homemakers, as well as Hayes’ other books. It’s about time somebody addressed the “why” of this movement and Hayes is th...

Continue reading…

Have any ideas? We’re rewriting the anniversary gift list

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
16 Comments
Okay, this has almost nothing to do with the post. But Anne, mentioned below, and her broody hen Big Wig, are fostering kittens. Yes, the hen sits on the kittens. You might die of the cuteness if you saw it. If you live in the LA area and need a fluffy, chicken-identified kitten, drop us a line. Our neighbors Anne and Bill are about to have an anniversary. Anne was thinking about a gift for Bill and referenced the traditional anniversar...

Continue reading…

Texas Town Outlaws Common Sense

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Thoughtstylings
16 Comments
Lancaster Texas city officials have decided to enforce codes outlawing backyard chickens and Marye Audet a food writer, author and owner of nineteen heritage breed Barred Rocks has been pulled into their poultry dragnet. She ain’t happy about it. “My dad and my father- in- law were WWII vets. I am a veteran. My husband is a disabled veteran. My oldest son is in Iraq currently, for his second tour of duty. And this afternoon, as I...

Continue reading…

The 10 Day $25 Survival Pack

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
RLeave a comment
...at crap food easily found in America’s bloated supermarkets. Normally we wouldn’t touch this stuff, what the French call malbouffe, but its long shelf life and ease of preparation make certain items, such as Knorr chicken and pasta dinner and Maruchan ramen noodle soup ideal foods for emergency kits. These convenience foods are also great for backpacking as they are much cheaper and often tastier than freeze dried camping foods. And H...

Continue reading…