Update on Hedge Fund Billionaire Crispin Odey’s $250,000 Chicken Coop

...on, “Quis primus venit?” Meaning? “Meaning, ‘Who came first?’ ” So is it a chicken coop and a library? Perhaps Odey is familiar with the poultry housing described in Cato the Elder’s De Agricultura. In this early Roman agriculture manual Cato details a live-in chicken coop that provides housing for a worker who collects the eggs and keeps predators away. Maybe he can read Cato while admiring his hens. Just look out for those peasants with pitchfor...

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Chicken of the Woods

...when foraging for mushrooms. Find yourself a local mushroom nerd or run it past your cats. That said, don’t be too fearful either or you’ll miss out on a free source of gourmet food. Chicken of the Woods is distinctive and still considered one of the easier mushrooms to identify. And, yes, it really does taste like chicken....

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Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Chicken of the Woods 2021

...Recent research has shown that what was once thought of as one species of chicken of the woods in North America is, in fact, a complex of species. Here in the west we have Laetiporus gilbertsonii. Here’s some good photos showing Laetiporus gilbertsonii at various stages. Note that should this mushroom show up on one of your trees you’ll want to hire an arborist as this fungus can cause serious structural problems. On the plus side you’ll have man...

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Los Angeles Chicken Produces World’s Largest Egg

...may be a sign of disease or nutritional deficiencies. Hall’s Cornish Cross chicken, incidentally, is a meat chicken that is not meant to live beyond a few weeks. Chickenzilla is remarkably healthy for a year old Cornish. They are bred to put on weight quickly and often can’t support their own weight should they somehow skip the butcher’s block. Permaculturist Harvey Ussery has a nice article in Backyard Poultry magazine on alternatives to the Corn...

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