Practical Backyard Chicken Biosecurity

...or coop surfaces to make them easier to clean. Don’t share garden tools or poultry equipment with other poultry keepers. Gallardo suggested being practical not perfect. The goal is to reduce risk while accepting you’re never going to eliminate diseases. He also noted that educational activities such as 4-H are worth the risk. Kelly and I get requests to bring our chickens to public events. We’ve decided that we don’t want to stress our flock and p...

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SIPS and Kraut at Project Butterfly

...our community and our planet. Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of The Urban Homestead, have become increasingly interested in the concept of urban sustainability since moving to Los Angeles in 1998. In that time, they’ve slowly converted their 1920 hilltop bungalow into a mini-farm, and along the way have explored the traditional home arts of baking, pickling, bicycling and brewing, chronicling all their activities on their blog Homegrown Evo...

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Why Urban Farm?

...r total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publisher and editor of the always informative Mother Earth News, wrote an editorial in the February issue called “Why I Farm” in which he says, “There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the liv...

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Looking for the Union Label

...d a highly catchy ad jingle from the roller disco era, “Look for the Union Label” (youngsters can watch it on youtube here). We looked for the union label and we were surprised to find it via a company called Union House which carries a functional, if unexciting line of apparel. Unless hipsters take to golf shirts in an ironic fashion judo move, these offerings will never be cool like the domestically made clothes made by the union busting folks o...

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Saturday Linkages: Poultry Shaming, Horse Treadmills and Garden Snark

Image: Thirdroar. Poultry shaming: http://www.thirdroar.com/journal/2014/2/24/public-poultry-shaming.html … Russian Man Uses Horse Treadmill to Power Log Splitter http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/russian-man-uses-horse-treadmill-to-power-chainsaw-1532466975 … Garden Variety SNARK | Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2014/02/garden-variety-snark.html … Pison eu, Colon grossum! http://wp.me/p4bjRl-5V Reviving forgotten recipes: http://www.thesmartset....

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