A question came in this week from a reader who has tried our deep bedding suggestion but is having trouble keeping the chicken waterer clean as a result. Chickens are certainly expert at fouling (fowling?) their water source. Which is why many people use nipple waterers like the one above. Chickens learn to use them quickly (they like to peck at things, after all).
Author: Mr. Homegrown
Plants: When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them
One of the most difficult lessons to learn about gardens is that they are not permanent. As Heraclitus says, “all things are flowing.”
The best gardeners I know don’t suffer the attachments to plants that I do. They are much more ruthless. If a tree is in the wrong place it gets cut down. If two plants are too close together, one gets ripped out.
Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health e-Library
I’m really enjoying the incredible variety of obscure old books being scanned and put up on the interwebs. Of interest to readers of this blog will be the archive of free e-books maintained by gardening author Steve Solomon. His Soil and Health e-library contains books on “holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living” You can download the books for free, but Solomon requests a modest $13 donation. You can find this amazing resource at: www.soilandhealth.org.
The “Radical Agriculture” part of the archive contains many early organic ag classics by authors such as Sir Albert Howard, J.I. Rodale and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The “Homesteading” part of the library contains tomes dating from the 1700s (William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion), all the way to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s (Gene Logsdon’s Getting Food From Water: A guide to Backyard Aquaculture).
So go load up those e-readers. Or maybe print them out in case we have a revolution.
Row Cover as an Insect Barrier
It ain’t pretty but it works. |
As one would expect, cabbage leaf worms love cabbage and nearly every other member of the brassica species. Which is why I’ve become a real fan of row cover material as an insect barrier.
The perp in question. |
It rarely freezes here so I use the thinnest row cover possible, specifically a product called Agribon-15. If you live in a cooler climate and want to use row cover for frost protection you would use a thicker product such as Agribon-30. Johnny’s Select Seeds carries Agribon row cover in lengths as short as 50 feet–plenty for an urban or suburban garden. I’ve used both PVC pipe and chain link fence tension wire as support. I secure the row cover down with pieces of rebar and bricks to keep out skunks.
What cabbage worms become. |
It’s not a plug and play solution, however. If it gets hot I have to remember to pull the row cover off. And the added humidity can cause outbreaks of aphids. But overall, it works great. I’ve found that I just need to use it when tender seedlings are getting established. Once they have a fighting chance against the cabbage worms I can pull it off.
Picture Sundays: Why Cats Purr
Some solid science here. Not sure where this comes from, but spotted it on Doug Harvey’s Facebook page.