Our first foray into urban animal husbandry is certainly becoming an integral part of our daily lives here on the homestead. Even so, keeping city chickens is not without its challenges. Its becoming clear that we overestimated the number of chickens our small (sub)urban lot could handle (easy when they are tiny adorable chicks!) and are now facing the job of "down sizing" our flock. Like I've said, its important to know the capabilities of your urban garden well in advance to avoid such a predicament! Fortunately for us, we have family friends who are also avid gardeners and are looking for some laying hens to add to their home.
The 11 standard buff orpingtons are close to laying and have grown into beautiful golden hens. We had originally purchased them as heritage meat birds but found the idea more and more disturbing with each passing day. In keeping with our views, one of our goals was to produce our own healthy meat for our omnivorous diet. Killing our "pets", however, proved harder than anticipated so we've opted for locally raised organic meat instead or cutting meat out altogether unless we can come to grips with the reality of going out back and killing it ourselves. Eating a vegetarian diet is a much more efficient use of energy resources and better suited to our goals of producing what we eat at any rate and its certainly challenged me to experiment in the kitchen now more than ever!
Luckily, these are good dual purpose birds which are also excellent egg producers and will live their lives as such. :) All the roosters and hens we found homes for will also enjoy such a fate. (Thanks Aunt Judith and Jeremy!)
Yesterday evening JC and I built a temporary coop from scrap materials for the chickens. While we restructure our backyard things are getting too hectic for 21 assorted chickies running about! A more permanent enclosure is in the works!
Vineyard Update:
Over the past couple weeks we have been busy getting the vineyard at our other family business, Green Family Winery, "suckered" and "tucked". Our family does all the work by hand ourselves and with the help of friends so we have a few rows left before were home free. Next we apply a natural foliar spray to prevent mildew forming on the leaves and check for leaks in the the drip irrigation system. The next big event will happen in August when harvesting begins. Its starting to look neat and orderly again!
LG
JC
BS
Jer
1 comments:
It's interesting to see how many homesteaders become vegetarian or very near to it. I jumped the gun and became vegetarian a couple years before discovering homesteading :)
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