Gardening Fever

I was just sayin as well. There again if we looked at this from a Freudian perspective, shooting those cacti could stem from a deep seated sense of inadequacy possibly jealousy.
But sometimes a Cactus is just a Cactus, a Colt 45 is just a Colt 45 and a Cadillac just a Cadillac.

 

We are not dry from the beer point of view.

 

Wow, what a surprise!

 

I’m installing mostly survival gardens for people. The base is potatoes, Carrots and beans. They can all keep for some time, Carrot greens are edible, easy to re-propagate these vegetables for subsequent seasons.
Helpful extras are cherry tomatoes, garlic, onions, peas.
Dwarf citrus and fruit trees in pots are easy to manage for space.

Feed crops, sunflowers, rye and Lupins. Pumpkins, leafy greens.
Animals need feeding and commercial supply chains are garbage, commercial feed too expensive. You can grow thousands of kilos of your own feed fairly cheaply.
Try reducing inputs as much as possible.

 

We take a different approach to chicken feed because of the dry spells we get. We set up snail farms to get the protein, but also the calcium from the snail shells is needed by the chickens for egg shell development. There’s other minerals in snail shell that you could only get from commercial feeds supplemented with crushed cuttlefish pens etc. ( But our rule is, lower the inputs )
Snails will automatically seal themselves and hibernate in the dry periods till the rain comes. They store great.

You can scrape a few buckets a day of snails and hose them till they wake up and hydrate a little before chucking them into the chook pen.

We feed the snails a lot of dandelion amongst other things, dandelions seem to have huge amounts of calcium, they run a deep tap root to extract it even in crap ground.
We also eat a lot of dandelion ourselves, love the stuff. Salad greens and roasted roots.

We also grow purslane, it’s kind of a feral weed here. It’s one of the only plant sources of Omega 3s. We have tons of the stuff. The eggs are absolutely loaded with omega 3 fatty acids. We are miles from the sea yet getting the equivalent of a can of sardines worth of Omega 3s a day almost.

Purslane and another similar weed here persist right through a hard dry summer because they are almost succulents. They actually seem to thrive in the heat. The chickens almost kill each other for purslane, they really like it.

Our egg shells are very thick and hard to crack, but the eggs taste very good and have heaps of fatty acids in them.

There’s quite a few other things I haven’t gone into about chicken feed, but that’s our basic approach.

 

Other ways we feed chickens is to patch graze them. Grow leafy patches with some sun flowers, which inevitably accumulate bugs and slugs as well.

If you are American you have access to many varieties of corn, some producing a high yield for feed. These store well.

 

Snails have many enemies. The ones we have here are lizards, sinks and snakes, if you can keep them out, you should do alright.
Some people here hose snails out of their shells and crush the shell to feed to the chickens with something else. But chickens will eat the snail, shell and all, it’s a totally unnecessary step.
I think it’s because recycle and crush old and broken egg shells.

Purslane is very important to us, it is an enormous weight of easy feed.

 

What’s your ground like Ben?

 

Have you considered any terrain management for water catchment. Apart from exporting permaculture Australians have been assisting other arid countries in re-greening to combat desertification. It’s about capturing as much water as you can, or slowing it down enough to hydrate the ground for longer, thus allowing certain crops and hardy trees to persist to generate carbon.

 

Once you can grow enough trees to generate ground cover, the ground is protected from dehydration and the organic matter composts into the ground creating soil feeding the trees and so on.








So when rains do eventually show up, you can grab and retain as much of it as possible.

 

Just by slowing surface water down with certain features can make a real difference. Rather than let it fall and run off in sheets taking whatever nutrient left with it.
If you have a dumping rain on rare occasions, you want to direct the flood into pre prepared storage ready to receive it.
Water just running over the surface is sadness, we are pathological about it. Don’t like it.

 

Same with seasonal or occasional creeks. We will slow water down by creating a leaky weir raising the creek level. It doesn’t block the creek but increases the water level so that the water has more time to lens out into the ground you are trying to hydrate.

Look where the water flows on and near your property when it does come, and see how you can capture as much as possible or slow it down.

Some hardy trees only need that one leg up to flourish, but once they do, they start working for you.

 

On our farm chicken is our main product, but we also have a garden where we grow most of our families vegetables needs. I compost the bedding (and guts) from our chicken operation and spread it over our garden areas. We are on the border of growing zone 6A and zone 5B here in NC. The coldest zone in the state.

Our soil is heavy clay. Slicker than dog snot when wet, hard as a rock when dry, but it has a lot of minerals in it. It needs to be amended with organic matter and then you get excellent soil.

I grow carrots, onions, potatoes, green beans, peas, garlic, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers and a bunch more. I'm a big fan of keeping beds mulched so I don't have to hoe them out as much.

• The squashes and pumpkins go into the root cellar on shelves.
• Onions and garlic we braid and hang in a window until dry, then they go on a shelf in the root cellar.
• We dig our taters (potatoes) on a dry day between Late summer and early fall. They get stored in cardboard boxes in the root cellar with holes cut in the box for airflow. A lot of folks plant and dig their taters by the Moon signs, I never bothered with that stuff. I go by frost dates and how good/bad the winter was to determine planting time. We always save at LEAST 50lbs of small taters to be seed taters for next year.
• The wife cans our green beans, and also makes her own jam with strawberries, and other fruits.
• Once every two years we grow out 2 feeder pigs. The kids help me shoot, stick, hang, skin, gut, half, and then quarter the hog then I cut out what I call the stew meat, the tenderloin, and the belly. Then we grind the belly and some stew meat in our meat grinder. We vacuum seal these and then freeze them. Old folk used to salt them and hang them to cure, but the temperatures have been rising the past few decades and it don't get cold enough.
• I also try to take several deer each year, I process them just like the hog and we eat on those too. I'm saving my hides and will one day make a deer hide shoulder cloak.

Oh, and before I forget! We make some applesauce with our apples and that gets canned too. We have 3 apple trees on our homestead. I believe one is a Newtown Pippin. A lot of folks make Apple Butter too in the Fall.