We buy chicken feed from a local feed store: it is organic and costs just under $16 for a 40 pound bag. It is ground corn meal, oats, etc and the girls never get tired of it. You can also give them treats…chickens can eat almost anything (this page from BackyardChickens has good suggestions). Our girls love cooked, leftover corn on the cob, fresh tomato…their favorite food is yogurt. We get unsweetened, full-fat yogurt from a cowshare and when some is left at the end of the week the chickens get it.
I just pour some out on a piece of cardboard or slate tile…or let them dip their beaks into the container which is hilarious. The Buckeyes will put their entire heads in, even covering their eyes with yogurt. The only time I’ve heard a chicken sneeze was when she got a beak-ful of yogurt.
Some things are not meant to be squishy.
Josh literally scared this egg out of a chicken…apparently before it had time to finish up with the shell-encasing process. He picked up one of the Wyandottes and this…mushy, warm egg popped out. UGH. I am definitely feeling my city-girl roots about this. He went right ahead and fried it…and ate it by himself! I hear that newly-laying chickens sometimes do produce eggs without shells and its nothing to worry about.
So, I’ve learned a few things about chickens & eggs this week (but no, I still don’t know which came first).
First, I learned that while laying boxes are easy to build convincing chickens that run around the yard and woods several hours a day to use them consistently is a bit more difficult. Of the four eggs we found today only one was in a box…one was on the ground in front of the boxes and two were under a rainwater tank by the house. I also suspect one of the Wyandottes laid an egg on the hill behind their coop but couldn’t find it.Can we train the chickens to lay their eggs so we don’t have to hunt for them? Is there a “chicken whisperer” we can call to coach us on this? Aargh. Before the pullets started laying I put a wooden egg and an egg shaped rock in two of the boxes to give the girls an idea of what these boxes are for…although we have found up to four eggs in the boxes in one day they seemed to have missed the significance.
Anyway, you can build a coop (much less the boxes for laying) out of almost anything. We needed a shed for garden tools so decided to get one (see Barn Razing) last February and convert a third of it into sleeping/laying quarters for the chickens. Josh put the laying boxes in last, using old boxes from a coop that must have been on our property years ago but people make cheap laying boxes out of different materials…plastic buckets, plywood, or scrap lumber. The most important things (as I have learned, anyway) is that the boxes should be at least 1′x1′x1′ and about 12 inches or so high. Also, slope the roof so chickens won’t roost on them, making a mess and possibly disturbing any hens that want to cozy in and lay eggs.
Josh put a plywood door on the back of the boxes so that they open into the shed which makes it easy to get eggs out and, like the rest of the coop, lined the opening with metal fencing to deter hungry predators. On the inside the chickens have a platform to jump up on so that they can step easily into the boxes; the way he put this on it drops down so that it is easy to clean the floor of the coop but that isn’t necessarily something you need to do…for us it helps because the coop is so narrow (only 3 feet wide) that it would be hard to walk all the way to the back otherwise.
I also learned that chickens love tortilla chips. The salt is probably not so good for them so I only gave them a couple but wow, these girls would love eating at a Mexican restaurant…bring on the chips, hold the salsa!
Finally, I learned that chickens & their eggs are sometimes repulsive.
So we were gone for a few weeks and while out of town it rained every day, which is unusual for late-summer in Cincinnati but not a bad thing. We came home to full rain-tanks (easily 600 gallons of water) — more than we’ll use and our flowers, vegetables and fruit/nut trees flourished. Only the tomatoes seemed to be struggling as the dampness allowed blight to set in (talking to farmer’s at the market assured us that we are not the only ones with sickly, blighted tomatoes). The weeds in the pepper patch are taller than the peppers — but the plants are still covered with peppers and look quite heavy. The beans are 8 feet tall and loaded with long green pods. The squash looked like it was doing well (see: squash beetles) when we came home, late-planted eggplants were thriving and we just picked the first eggplant a couple days ago, and the invincible chard is still going strong.
Our chickens also survived our absence and began laying just a week after our return. The first layer was an Americauna who is also the chicken who loves to be petted. She will walk up to me and hold her wings out so that I can scratch her back…she also loves LOVES to eat tomatoes and runs up to grab whatever cherry tomatoes are offered.
Next year we will have to fence the gardens to keep the chickens from devouring so many tomatoes. They only eat the very red, very ripe ones tear them right off the vine (even the really BIG ones) and cluck over the fruits, peeling back the skin to eat the seeds. If we hadn’t more-or-less given up on most of the tomatoes anyway it would be a problem but the fruits have some black, crusty spots and it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice to let the chickens have them.
Especially since now 3 or 4 of the ladies are laying eggs and so they are officially the only “pets” I’ve ever had that actually contributed something tangible to the household. Pretty amazing…and the taste of eggs that are only a couple hours old is truly different, better even than farmer’s eggs from local markets. We are getting between 1 and 4 eggs a day; they are all similar shades of brown/pink — Wyandottes and Buckeyes lay brown eggs and Americaunas can lay eggs that are blue or green so we can’t tell who is laying what at this point.
Two of the eggs were really, really small and I think of those as “first-try eggs” but it’s all guess-work except for the Americauna who laid the first. During the last week of August we could tell she was wanting to lay an egg…but she couldn’t quite figure out how. She would jump up into the laying boxes, turn around, squat down, get down and go outside and cackle and then a few minutes later start walking around in a crouch like her stomach hurt. Funny, I wonder if having older generations of chickens to teach the little girl chickens where eggs come from would have eased her confusion? At any rate, she figured it out!
In our ongoing quest to eliminate the need to ever mow grass I spent a couple afternoons transforming the narrow strip (of grass) between the sidewalk and the street into a rock garden, complete with a variety of sedum and about 35 hens-and-chicks. These are plants that thrive in harsh conditions…it gets HOT between the asphalt and sidewalk and Ohio winters can be pretty fierce, too. They shouldn’t require any watering and will spread over time. So far the plants have also survived several duck attacks. I found the plants ripped out of the soil, lying on the sidewalk or street several times and mentally blamed kids riding their bikes through the gravel. Well. Yesterday I looked out the window early in the morning to see Mr. Duck running through the gravel, pushing rocks onto the sidewalk, pausing only to rip a couple of the plants right out of the ground and toss them in the street!! Then he ran the entire length of the patch flapping his wings as if he thought I’d installed him a personal runway. Weird. Nothing to do but re-situate the plants. They seem OK and hopefully the duck will get distracted by his mate and 8 babies and stop the shenanigans!
Anyway. Here is how to build a curbside garden that doesn’t involve grass. Key step: dig deep enough that you remove as much of the root structure as possible! This will prevent you from having to continuously weed out the grass…it can be very persistent. So:
1. Dig at least 6 inches down, scraping your shovel along the concrete to dislodge roots that cling.
2. Layer pack gravel or sand about 2 inches thick to discourage grass/weeds from sprouting.
3. Lay landscape fabric on top of the gravel to further discourage unwanted plants.
4. Topsoil, 3 inches deep.
NOTE: Depending on what you are planting you may need more or less than 3 inches of topsoil. We chose plants that need almost NO soil; a neighbor used wooly thyme which presumably needs more soil to support its root structure and for water, nutrients, etc. There are lots of different plants that will work, depending on your climate, of course.
5. Embed your plants of choice in the topsoil and cover with a layer of gravel if you desire. I’m also placing a few large decorative rocks for aesthetics.
6. Celebrate not having to mow this area again!
Just to update generally on how the gardening is going…we’ve had meals that consist almost entirely of food from our own yard which is awesome & hopefully will become easier to accomplish as we get better at this. The hardest part (for me) is finding/making time to cook the food that I have when it is so easy to just pick up whatever I’m in the mood for at the grocery. In any case, here are a few pictures that I just took today:
Pawpaws
Cucumbers
We have been eating these a lot: raw with white vinegar, dill & salt = yum)
Chickens
Only 3 – 4 weeks before they start laying!
Squash
Including at least 1 giant 16-inch (& lots of smaller) zucchini: 
Beans
Tomatoes
(only 4 ripe so far)
Asparagus
(looking pretty good now that the beetles are gone — I spent a couple hours squishing their nasty caterpillar larvae a few days ago, think the beetles die when their eggs hatch?)
(looking pretty good now that the beetles are gone — I spent a couple hours squishing their nasty caterpillar larvae a few days ago, think the beetles die when their eggs hatch?)
**we also have peppers, eggplants, herbs, etc but I didn’t take pictures of everything.
Wire Cage
There are hundreds of different ways to trellis your tomatoes, really. Most of them are easy to accomplish; often you can build a trellis out of random stuff you have laying around your house or yard. String/twine is usually involved or you can use netting like we did with the peas (and are now using for the beans). You can use metal poles, wood stakes or deconstructed furniture. Of course, you can also buy pre-made tomato trellises…we caved in and bought one of the tomato cages that are round and made of metal. We have one tomato plant that grew voluntarily in a random corner of the garden with the brussels sprouts so rather than mess around giving it something to grow on we spent the $4 and bought a cage. I would NOT want to spend $4 on the number of cages it would take to trellis ALL of our tomatoes (we have more than 20 planted, various varieties, all heirloom).
Since we like things that are cheap AND we like to use what we have (cuts down on garbage, gives new life to scrap, whatever) Josh trellised most of our plants using twine and more of the bamboo that we cut down last year. On one side of the garden the structure is A-frame and the other trellis is laid out like a grid with 8 upright poles connected by poles across the top. Twine is what holds the bamboo together and we used more twine to give the plants more room to climb. The plants are tied onto the poles with plastic oxygen hose – a friend with heart trouble collects this (UNUSED) tubing from other patients in his support group who would otherwise throw their leftover tubing into the trash. Said friend realized how wasteful that is and, being a lifelong gardener, realized that the hose would be great for tying plants. It is smooth and nonabrasive to the plants and it won’t rot or break.
We have about 8 plants that are volunteers; they just popped up from plants that grew last year. A few plants were purchased from a local farmer and the rest are plants we started from seed. The ones we started are much smaller than the other two kinds; we will get a better headstart next year once our green house is built. Our little seedlings were brought up under fluorescent lights and the only plants that seemed to really thrive were the cucumbers and the peas.
I love the name of these carrots…purple dragons! Just like fairy tales or Asian mythology that we can grow right in our own backyard! Interestingly, carrots were originally purple, not orange so these may be a true heirloom variety dating back through several centuries of dometication. As for taste, I haven’t cooked them yet but raw they are a bit tough and not nearly as sweet as the orange varieties I’m used to. They are beautiful, though! Deep purple skin, orange on the inside.
We had some trouble growing them; our dog kept running through the carrot bed, pushing the seeds too deep with his feet and messing up the rows. I planted them in loose soil that was heavily mixed with half-composted leaf matter, then covered the seeds with more of the leaf compost. By the time we harvested them the carrot tops were more than 3 feet tall!
I’m not sure that I would grow this particular variety again although I do like the historical aspect of the purple…orange carrots have more carotene and are sweeter…I think they were originally developed in the Netherlands in the 16th or 17th century but would have to do more research to be sure. In any case, hooray we have carrots!! I think I will saute them tonight with chard and onions.
Can you identify this? Also: what did we learn from this?
…but if you do we are ready.
It has been raining a lot this spring…but Cincinnati usually gets very dry during summer. Finally we got one of our new 275 gallon rain collectors in place…just in time for a huge storm in the middle of the night. It rained so much that the tank is 3/4 full! This tank is collecting water from just one side of the house; we put the 50 gallon rain barrel beside the front porch to catch runoff there (bonus: no more water pooling under the porch and seeping into the basement!) and have another 275 gallon tank for the other side of the house.
To install the tank Josh piled gravel and earth about a foot or two high so that as the tank settles (it will be HEAVY when it is full) it won’t sink into the ground. We also decided to put it about 4 feet out from the house just to keep it away from the foundation. The tank sits about 6 feet above the highest garden beds (our back yard slopes away from the house) so gravity provides enough pressure to use a 100 foot garden hose.
How to install a rain barrel:
1. choose your location…this should be at a downspout
2. you may want to mound up earth to account for settling
3. if necessary put the barrel on concrete blocks or platform so that gravity works in your favor
4. connect your downspout to the barrel
5. optional: connect a garden hose to the barrel’s spigot
6. do a rain dance
Make sure that the top opening of your rain barrel has screen across it so that mosquitos don’t use it as a nursery. Buy a rain barrel that already has a spigot and an overflow unless you are into DIY for the sake of DIY; you won’t save much money buying unfinished barrels and then doing the work yourself (unless you get a really GOOD deal on food-grade plastic tanks in which case – DIY!).
One more note: plants prefer rainwater to chlorinated city water. Rain barrels aren’t just about conservation they are about quality produce.
