Our little homestead grew with the addition of chickens this year. We are happy to share the journey of raising chicks and building the chicken coop with you.
Simple Suburban Living offers a weekly aquaponics episode that highlights the saga of our indoor aquaponics gardening system. We also share our knowledge of square foot gardening and planting seeds. Our homestead is located in southeastern Michigan.
It was a nice day today so we decided to experiment with reintroducing our picked on chick to the flock. We have learned a lot about chickens and one thing is for sure - they are kind of jerks!
It all started when we noticed one of our chickens was getting picked on......very badly, I mean blood bath bad. You can read more about that here. We separated her into a dog crate in the basement where we made her a little chicken "tiny house" for the time. It has now been about a month and it is time to get her back out to the coop with her sisters since she is all healed up. But, once a chicken has been picked on and separated from the flock it is not easy to get them back. Outsiders are not easily welcomed back and since she was being picked on before it will be even harder. Time for some experimentation.
I gave "Bloody Mary" a pep talk, advised her on how to handle the situation, and decided to just put her out in an open space with the rest of the chickens and document what happens. Oh yeah, did I mentioned we have named her Bloody Mary, the kids thought Mary was a good name....Bloody Mary seems to perfect. Ok Mary ready to see daylight?
It was a nice day so I let the chickens out in the yard before bringing up Mary. I threw out some Kale from the aquaponics system and then brought up Mary (this probably was a bad idea as it brought them all together). She ran to the food and immediately the other chickens started to attack her! They were going for blood again and she ran for cover. Another one went after her chasing her around by the house, and another, and they were all looking for blood! Time for another approach! I rescued Mary and took her back to the relative safety of her tiny house. time for Plan B.........
To watch the video on Mary's introduction click here
Live in a small lot in the city or suburbs? Did you know that you can still produce a decent amount of food for yourself? Here in the U.S about 80% of us call the city or the suburbs our home but why can't we produce some of our own food too!
In this video I give a quick tour of some of the ways in which we are utilizing space around our yard to grow food. It is a work in progress but much progress has been made in the last 18 months since we started this venture. The goal for us is to produce as much of our own food as possible for now and eventually produce all of our own vegetables and fruit for the year.
We started with the chickens last year and some small garden spaces. The chickens have been the highest producers and most impactful addition to our small homestead. We feed them our food scraps and they graze in our yard; in return they produce six eggs per day for our family. That is a lot of eggs! Chickens are probably the only real livestock that we will be able to have here on our small lot and they are a perfect fit here.
The first gardening step we took was to watch the amount of sun that we get in various areas of the yard. Unfortunately the best area for gardening at our home is also the septic tile field and cannot be used. We decided to start with raised bed gardens. Closer to the house in a hilly location where traditional gardening would not work well. We current are using 6 3'X6' raised bed garden boxed made for free from pallets. These have been able to produce many pounds of sugar snap peas, over 180 carrots, 72 onions, over 15-20 cucumbers per week, basil, lettuce, dill, spinach, cilantro, and a potato harvest coming soon. You can pack a lot of food into a few square feet with the square foot gardening method.
Along our privacy fence we have about 96' of space that was not being used. This does not get full sun all day but it gets plenty for more than half. A garden bed was cleared along the fence about 36" wide and amended with compost, peat, and some sand. We then layered planting here so that we have some climbing or taller plants in the back along the fence, some tomatoes a along, vining plants along the front bottom edge and some corn plants scattered along the front edge in between the tomatoes. This is proving to be a very dense and efficient way to plant along this area and will produce a huge amount of food for us this year.
In the back of the property we sectioned off a small 20' X 20' area and planted six apple trees. We covered the ground with free mulch from the city park and we now have an orchard in the makings. As these tress grow and produce more and more each year we will eventually be able to make apple cider, apple cider vinegar, pies, canned apples, and dried apple fruit snacks for long terms storage.
We have also landscaped up near our house and instead of flowers and bushes have planted an herb and strawberry garden. This will be a perennial garden and will continue to become more diverse each year. We also utilize space between other landscaped areas for tomatoes, cabbage, peas, beans, sunflowers, and flowers to attract pollinators. Even though these are smaller scattered spaces they have proven to be very productive.
Each year the gardens grows, a few more fruit trees are planted, a few more raised beds are built, and more land is cleared from grassy nothingness to food producing farmland. Although we are not buying a combine yet, the small suburban farm is an ever expanding adventure that we will never be finished with. Thanks for tagging along to see how the SSL Family grows in the suburbs.
Every year I see people burning and bagging leaves, are you one of those people? If so check out this easy and basic process for composting that we have found to work very well.
We stopped giving away our free fertilizer a few years ago and we will never turn back. We now do not throw away any organic material from our yard or kitchen unless it is somehow toxic or gone really, really bad. All of our leaves, sticks, sawdust, chicken manure, food scraps, cardboard, compostable paper products, and much more all end up being processed right back into our garden beds. Is there any other way? I can't imagine going out to the store and buying fertilizers and compost that some company is selling back to the same people that left their yard waste at the curb, doesn't that seem silly?
There are many resources out there on what you should compost and how much of each type of item to put in the pile or bin or whatever you have setup. I go with a simple and very general rule of thumb. We add about 75% carbon material (leaves, saw dust, cardboard, paper, wood chips, etc.). This is the base to any good compost and handily this also makes up the majority of most peoples yard waste (remember that giant pile of leaves you had to rack up last year?). The next ingredient is nitrogen materials (chicken manure, vegetables, plant materials, last years jack-o-lanterns, and all of our kitchen waste). Just to be clear you cannot add any leftovers or meat products to your compost, only things that at one time grew from the ground in some way.
Now that you have all those goodies mixed together the only thing left to do is to wait and turn it over as much as you can remember. I mix mine up about once per week. This allows air to get into the pile and for the bacteria to get to work doing their thing. Many people suggest watering the pile as well but up here in Michigan I would not do that unless it was a drought. I might pour a bucket of nitrogen rich aquaponics water on it if that was needed.
We have found the best way to get started and make sure that our lazy genes don't take over is to keep a small container on the counter in your kitchen for scraps and one just outside your door to move them into every day or two. We use an old mixing bowl inside and an old trash can outside. Once per week or so I take the trash can back to the "pile" and dump it and stir it up with a pitchfork.
If things go well and the pile gets cooking you should be cooked down to useable soil in about 60 days or so depending on your weather. This soil has everything that your plants, flowers, vegetables, or anything else needs to grow. If you do this right you should not need to buy soil, compost, manure, or fertilizers for your garden.
I hope this encourages someone to get started and save some food scraps from ending up in a landfill for goodness sakes!
Where the subdivision meets the country! This blog chronicles projects, tips, and ideas on how to live in suburban America faithfully, sustainably, organically, and happily using today's technology. We are homesteading as much as we can on this little plot of land we have!
