Humble Garden

This is a call out to those of you out there who have some experience with setting up your own CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) activity.

I need your guidance and mentorship so any and all input is welcome and appreciated.

We are currently seriously contemplating setting up a trial run chicken CSA where the chickens will be raised naturally (the word “organic” is woefully deprecated and co-opted by money-grabbing certification types – I cant afford organic certification status right now, not if I want to actually get started that is).

We will raise slow-growth long bodied breeds of chickens like you see the French growing in their “Label Rouge” program. Our chickens will be forest dwellers like those in the Label Rouge program. There is no official “Label Rouge” program in the US but that’s ok because the First Principles of Label Rouge are attractive and to be emulated. We will be more like the organic Label Rouge where we will not use any sorts of chemicals or antibiotics, not because I think it’s the “in” thing but because I follow the golden rule in my cultivation and animal husbandry:

Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

Corollary: Treat your animals with the greatest respect possible – they are beings too

Life is absolutely too short to start something like this and not do it MY way. This is not to say that what the neighbor down the street is doing is wrong, its just that I need to do this my way.

I compromise on so much else; don’t we all!

What do I need?

I need to know how to find a local butcher and how that all works (in terms of costs and their capacity) – I have zero clue here. I need to know how best to find people who will want to buy these CSA shares – I fear raising a load of chickens which then are not pre-sold. These questions MUST be asked by any producer when they first start, I know, but I do sound sorta goofy not knowing the answers.

We are also going to be doing CSA egg shares (we just love them girl chickens so much!).

I hope that you all, with clues on this, will come out of the woodwork and drop me a note. When you leave a comment the system gets your email (confidentially I think) and then I can reply to you off-blog to have a longer convo on this.

(Mesclun)
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I hope that your indoor garden is sprouting up a storm!

We have been starting things like tomatoes and eggplants and onions and today we will seed out herbs.

A while back I found a link that showed people starting corn indoors so we have been giving it a try.

(Giant corn sprouts)
(Bitten a bit by our cats, I think we got it in time tho)
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These are not your normal corn. No, these are Giant Corn which will, supposedly, reach over 12 feet high. They are seed corn and not meant to be eaten by humans. The chickens will LOVE it.

I planted a tray of mesclun lettuces so that we can start having some salad even before mid May which is when we can start planting in the garden outside.

(Sprouting mesclun)
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We have some other news but I will share that a bit later in the week.

Share how your indoor starts are doing!

The young chickens have moved into their new chicken house and are loving it. We are enjoying an indian summer here in central MA so they are doing fine with the transition (we also have some heat lamps for when it gets chilly at night and for the coming weeks when fall gets down to business).

Today we are looking at 83 F as a high so I am hoping they stay cool enough. We have yet to finish the outside enclosure but the husband is working as fast as he can to get it done.

Let me know if you cant see the slide show above!

What do you think?

The chicklings have arrived and they are growing like crazy. We have them set up in a large enclosure in an upstairs bedroom (that is naturally hot these days) with a heat lamp. Things are getting interesting because they are NOT ready to go outside but the little guys are getting a bit feisty and are deciding to fly on occasion, not a good thing inside one’s house.

The little chicks are growing proper feathers now.

Ed has done a whole lot on the chicken house and its time for me to put in the nest boxes.

I am working on a set of 5 boxes to start, with room to make more, that will have roll out bottoms that feed to little ramps in the back that then feed to a hole that is accessible from the outside of the house. This way I do not have to open the house to get inside to get eggs and let out a ton of heat in the middle of winter (when its -20 F around here).

I think I am going to use some of the roofing plastic material for the egg ramps in the back. It wont come together for me until I am actually putting the thing together because I am not certain how much of an angle is best to get the eggs to roll but not too fast.

This is rather academic in some ways because the chickies are MONTHS from egg laying. I just want to get the boxes built before we put the little things in the house.

We still have to do the run in the back. Once that is done, they should be big enough to be put out with a heat lamp and perhaps some seedling mats to help them transition.

I just wanted to let you all know that I am indeed very much here but that life has been whirlwind as of late (including our first brought-home-from-preschool sickness).

I just wanted to share a couple of images I took this last week while on a project which I will post about more later.

Just wanted to do a shout out to Ingrid and say “You are the best for asking!”

(3/4 view of in-progress chicken house. Front door is rough cut, will be full height)

Tomatoes are coming at us fast and furious, watermelons and squash have met fates which I will write about after this post, sometime soon.

Our attention is turning to the chickens today as I have some photos of the house in progress to share.

What you see above is the house in most of its glory :-/. The front door will be full height and not all topsy turvey like that. Notice the roof, its made of clear plastic roofing material. I didn’t want to build a cave like house so I requested that.

Here is what the ceiling looks like from inside.

The join between the roof and the walls looks like this.

And this.

Let me just say this – do not ask me WHY things were constructed as they were, its just the way my husband felt they needed to be.

This is a shot of the roof from the outside.

All those openings you saw at the top will be sealed with wire mesh. They will be open in the summer to allow cross breezes and then stopped up with insulation in the winter, as needed.

I requested a little manure sweep-out door at the base of one of the walls so that all we need to do to get rid of manure is to open the flap and push the manure and litter out into a waiting wheelbarrow.

Seen here from the inside.

Seen here from the outside.

Wire mesh lies beneath the flooring to inhibit rodents and also the ferocious Fischer cat weasels that we have indigenous to the surrounding forest.

Here you can see some of the foundation to the chicken house.

There is a huge amount of stones in the foundation into which radiant flooring tubing has been buried. It will serve as a heat sink for the radiant heating system, allowing for very low energy input but good returns on temperature control. Those orange tubes are the radiant floor tubing.

We will be painting the interior to waterproof it (and keep chickens away from the pressure treated wood). We will be building a deck in front of it which will also be covered. We will sit on this deck to enjoy the garden and also, around the side, watch the chickens in their back enclosure, if we feel the need.

I will be building roll-away nest boxes that will feed to a central collection point where I will then have a hole made through the wall so that all I have to do is walk up, open a little door in the wall, and pick out the eggs for the day.

I will shoot that when its done.

All gaps and such will be sealed with the wire mesh. We are determined to not lose our chickens to the fox and weasel which have been so awful in previous years.

We are thinking about setting up a motion detector system inside for nighttime to scare away any predators that may have gotten too close to or into the house. I am thinking of rigging up a speaker system that will emit a lion’s roar should we have a break in.

ROFL

It will be tempting to also put up some sort of cam to be able to watch the girls during the day and capture predators in the act of breaking in and then losing their minds when the roar lets loose. (These are all fun ideas which come WAY after getting the darn thing done in the first place!)

Yeah, we are scarred from predator attacks, can you tell?

If you have been reading here a bit, you will remember that we are in the process of building a new chicken house. I have not mentioned this in a while because construction on the house has been delayed. Why? We live not too far from Old Lyme, Connecticut and live in the Lyme Disease Hot Zone and as a result, like everyone else around here, we are awash in deer ticks and the constant lingering menace of Lyme Disease.

My husband, while building the decking between the wood shed and the chicken house, was bitten and came down with lyme disease. Let me assure you, this is not a minor annoyance. Lyme disease, the way he got it put him in the ER several times, bought him a spinal tap and dubious concerns by ER docs of Eastern Equine Encephalitis, West Nile, even Malaria (which his symptoms were mimicking tho they said since he didn’t just come from some stinking steamy malarial swamp – they haven’t seen parts of our land! – that malaria was not likely). It finally took our family doc, who is just awesome, to know as soon as he heard the details that this was lyme disease.

Whew.

Back to the chickens.

Some of the chickens we are thinking of raising include the white silkies which the Chinese love for it’s black meat and traditional medicinal value, MAYBE we can get a hold of some blue feet chickens, some hearty brown and other color layers, and perhaps some cubalayas.

In my previous chicken experience we had meat chickens and I am still traumatized by the experience of killing and butchering them. As a scientist, I have taken down numerous rodents but I never butchered them nor ate them (yikes). I always did it because I had to and I always detached mentally from it. That doesn’t mean I don’t still think about those animals and I certainly appreciate their contribution to my thesis and published works.

To get more experience from people who have done this a lot and who raise organic pasture chickens, I attended the “Chickens for meat and eggs” workshop at the Many Hands Organic Farm.

I have put together a slideshow of some of the photos from the part of the workshop that demonstrated how to kill and then butcher the chickens below.

I share this with the intent of helping to educate. I do not share this to traumatize anyone so if this sort of thing bothers you please do not click through the show.

I also do not share this so that it can be used to traumatize others! I believe in mindful eating and mindful animal husbandry. Its important to know from where and how your meat comes to you.