A New Chicken Coop

Ok, months passed again and no one posted anything on our blog. (Its difficult because our internet connection has limited bandwidth, and uploading pictures takes a lot.)

But much has happened.

As always!

Melissa has setup bees, Berea and Adam are finishing a sweet cabin, Sean built a composting toilet and revived our local buying club food coop, and I just finished a new chicken house and yard. We threw a couple nice parties, hosted some work days, and have gone on night-time bike rides in the country.

Here's some pics of the new chicken house:

This is a stationary house with a movable yard. It was important for us to establish a movable yard ("paddock") system. When chickens don't get moved around they get bored and sick. Several of our chickens caught diseases and died before we finally got this new system together.

This structure is simpe: it is a small pole-barn, made with four cedar posts, scrap wood, scrap metal roofing, and tarps and plastic for walls. It cost about $10 to make, for 2 tarps and some staples.

In the yard, you see the red automatic waterer hanging from a bamboo tripod. The netted fence is electric...it keeps predators out and chickens in. The solar panel charges the fence. The bucket hanging near the solar panel is filled with water, and feeds the red waterer. And inside the tires is a bucket full of feed.

Side note: if you are ever looking for advice on how to keep chickens, get "How to Keep Chickens-Naturally" by Alanna Moore. It is THE book to get for naturally-minded, permaculture-minded people. I found that a lot of farmers gave terrible advice when it came to keeping and caring for chickens, and it has taken a couple years and a lot of suffering on the part of my chickens for us to get the ball rolling with a system that (hopefully) keeps them happy.

We're starting to feed our chickens a 50/50 mix of pellets and home-made mixed grains. The pellets are from Bagdhad, Kentucky, which is nice. They are not medicated, which is also nice. However, they are conventional and therefore contain genetically modified grains and probably chemical residues. So we are trying to get away from this.

Our home-made mix consists of home grown (and home-cracked) corn, sorghum, and wheat, with dried and crushed nettle and comfrey. We'll occasionally add in a different grain or herb to give the chickens some diversity. We'll also hang bouquets of dried herbs for them to free-forage and self-medicate from, and occasionally put tea of garlic, onion, dill/fennel, comfrey, nettle, sage into their water, for prevention of disease and to provide nutrients.

Here's an inside look at the coop. In the back is the roost, which is made from cedar branches. (There's a door at the back so we can switch their entrance from one part of the yard to another while giving the other a "break" from all the chickens' traffic. The back door also allows access to clean out the bedding under the roost.) At the left are the laying boxes, which I moved from the other house.

A view from the outside, showing how we'll access the laying boxes and harvest eggs. Its basically a hole in the wall with a heavy rubber flap that latches down or up. The walls are sheets of tarp (outside) and scrap clear plastic (inside), stapled onto the frame through a piece of used T-tape (irrigation tape), to reduce tearing. This structure is covered much like the hoop house (see last year's hoop house entry...).

Free range! Well, pretty free, anyway. They are enclosed by the electric netting, but the idea is to move them around often enough to keep them happily engaged in scratching and foraging for bugs and greens. Here they are entangled in some thornless blackberries, eating basil seeds, and dining on baby turnip greens.

Yes!!!

A Return to Blogging

Much time has passed since writing and thinking about the scythe. Camp Pleasant has been busy, fun, and transforming. Adam and Berea threw a work party and broke ground on a cabin. Sean built a sleeping platform out of an old barn, bamboo, and rope. The chickens got moved, gardens continue to be built, and we started catching and drinking rainwater. Last to note, we all joined with friends for a vision retreat to hash out our ideas for land-based community near Frankfort.

And for the blog, I take us back around to cabbage and sauerkraut. What can I say? I love it.

The cabbage was ready. The pathways of white clover and oats filled in nicely and kept weeds down. Looking back, the cabbage could have used a bit more space between it and the grass/clover mix. At the left side of the above picture you see buckwheat that has flowered and is now setting seed. We harvested the cabbage patch and will use the mature buckwheat to cover crop the beds where the cabbage plants were.

A friend and organic farmer brought us around 500 pounds of cabbage, and all together we had around 900 pounds to process into kraut. In the kitchen, it seemed a little overwhelming.


First step: slice the heads and cut out the cores.


Secondly, shred it.

This is the workhorse of the operation: a fancy industrial shredder in the University of Kentucky's Bath County Cooperative Extension's processing kitchen. And that is Melissa, who helped the first day of processing, to make 35 gallons of kraut.



Third, add salt and caraway.


Step four: pound it! Mix it! Pound it! Feel the kraut. Be the kraut. Make the kraut.


Step Five: call your friends and tell them you are about to process a bunch of kraut, and that it is a totally exciting thing to do.

The Camp Pleasant Kraut Crew: Adam, Sean, Melissa, and Berea. On the second day of processing, we filled that big blue 55 gallon, and felt good for doing it. Here, we are ready to celebrate with pizza and beer. Sean did not take off his apron for the rest of the evening. Being a kitchen worker is probably the coolest thing, next to farming, if you ask me.

The Scythe

This is Brian again. (Note: so far, all these posts have been from me, but soon, you should start seeing posts from other folks who live at Camp Pleasant...Adam, Berea, Sean, or Melissa...)

I am absolutely obsessed with farming. Farming, to me, is a lifestyle that strives to live in balance with the ecosystems around you, while at the same time recognizing where excess is and how best to distribute that excess and feed people GOOD FOOD. It is a subtle art of balancing biodiversity and fertility with harvest and consumption.
I like to consider that we are humans that live in a specific age. It hasn't always been like this, nor is this current culture one that is likely to stick around for very long. I see our age as one that is entrenched in an industrialization that is eating up its resource base at an astoundingly fast rate, while at the same time, we are awakening to that fact and beginning to call for solutions.
Sadly, many of our solutions are just as harmful as the industrialized models we seek to replace. So we must remain vigilant when we activate. We should definitely steer this ship away from its current course, but not any old direction will do.

Back to farming. What does all this mean when it comes to producing food on a piece of land? It means a lot. Today I want to share some experiences we are having with trying to find alternatives to using fossil fuels to prepare fields for production agriculture.

In the above picture, you can see "hard red winter wheat". It was planted last fall, by the farmer before us, as a cover crop, and now, at the beginning of May, it is beginning to make seeds. It has only just begun, though, and the seed heads are still green and milky.
We want to plant vegetables and grains where this winter wheat is. Conventional thinking would tell us to plow and till it. And we have used some small machinery to prep some areas like this. But today we are trying an alternative: the scythe! In this pic, Adam is sharpening his scythe. He has a really nice scythe. A nice scythe makes ALL the difference.

Here's Sean, helping out. The area we are mowing will get a few different treatments: some will be tilled and planted into corn and sorghum ("conventional route"), some will be mulched and transplanted into (fun, risky alternative), and some areas we will spread seed (buckwheat, dry beans, clover/rye) first, then scythe. We're also leaving some areas so that we can harvest the winter wheat for flour, chicken feed, beer, and, of course, for future seed.

This pic shows the wheat stubble after scything. It is 4-12 inches tall. Again, having a good scythe makes all the difference. Having a few people working together is a good way to go, too. Scything is extremely rewarding and it feels amazing for your arms and back.

This is the beginning of Berea's vegetable patch. Berea is planting watermelons mounds here, as well as transplants of several veggies. We've unrolled a roll bale on top of the stubble, so that the area is covered with 6-12 inches of hay (young hay with few seeds in it, hopefully). We're hoping the hay will kill the wheat stubble and any weeds that are in the field. We'll see...!

Sunrise at Camp Pleasant

Some pics from Sean's eye...

KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN

We have been keeping chickens at Camp Pleasant for about a year and a half. We started with about a dozen beautiful hens, who grew up happy. When full size, we realized our coop seemed a bit small (even though most chicks are probably given much less space). So, we started to simply open the door and let them roam free, during the day.
There were a couple of problems with this "wild and free" range practice. One, they don't give a rats ass about wildflowers, and will dig up a perfectly good, rare wildflower to get at a bug. And two, they get picked off by racoons, and foxes.
Racoons turned out to be some special predators. Even when we stopped letting the chickens out, the racoon returned, and figured out how to climb a fence, pry netting from fence, and open a latched door. By the time we got our chickens secured again, and caught the racoon, we had lost 5 chickens.
So, last year, when a friend had some extra "pullets" (teenage chickens), I brought some home to join our flock. I made the assumption that all the chickens would be laying hens... But we ended up with 5 roosters. Five roosters is way too much for a confined coop, and they soon started to terrorize the hens. Our beloved laying hens became victims of an onslaught of abuse and straight up gang rape. We could take it no longer.

That's me, Brian, on the left, holding the first chicken that we killed. It was the most aggressive...a fact that I thought might make me feel better about killing it. We tried to keep the "best chicken", but when it came down to it, deciding who gets to live and who has to die transcends reason. Fact is, you are killing something that doesn't deserve it.
It helps to have someone like Rob (at right) around, who has some experience, who grew up eating fresh chicken, and who can help keep people cheery, even when their hands are covered with blood.
I'll spare you all the bloody pictures taken during the kills, but share this picture because I think it does a good job of showing the reality of slaughter...not only do you kill a living thing, but you immediately "process" it into something you can eat. Here we are busy cutting, plucking, soaking, and gutting two roosters.
Several hours later, we have fried chicken, and Sean takes his best shot at gnawing through the tough skin of a year-old rooster. The meat tasted amazingly GOOD, although it was very chewy. We had fried chicken for several days. It was an interesting feeling, to go to work with lunches of meat that I grew and killed.

I've been everything in terms of eating: vegetarian, vegan, raw (ok, for only a couple weeks), freegan, and localvore. Now, I'm somewhere in between localvore and freegan...although we all buy more crap than we'd like to admit. This experience definitely made me question meat eating. But more to the point, it made me question my domestication of chickens altogether.
We like things to be replinishable and sustainable, and we LOVE eggs and chicken manure. (Chickens are undoubtedly some of the most helpful creatures for the small farm/homestead.) To keep the chicken flock alive and going, we need at least one rooster to fertilize the eggs, and when those eggs hatch, we get a mix of sexes, and end up with too many boys to maintain a healthy population of laying hens. I cannot see a way around the death of the young boys to keep the girls happy. Of course, this is an insane line of logic, and so I am led to question the entire paradigm of domestication of this species. Is there a way to keep laying hens, and to hatch your own chicks, without killing roosters? Or is domestication problematic from the get-go, and something we should steer away from? Or does the consumption of these animals make sense?

I certainly don't have the answers to these questions, but I am glad that I am surrounded by people who pose and consider them, together.

The Farm: a Cabbage Patch

This is "the farm". Its an acre that we are renting from a friend. Last year, it was filled with sunflowers for the summer, then planted into hard winter wheat in the late fall. That is the green that you see.
The big inspiration for fencing and irrigating and farming an entire acre was the idea of growing cabbage for making live sauerkraut. But that is only taking up 1/5 of the acre. Another 1/5 will be mixed veggies, another 1/5 will be grains, and the other 2/5 will be cover cropped.
The tilled area in this picture is the 1/5 acre cabbage patch. I would like to develop a long-term, no-till rotation that includes cabbage production, but for this spring planting, we used a walk-behind tractor. We got the tractor from Earth Tools, which let us borrow it for the weekend. They also let Sellus borrow it to till another community garden in south Frankfort. I heard he was up til 2 am tilling that community garden. Now that's just simply legendary, if you ask me.


I mentioned the desire to get away from tillage. Tillage is destructive. I compare it to surgery. The earth is opened up, and all kinds of micro organisms are killed. Tens of thousands in each tiny teaspoon. Its a micro genocide. As farms move away from artificial fertilizers, we need to take care of microbes, because they are nature's way of releasing nutrients so that plants can use them. To be honest, I really dislike it. But I'm still doing it. We live in a crazy age, don't we?
Anyway, I am trying to develop a farming system that reduces or eliminates tillage altogether. I really like the idea of permanent rows and permanent beds. In the beds, crops will be rotated by family (Cruciferous crops, Cucurbits, Solanaceous, Grasses, Allims, Legumes, etc), while the rows will remain in some kind of mowable mixture (I'll be experimenting with a few mixes for this). Permanent rows allow us to keep some soil undisturbed for long periods of time. I think of it as a microbe safe haven.
For the cabbage patch, I'm trying a mixture that a seed distributor in southern Ohio made for me. It contains "Green Spirit" rye grass and "Alice" white clover.


We spread it by hand, at a rate that looks like this:


Then we raked over it, so that the seeds get better soil contact and have an easier time holding water during germination. This is my dad, raking it all in. I convinced him to take a day off of construction work to come help with my cabbage plants. So it really is becoming a family affair (at least for the weekend) which is totally the dream. We had a very good time.


Then came the cabbage plants. Luckily, I got the support of the farmers at Elmwood Stock Farm, a nice, large organic farm in Georgetown, Kentucky. They are a family farm that has transitioned from conventional tobacco to organic vegetables (30+ acres!), organic tobacco, fruits, herbs, and animals. The farm is an impressive work that has obviously been lovingly tended to for more than a generation. They took my seeds and started these plants for me, then sold them back to me at an affordable price. We got about 1,400 plants!


And finally, the transplanting.
Want to know how to get a truly insane leg workout? Transplant a thousand plants into the soil. You will melt into sweet soreness for two days.
We got this planting done just before a nice rain, and with some good weather, we should have a LOT of sauerkraut to make...and EAT!

Late Afternoon, Early Spring

Spring has sprung, and things are waking up. It is amazing to watch the emergence of last year's plants. It never ceases to amaze me when a plant goes dormant in the soil and sits all winter, only to grow tender green shoots again in the spring.

In the picture above, we have black currants, comfrey, strawberries, and valerian (freshly divided into 8 plants, and very wilty).

Things inside the hoophouse are holding up well. This is Melissa, watering some little seedlings with a misting wand. We made a shelf out of bamboo, and have flats of leeks, greens, wildflowers and medicinal herbs.

Here, we planted leeks directly in the ground. So we have leeks in the ground, and leeks in flats. We're trying a few different things as we develop a little production system for leeks. I envision a couple truck loads of leeks in the future!

Above is a work party in April of 2008. We laid out pathways on contour of a gentle slope, dug paths along the contour, and built garden beds right on top of grass.

By the end of the work day, in April '08, we had pathways mulched with wood chips and garden beds made of cardboard and manure. This whole area was grass just a few hours earlier!

The same area, in March '09. The small retaining walls be built at the work party are holding up wonderfully. After a year of adding grass clippings and cover cropping with cowpeas, sunflowers, and a crop of cabbage, we are ready for another summer.
Right now, we have some happy garlic, comfrey, black currants, paw paws, mustard greens, radishes, and peas...and this is only the beginning!

Closeup of the peas, with a trellis ready to support their climb. On the left, we have comfrey planted as a border between the garden area and the grassy hill. Comfrey is one of our most useful plants. We use it with oils and beeswax to make salves for sunburns, wounds, and dry skin. The leaves are dried and used for teas that we drink as well as teas that we spray on gardens. It grows so well, we scythe it 3-4 times in the summer, and use the leaves to mulch the garden below. We try to allow some plants to always be flowering, though, because bees love the purple/blue blossoms.

The Farm: Building a Deer Fence

Just down the road from our hilly homestead, we've rented one acre of nice Elkhorn Creek bottomland from a friend and neighbor. I feel blessed to have access to such a beautiful, flat, and fertile piece of land. This picture shows the beginnings of a deer fence. We're using bamboo instead of buying stakes. There is a large bamboo grove on this farm which the farm owner is coppicing (cutting at ground level) each year.
What will we plant? Lots of cabbage for sauerkraut ("Geier Krauts, LLC"), grains to feed our chickens in the winter, and all the veggies we can plant, weed, water, and harvest.
In this picture, I'm (Brian) talking with Sellus, our newest city commisioner. Sellus is heavily involved in creating community gardens all over downtown Frankfort, and we like to consider our acre a large, country community garden. You can check out the commissioner's website to learn about what's going on in Frankfort, and where Frankfort is headed.

...close-up of a corner post. The farm owner loaned us these great poles to put at the corners of our fence. We'll attach some gates to these as well, so we can open them and drive a truck by the garden to haul in compost or haul out produce. Sellus is keeping his cool with the sunglasses, but he was really bummed that he forgot it was Sunday, and couldn't get beer for us on his way out. As long as we learn from our mistakes...

John and Nathan worked on tying 8 ft. poles to small, stout bamboo poles which we had pounded into the ground with a post driver. Later we'll attach a 7 ft. mesh deer fence.
John is nursing 70 or so strawberry plants at his house that he is going to transplant into this garden. With a small loan from his brother, he will get a taste of what its like to invest, plant, and produce. I hope this garden can be a way for a few of us to get our feet wet with farming that's a lifestyle AND a paying job.

I cannot promise that I will not eat ripe strawberries before John can pick, pack, and sell them. Who could resist?


Kierston and Mike's family came over to help for the day, and Liam had to test the water at the creek. Still a bit too cold for swimming, but it won't be long!