Winter on the Farm

We’ve been waking up to some cold, frosty mornings around here, and I decided all of Queen Winter’s marvelous artwork need not go un-noticed. I also figured it was high time I wrote a post about the permaculture farm where I currently reside. I’ve been here for about three months, and between farm work, parenting, a job coordinating volunteers at the kids’ school, and orders for my handcrafting business, writing time has been more scarce. Somehow, I’ve managed to find a few minutes here to show you some highlights of the farm I call home and the chickens I live with.

Many of these mornings have found the fields socked in with thick fog, so thick you can hardly see the cows out there in the neighbor’s pasture. The lower garden here is pretty much put to bed at this point with piles of leaves, coffee grounds from local espresso stands and coffee shops, cover crop, and the chickens invited in to scratch and till it all up.

The greens in the upper garden have been covered in a white, sparkly coating of ice crystals. I love seeing the bright green of the kale and the rainbow hues of chard stems catching my eye against the backdrop of gray, winter fog.

I’m really loving chard right now. It is quite the cheerful winter vegetable.

Friendly the rooster greeted me in the chicken coop when I let him and all his girls out in the morning. He likes to try to round everyone up over at the scrap feeding pile for breakfast.

One of the coops is made entirely of re-purposed doors from the local recycled building supply store. I like the very artistic one in the middle.

The chicken feeding system here is very impressively resourceful, with local restaurants and health food stores saving their scraps in totes for the farmer to pick up on a weekly basis. All kinds of good greens, veggie peels, pastas, salads, breads, and leftover scrapings make it into the mix. This gives the chickens a well-rounded, diverse diet and saves on the cost of chicken scratch.

I wash the totes to return to the restaurants every week in an old clawfoot tub with graywater from the washing machine.

This three-tank graywater system holds all the water from loads of washing and gets used for everything from washing chicken feeding totes to watering the garden and compost piles in the summer.

It all makes for some very happy chickens and lots of delicious eggs. If you ever really wanted chickens and worried over the cost of keeping them, I suggest you talk to some local restaurants and see how they would feel about keeping a kitchen tote for you. Chickens can be kept for nearly nothing, they produce eggs which you can eat and sell, and they produce fertilizer for the garden. They will even turn your compost piles for you, and they make good friends!

I think everyone needs chickens.

The world would be a much better place.