How do I keep my chickens clean?

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

One of the sites I like to follow is Fiona Nevile’s The Cottage Smallholder

The trick to quick and easy cleaning is to store everything that you might need within a few feet of the chicken house. We keep our chicken consumables in two large barrels in the run. One holds the bedding the other contains sprays, powders, oyster shells, grit and everything that a chicken keeper might need. These storage bins are also popular with the flock as they have another vantage point on which to stand and observe the world.

via The Cottage Smallholder» » How do I keep my chickens clean?.

Does rural equal isolated?

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

Country real estate columnist, contractor, PhD, and land consultant Curtis Seltzer writes about isolation in rural America.

The topic is timley in that is offers a different view of the isolation of the rural counties in America. He is responding to a Washington post article on maple syrup makers in Virgiina in which the Post’s David Fahrenthold describes Seltzer’s home county of Highland as cursed with isolation.

But Seltzer counters with some interesting observations:

In what sense, if any, is rural America isolated and empty? And what difference does it make?

We seem to be about as plugged in as other Americans with television, high-speed Internet and cell phones. We are subject to the same laws, taxes, gasoline prices, global warming, interest rates, stock markets, foreign-policy adventures and telemarketers.

As we’ve shared, the above may be true with the exception of high-speed Internet .

It takes us less time than city folks to do many routine things like see a doctor, but more to be greeted at Wal-Mart or eat Thai, both of which are an hour’s drive away.

Like many communities, we are isolated from blue-collar manufacturing and high-income, white-collar jobs. We are also largely isolated from gangs, drugs and sirens. A couple of kids were arrested for shooting cows…with paintballs.

Seltzer continues with these points:

To casually characterize us as isolated and empty is, I think, implied code for saying we don’t quite measure up because rural is different.

The increasing number of urban people moving to the countryside quickly understand that they have not entered a vacuum. Their neighbors are people—not quaint relics, not noble rustics. Like everyone else, we are individuals with good points, bad points, and all points in between.

When off-hand descriptions marginalize the 50 million who live in rural America,
harm is done. We become the outback other, zoo specimens that are interesting to observe but dangerous in the wild.

Most Americans now live in metropolitan areas. That’s the norm. Because we’re here, not there, it’s easy to consider us a little abnormal.

Daylight Savings Time March 8

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

We turn the clocks ahead one hour on March 8. Daylight time will begins the second Sunday in March, March 8, 2009, at 2:00 am local time. Our current verison became law in 2005. Many countries observe some kind of “summer time” and most of the US observes daylight savings time expect for Hawall and parts of Arizona. A recent hold out, Indiana began observing DST in 2006. Daylight time ends the first Sunday in November.

Build a Cabin – Prefab Cabins, Plans from Form & Forest | Form & Forest

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

Form and Forest is offering a new way to look at pre fabricated cabin building:

If you have ever dreamed of getting away to a contemporary piece of design your moment has arrived. We have worked hard to bring stunning design together with prefab manufacturing techniques that allow you to build a cabin and enjoy it sooner.

We start with great design and the understanding that people are going to use the cabins we build. A cabin is a sanctuary. The cabin experience is about recreation, and restoration. It should restore, not diminish your sanity.

We are about building less. Building less means less money, less time, less waste, less stress on you and the environment. Building less means less of everything that doesn’t make you happy.

We believe in a new approach to design and building a cabin. We utilizes building methods that result in faster construction times, higher quality, and greater affordability.

We believe in streamlining design and construction in order to make good design by noted designers more accessible. We are building a framework that allows you to build a cabin that reflects a mutual passion for good design by both you us.

Build a Cabin – Prefab Cabins, Plans from Form & Forest | Form & Forest.

The ‘Organic’ Stamp – Does It Mean That Food Is Safer? – NYTimes.com

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

Kim Severson and Andrew Martin share this reminder about food labeling.

Although the rules governing organic food require health inspections and pest-management plans, organic certification technically has nothing to do with food safety.

via The ‘Organic’ Stamp – Does It Mean That Food Is Safer? – NYTimes.com.

Be sure to listen the “Backstory” Multimedia audio link that accompanies this story.

Eat local – even in winter | csmonitor.com

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

Amy Farnsworth of the Christian Science Monitor shares this view of a mid winter Rhode Island farmers’ market:

This desire is one of the main reasons farmers’ markets are increasing, up some 300 in the two years between August 2006 and 2008, as the total number surpassed 4,500 according to the US Department of Agriculture. And it’s helping sustain about 750 farmers’ markets that operate between the months of November and March.

via Eat local – even in winter | csmonitor.com.

Standards and Stewards | The New Agrarian

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

While looking at ideas for raising ducks, I discovered David Walbert’s The New Agrarian Website and blog. His content has a deep and insightful discussion about standards and stewardship.

When we decided to get ducks I could not have easily articulated my reason for wanting them. Now, I can: for breakfast this morning I fried two eggs over-easy that we had gathered only an hour before, and while I ate them I watched through the kitchen window as the ducks who laid them bathed contentedly (it seems to me) in their pool. That breakfast is what I wanted: good, rich, complex-tasting food from happy, healthy animals; a breakfast in context. I wanted to see the process of agriculture, from beginning to end; to participate in my own sustenance, but especially to know that it was made in a manner I believed to be right. It is not, on reflection, so much to ask. But that knowledge — intimate, personal, complete — is something I can’t get from a supermarket, no matter what standards my food meets, no matter how many agencies certify it with how many eco-labels. I wanted knowledge not labels; process, not product; stewardship, not standards.

Standards and Stewards | The New Agrarian.

While you are there, please read What’s a New Agrarian and this essay The Eightfold Agrarian Way

New Agrarianism, most importantly, is not about preserving a way of life or recreating the past; it is about building the future. These eight principles draw heavily on past expressions of agrarian thought, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century America, but they are not bound by them. Agrarians have few models but the past, and the past is valuable for the lessons it teaches, but each of us must live in the present and plan for the future.

M R Ducks

Posted on March 1, 2009 by Fritz Nordengren

Black Cayuga Ducklings

It was really simple enough.

I was just going to the feed store to get cracked corn for the pheasants and some starter feed to stock up for this year’s new pheasant arrivals in a few months.

While I was there, I got to talking with the owner and he asked,

“You wouldn’t want 4 Black Cayuga ducklings would you?”

Keeping in mind the forecast for the weekend was 8 degrees and snow, and without heat in the barn, there is really no good place to keep ducks at the cabin, so I said no, but looked at them anyway. What he really wanted to do was get rid of the largest of the ducklings. I told him I needed to think about what they would need and I could get back to him on Monday.

“No”, he said, if no one took them today, he would get rid of them.

Hmmm.

So I figured the worst that happens is they don’t survive, and since I have two ponds of natural duck habitat, they would have a nice place to live once spring came…so I took them.

For now, they live in a rabbit cage in the little cabin. In a few weeks, I’ll move them to a pen in the barn, and then in a few more weeks, out to the pond.

So far, the suggested names include:

Duck Vadar
Bat Duck
The 4 Tops
Mocha
Black Coffee
Gilbert
Indiana Quackers
and finally Gladys Knight and the Pips

Black Cuyugas are good egg layers and good meat ducks — but rather than go to the trouble, I’ll put them to work eating the algae out of the little pond. We’ll see….

There is an old visual joke that is often attributed to the Iowa test of Basic Skills, however, it is usually used to refer to anyone you want to teasingly make fun of. The test reads like this:

M R ducks

M R not
O S A R
C M wangs?
L I B! M R ducks

The “key” or translation is

Them are ducks
Them are not
Oh yes they are
See them wings?
Well I’ll be! Them are ducks

March Moon – the last full moon of winter March 11