Questions, updates, and ideas. And a wasp!
Happy Wednesday! Or whatever day it is...
Wanted to share the garden with everyone and my thoughts for the coming season. (Next spring)
It seems our sunflowers are blooming one at a time. I'm not against that. Kinda considering a sunflower field in the side yard. Take seeds from whatever blooms this year and plant them. Less to mow, more to be pretty. Sounds great to me.
Up next is the big one :)
PoW: proof or watermelon. Idk if it'll fruit. Nothing else has. And it'll be late if it does. But we'll see. So far only one sprout of four seeds.
We had a unique visitor today. A wasp that may be interesting to @kafkanarchy84. This little guy is called a velvet ant.
It was hard to get a good picture cause they're pretty fast. Velvet ants are actually a species of flightless wasps that will ruin your day. They're really pretty and I usually marvel at their beauty a while before I kill them. Today Sam got to decide, and the wasp went free. I told him to never mess with them cause their sting will put a child in the hospital. A learning moment for Sam.
As far as ideas for next year, I've been reading on straw bale gardening. It seems like something that could be worth a try, but there's things to be cautious of. A lot of that stuff has herbicides like crazy in it that'll keep everything but grass from growing. I'm not particularly okay with that cause grass doesn't taste as good as most veggies.
Something I'm kinda kicking around as an idea is making some kind of pen with the bales. Maybe a rabbit or chicken pen, but I'm really undecided as to the ambition of such an idea. That might be too much, so it probably won't happen. But it would be cool to put a garden on the inside side of the bales to give the animals something sustainable to eat.
I'm debating between chickens and rabbits as a homegrown protein source, but I'm really hung up on the issues of what to do with the guts after slaughter, and the fact that my baby girl would cry her face off when she saw he favorite bunny getting killed. That's making me lean heavily towards chickens at the moment because the don't necessarily require slaughter because of egg production and I've heard they'll eat chicken parts as a protein source. I'd like to have protein production by the end of the year.
I obviously need a lot of guidance here cause these are all issues I've not had to deal with before. Any discussion is heartily appreciated. Thanks for reading :)
Stay relevant.
Nate.
You can feed the butchering of chickens back to chickens. They are omnivores and will eat anything. Personally, from a bio-security standpoint, I never feed animal to animal.
So the chickens get beef and pork, the pigs get chicken. Nothing goes to waste, and you don't have to worry about passing on disease, etc.
That makes sense. So then what options do I have with the waste products?
Aquaponics could use those waste parts. Here, we would gather them, take them to a field and use them to draw in coyotes. Then the hides of the coyotes are worth a minimum of 150 cad.
Your chickens could eat those sunflowers also so ya know :) I wonder if vermaposting would take care of the animal waste?
Vermaposting? Never heard of it.
Also, couldn't they do in a bookashi compost pile? Thought I remembered seeing that they can handle meat products. We may be onto something here...
Like raising worms to compost is what I'm attempting to talk about. I'm ULTRA unaware when it comes to this stuff, just starting to learn now. This morning in conversation with my darling wife "so we need to do worms before we do aquaponics?" "Yep"
-regarding feeding the crayfish.
And yes, you DEFINITELY can use the animal waste for bookashi composting. However, here we don't use much for meat or large bones, because we don't want to encourage the coyotes to come into our yard. For you I suspect there's other critters that might be trouble too?
I don't think so. I've heard coyotes before, but our yard is fenced in. We're in town, so possums and raccoons are the most credible threat I would think. Nothing my .22 wouldn't handle, except then we'd have more animal waste lol
Hahaha
Eggs are a excellent protein source. There isn't any butchering, and the family typically loves to see a few chickens pecking around the yard.
If you have much vegetable waste coming out of the fridge, that helps supplement the feed costs.
downsides:
Egg production is seasonal.
It take a little effort every once in awhile to clip the wing feathers to keep them from flying off or into your trees.
It takes a pretty secure cage for them to roost at night.
Local cats, raccoons, snakes, dogs, hawks, don't play well with chickens.
May have to keep them out of the garden, as they like veggies on the vine.
If they escape your yard, it requires a lot of running like a madman with a fishing net to bring them back.
If your uncertain you could try a couple bantams. They are pretty small and wouldn't require much resources to figure out if it's a viable venture.
Are bantams good eggers? That sounds like a viable plan. If it ends up not being for us, we can always sell em or chop em and have a BBQ. I'd like to start with half a dozen of em probably.
Bantams make smallish eggs.
Until ya know what the predator conditions are, i would recommend only two of them at a time until the issues are sorted out.
If ya have six repeatedly wiped out per engagement, that adds up pretty quick.
After the situation is stable, then i would add full sized hens. Bardrocks have done well, but the genetics can vary depending on where they come from.
Thanks!
Sounds like a plan is coming together :)