Wildflowers on the Homestead

If you're read this blog, and I know at least 3 of you personally, you've probably seen more pictures of wildflowers than any sane person would post... Why? We're growing soil here, and to do that successfully we need bees to pollinate everything. That means that we let the wildflowers grow everywhere we find them. 

It was 84 degrees on the 16th of November here on the homestead, so the flowers are still blooming and the bees are still hungry. All the wild sunflowers are still covered in bees and butterflies, as are the basil plants, and peppers that are still producing heavily the week before Thanksgiving. 

I hope we've done our part to feed the bees, and trust they've put enough honey away to have a comfortable winter here in Texas.

Putting Your Free Range Chickens to Work

Cow Patty

So the basis of Permaculture is minimizing inputs, and maximizing outputs, while improving the earth, and giving a reasonable . Joel Salatin routinely says that his egg laying tractors and broiler chicken tractors following his cattle grazing are there to spread cattle manure, add chicken manure, and lightly turn the soil, the eggs and meat are just a bonus.

Chickens at Work on a Patty

It's just been the last couple of weeks that the Ideal 236 layers have really started to go to work on the cow patties, but it's been a revelation. The cow patties within a couple hundred feet of the barn have all been reduced to the photo below.

Fertilizer and Soil Amendments 

It seems that each day the range of the layers increases a bit. We're doing our best to minimize predator pressure, and though I'm sure we'll lose some to hawks and feral dogs, I think that we've finally got things figured out to be sustainable moving forward. Right now the 27 chickens we hve on site are being fed roughly 3 pounds a feed per week, in a mix of cracked grain/corn at night to encourage them all to come to the coop daily, and a bit of the feed that I had left over from the FrankenChickens.

All in all I'm really excited about the layers coming online in early February for the eggs, but I'm also trying to find a couple of broody bantams to raise replacement chickens moving forward. The tractored chickens next spring will continue to help spread the manure and improve the soil on the homestead.