Mini-Ecosystems on Our Mini-Farm

At our place, when our mini-ecosystems are running as they should, the goats, chickens, ducks, worms, catfish and tilapia, all work together to feed each other and us humans.

The chickens like to get to the fresh goat manure as soon as it comes out of the goat. They peck it open to get to undigested seeds and, we presume, parasites. In the process, the chickens scratch to turn the manure into the straw bedding of the goat pen. Thanks to the chickens the composting bacteria begin their work even before we muck out the pen.

The straw and manure from the pen go to one of several compost bins or piles until the composting action cools. In the meantime, we dump kitchen scraps on top of these piles and let the chickens and ducks have at them. They add manure to the piles as the chickens scratch and turn the compost, speeding the decomposition.

 

From there the cooled, but not necessarily completed compost goes either to the garden as mulch or to the worm bin to become vermicompost (worm castings). The worms go to feed the fish, ducks, and chickens. Most of vermicompost goes to the garden, some goes as tea to feed the duckweed, while a bucketful (with worms) goes to the bottom of the empty compost bin ready to receive more muck from the goats.

The fish eat the duckweed, and in moderation and for variety the following: garden and kitchen scraps, chicken and duck manure (and the flora these encourage), worms, chopped offal from the duck and chicken butchering, and raw scrambled eggs.

The ducks and chickens receive the fish offal, greens from garden and the aquaponic grow beds, and duckweed (the ducks like it wet, the chickens like it dry).

Solid fish waste is filtered out of the fish tanks to feed the garden and to help heat up the compost as needed.

Goats get leafy greens from the garden and aquaponic beds.

The humans keep it all moving and healthy. In return we get veggies, fruits, nuts, herbs, eggs, milk, meat, and fish.

Sulmtaler Chickens

We're incubating a couple dozen Sulmtaler eggs we recently received from our good friends at Java Hill Farm. This variety originated in Austria in the mid to late 1800's as a table bird, and was for a time considered a delicacy.

We're trying this variety as a meat bird for a couple of reasons.

First, the meat is considered to be some of the best available, and the birds are fairly large--the rooster weighs between 7 and 9 pounds, the hen between 3.5 and 7 pounds. Hens lay about 150 smallish eggs per year--so not as many eggs per bird, so we'll add a few hens (normally we keep about twenty hens of dual-purpose varieties)  to have enough fresh eggs each day. So we won't be getting large or extra large eggs each day, but we will be getting bigger birds to the table. (Granted, we could have some laying hens as well, though this complicates the coop arrangements.)

Second, the Sulmtaler is reported to be quieter than other varieties. Our hens make a lot of noise celebrating each egg they lay. Sulmtalers reportedly do not engage in this revelry. Our poor neighbors have also suffered through our Marans rooster--one loud bird. (He was very tasty though!) We're hoping that the Sulmtaler rooster will not be as loud.

In a couple of weeks our eggs will hatch, beginning our trial with this interesting and historic variety. We'll have pictures and details as they become available.

Home Grown Breakfast

Eggs, cheese, potatoes, tomatoes, basil, and milk. All home grown. Yummy and very satisfying.

If we can do it, so can you. We encourage you to “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” --Theodore Roosevelt

With just a little patch of ground (or a couple of containers) you can grow tomatoes, greens for salads, herbs, and strawberries for example.

With a little more space, you could have a couple of chickens--they'll eat your kitchen waste and give you eggs in return. Scraps of food to scrambled eggs--a rags to riches kind of thing. They'll also give you manure to compost an put on your vegetable patch.

We agree with Julia Child who said, "You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces – just good food from fresh ingredients." And it doesn't get much fresher than picking or gathering your food a few minutes before it goes onto your plate.

Abby's Orange-Kefir Smoothie

(A-O-K Smoothie)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups orange juice
• 2 cups of kefir (substitute or mix and match yogurt, fil mjölk, piima, viili, or your favorite milk culture)
• 1 tsp. vanilla (or more to taste)
• 1 egg
• about 5 ice cubes
• 1/4 cup honey (to taste; more or less depending on the tartness of your oranges)

Directions

Pretty simple: put all ingredients except honey into the blender and blend until smooth (hence "smoothie")--a few seconds will do. Taste. Add some honey. Blend again. Taste. Add more honey if desired. Blend again. Pour into glasses and serve.

Coloring Eggs

It's Spring, and time to hunt some eggs.
As is our annual custom, this Saturday we'll be hunting these brightly colored eggs.

If you haven't already, do not buy those pricey egg dying kits in the supermarkets. You can dye eggs with natural colors from beets, spinach, onion skins, and other veggies. Or as we did last year and this, you can use food coloring (McCormick, for example).

For each dye bath combine 1/2 cup boiling water with 1 tsp vinegar and 10 drops of food coloring in a cup or bowl. You can mix your own colors by using 5 drops red and 5 drops yellow for orange, for example. Leave the hard-cooked eggs in the dye bath for 3-5 minutes, or longer for a deeper color. Use tongs or a slotted spoon to remove eggs and place on wax or parchment paper to dry, blot any excess dye with a paper towel. If you plan to eat your colored eggs, don't leave them unrefrigerated for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Marans eggs dyed up to look like this in the house, but...

McCormick's has a chart on the back of their Assorted and Neon! dye sets showing ratios for making various colors, suggesting around 20 drops of dye in each cup, but we found that around ten drops total in each cup will give a nice pastel color. We have brown eggs, so our colors have a deeper shade for most colors, and some colors didn't turn out so well.

...looked like this in the sunlight outside!

Our Marans eggs are a chocolate color to begin with, but after they were dyed, they looked very dark brown or black in ambient indoor light. But out in the sunlight they showed a deep, almost metallic shade of whatever color. Very nice!

We've already had an egg hunt of sorts. We have two Campbell ducks and two Muskovies sitting on nests (which are fairly well hidden--we know because we had to hunt a bit). Our goose, Buttercup, was on a nest (also pretty well hidden) until a couple of days ago. She decided not to stay on her nest. Now each day she lays an egg in the yard for us to hunt up! So much for the Bunny....

We typically don't eat things that have been dyed. Of course, we're not going to eat these dyed egg shells, but will eat at least some of the eggs inside. As mentioned above, you could also use beets, spinach, onion skins, and other veggies to color your eggs. Time permitting, we'll be trying some of these this week.

Steam, don't boil those hard cooked eggs.

Sometime last year we experimented with steaming our eggs to hard cook them. We like the way they turn out. Just steam the eggs in a vegetable steamer set over boiling water for 10 minutes. Cool them right away under cold water so they don't develop that gray-green ring around the yolk. If you like soft cooked eggs (the yolk is still runny), take the eggs out of the steamer after 5 minutes.

Egg Steamers on Amazon.