It seems that GRIT editor Hank Will and I are “on the same sheet of music” this week. He put up a great post about saving money in 2009 by raising your own chickens on the same day I was planning on putting this one up, so I thought I’d give it a day or so before adding my two cents.

One of the first things that many small scale growers and aspiring “urban pioneers” decide to do after they’ve established their garden plans is to look into obtaining some chickens. I know a lot of the Grit readers probably already have them or have had them in their past so this may be old news to them. I’m guessing though, that with purse strings getting tighter all around the country and concerns over industrial food products in the news so regularly, that there’s probably a good number of folks trying to get a good idea about what it takes to get started with some small scale egg production.

First off, and in my mind foremost, I have to say this; these are not just egg producing fertilizer factories. They’re that too and much more honestly, but they’re also a responsibility as would be any other livestock that any size farmer decides to integrate into their operation. The scale may be smaller but the obligations are no less pressing. That said, I think the most important thing that any aspiring farmer should do, regardless of scale, is to make an honest assessment of what they want to gain vs. what they are willing to give for this addition. The second thing that you’ll need to be aware of, particularly if you’re like we are and you’re in a residential area with close neighbors and often times limiting covenants and restrictions, is whether or not you are even allowed to keep chickens. Take heart if you’ve already learned that they are not currently allowed, however, mine weren’t either when I first decided I wanted them, but with a good dose of persistence and some community involvement, laws can be changed, and anything is possible! And there you go … the caveats are out, chickens are great, but they are a commitment, so then, on with the fun stuff.

There are a lot of websites and good books that can help you to make a decision on what kind of chickens would be the best for you to keep at your home so I’m not going to try and reinvent the wheel here. A couple I recommend would be “My Pet Chicken’s” Breed selector tool and of course GRIT’s Perfect Chickens, a guide to heritage breeds of chickens. Whichever way you decide to go, however, this is another point where you’ll just have to be honest with yourself about what it is that you want from your birds. It won’t do you a lot of good to get a beautiful Bearded Silver Polish hen because you like the way they look if you’re looking to keep a family of five in eggs regularly or to be able to possible sell some at the farmers market. Do your research thoroughly and honestly. You’ll be happier later because of it.

Now, once you’ve decided what it is that you’re looking for and how many of them you will need and can have, it’s time to look into the different ways of getting them. You may have a farm store near you or perhaps you’ve seen the cute little chicks at the pet store. These are both potential ways to get your chicks but you may want to check out some other possibilities. There are a number of excellent hatcheries out there that can provide you with day old chicks of almost any breed. Some have requirements that you order a minimum number of chicks however, so if you have a friend that’s also interested in raising birds, you may be able to split an order like I did with one of my neighbors. It’s a good idea to order 1 more bird than you will ultimately be able to keep as it’s not uncommon for one to get sick and not make it to adulthood. You can also order fertilized eggs that you can incubate and hatch yourself. Either way, you’ll need to set up a brooder for your young chicks.

You can probably find a company that’s willing to sell you some automatic self regulating brooder set-up if you’re so inclined but I’d say most of us are probably the make do with what you have type. I know I am! This is the brooder box that I used last spring to raise my two clutches of hens. I just lined an old computer box from work with some wood shavings and notched a piece of pvc so that it would hang from the top of the box. This allowed me to hang a light from the pvc so that I could elevate the light or lower it as the chicks required. Hank goes into the requirements of the brooders pretty well so I’ll defer to his article at this point.

And that’s the basics of getting started with Chickens in my opinion. It’s not rocket science, but it does take some thought and some planning. There’s a lot more beyond this though as the chicks start to grow; too much to cover in just this post in fact. Check back next week, and we can continue the discussion.

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse.

In my garden, I use a sort of variant of Square Foot Gardening. It works well because of the fact that I only grow on approximately 400-500 square feet. My biggest difference is that I generally like to keep things relatively informal. Part of my logic behind this is that I like to "leave my options open" so to speak. I've found that in the garden, as with many other parts of life, if you follow too many rules (or perhaps guidelines is the better word) by doing it the way that the "experts" tell you to do it, you run the risk of missing the opportunities and flashes that are possible through experimentation.

One such "flash" came to me early last year and I went with it. The result, I think, is one of the best from any of my gardening technique trials that I've had and I thought that with a lot of people just starting to try and figure out what their gardens will look like this summer it was a perfect time to share it. What it is, is a trellising system that allows me to use my 4-foot-by-6-foot raised beds in many different configurations depending on the crop that I wish to grow there that particular year. In doing so, it also frees me from the chore of having to rebuild or move trellising apparatus every year, or worse yet every season, because it can be quickly tweaked to serve my needs. I've built one over each of my 4-by-6 beds and can either set it up as needed, or ignore it altogether and use the beds as though there were nothing there at all.

I put together a couple of renderings of the basic structure to give you an idea of how it's built. The ones I have in my garden were made largely from recycled 2-by-4s that I ripped in half to make 2-by-2s, although I did have to purchase a few. I joined them very basically with long grabber screws (course threaded.) and some corner triangles for strength.

Basically, it’s just a cube that’s been built on top of an existing 4-by-6 raised bed. The image above is of the system in a straight configuration. Across the bottom of the raised bed, I ran a piece of 1-by-2 scrap wood that I could tie twine off to and then ran that up to a third top piece that I added. You could actually run the string out to the edge pieces to support the top of the plants when they reached above the top of it as well. My beds are 6 feet deep, so I would run one string in the middle of each square foot to support, for instance, a tomato plant.

Here's another way of setting it up that I'm calling the "V-configuration." This was the original catalyst for this whole experiment. The reason I did it, was to try and solve a problem that I continually had with growing my pole beans. The issue I was having with conventional ways of doing them was that in my raised beds I either had to only grow one row per bed so that I could easily get to them, or I could grow them in a grid which inevitable turned into a nest of vine in which I couldn't find the dang beans! Also, in a four foot wide bed, I had a hard time reaching in easily to access the beans. I could get them, but always felt off balance. This "V-configuration" was developed to grow the beans on the inside of the bed allowing the edges to be used for other plants and, as they got taller and taller, to bring them out into my reach for harvesting from the side. It worked great as you can see here.

OK, not the greatest picture of me... but the beans look good right? I have a small wheeled garden cart that I can sit on and could actually just sit down and slide along the paths as I picked. It was perfect.

I also made another version of this that ended up as a sort of "Double-V Configuration."

Readers of my personal blog may have seen something that I tried this summer to make a little different use of the space around my plants another way. You can see on the top of the bed here that there are two 1-by-2s holding the strings down. In the space between them, I planted a crop of carrots just after my cucumbers had come up. They grew there with plenty of sun initially, and, since they are cooler weather crops, did just fine in the shade from the larger plants. I will say that I should have planted them earlier than the cukes to have gotten better results, but it's a method that I'll definitely try again!

Interestingly, there are a couple of additional benefits to this system that I hadn't even thought of. Wind tolerance for instance. We get some nasty micro-bursts during the summer storms here and I've had problems with single frame trellises getting blown over from the force against the large plants growing up them. I watched my beans getting blown around severely with this, and yet lost not a one of them! In fact, I noticed later that some of the strings had broken from the force, but since the vines reached the tops of the frames, they no longer needed the strings anyway. Also, the frames can be used to support either shade cloths for the hotter climates or tarping to protect from frost and hail in other climates.

So there you go, my way to build a better trellis. I've tried to come up with some cool catchy name for it, but have come up short. Any suggestions, I'd love hear them. Also, if any of you decide to give this a try, I'd be honored if you'd email me a picture or two, I'd love to see how you're able to suit it to your own needs. [We’d love to put some of the photos up on the website, too. So go ahead and send them to editor@grit.com as well. – Eds.]

Till next time everyone ... all the best!

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse.

The place of the American garden, at least inasmuch as it has become a societal movement from time to time in our history, was outlined beautifully by GRIT editor Hank Will in his blog post on how gardening is good for the soul. The point as I saw it, of the article, was that there is just something about being able to get our hands into the soil and to coax from it a thing as tangible and basic to life as healthy, nutritious food for very little cost, that is good for our soul. I couldn’t agree more! As he outlined our recent history of war gardens, victory gardens and urban collective gardens I found myself thinking that this has been a phenomenon that has largely come about since the time of the industrial revolution when we, as a nation, began to separate ourselves from our agrarian roots. It was natural then, when wars or depression or economic necessity dictated it, that we would gravitate toward something that could bring us together and provide us comfort. Being able to feed ourselves and being able to bless others with food can do this like few other things.

Hank made the statement, in his previous post, that he didn’t “know what to call the new wave of gardening frenzy, but [does] know that it is exciting, and will, no doubt, play a role in healing our culture.” To this I replied “Freedom Gardens” and it has sparked a great conversation I think. He’s asked that I give a little background on how this name for a movement came about so I’ll do my best.

Let me give you a little background. In my first post here at GRIT, I talked about how I had had an awakening within myself. When I realized that, while I was depressed about not being able to drop everything and move to  the country and have myself a farm, I was squandering the land that I already had right in my backyard. That epiphany changed the whole way I looked at gardening. My mind had been limited to growing a garden as merely a hobby, while the “real” farming required having acres of land and tractors and so on. The ability to look at my own small .25 acre suburban lot as an urban farm of sorts came about quite by accident when I stumbled onto the website of the Dervaes family in Pasadena CA called Path to Freedom. There I found the story of a family that not only gardened on their tenth of an acre lot in the heart of Pasadena (hardly the country) but was actively supporting themselves through their efforts both physically, in that they largely ate from their garden, and financially in that they had a thriving niche market selling their excess to local markets and chefs. That’s right, excess food from a 10^th of an acre lot. It’s not unimaginable when you consider that they regularly average over 6000 lbs of food from that same 10^th of an acre.

As we faced issues at the beginning of 2008 of global climate change, increasing costs of oil (which by the way is the basis of all of our commercial “inputs” like fertilizers, pesticides, etc.), regular warnings about tainted foods in our stores and economic pressures that were starting to limit our food buying power the Dervaes family launched a site called “Freedom Gardens” and with it put a name to a movement that was already beginning to form not only here at home, but world wide. Whether you’re a young family trying to make ends meet or a rural farmer that want’s to not just grow commercial crops but actual food as well or a suburban parent worried about the future of the earth for your kids this is a movement for you. If you’re a city dweller who wants to eat organic foods but can’t afford the exorbitant costs at the whole foods stores or someone worried about providing consistent, healthy food to your family in the event of a crisis then this is a movement for you.

The point, I think, is this; gardens ARE good for our souls. Not merely because they’re therapeutic or because they provide healthy foods or even because they give us a hedge against lean times but rather because, if you look at the big picture, they offer us that thing that we all crave so dearly. They offer that thing that drove our founding fathers to strike out on their own. They offer Freedom.

If I sound a bit zealous, well, that’s because I am. I was able to have my eyes opened for me to a world of possibilities a few years back, and returning the favor has been a large part of the reason I write. I hope you find success in your own freedom gardens no matter the size or scope and would love to hear about your efforts. In the event you decide to check further into the Freedom Gardens online community (which is totally free btw.) please drop by and say hi to me. You can find me there as “CornerGardener” and I’d love to help you find your way around.

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse

First off let me say Merry Christmas and Happy New year to all. I hope everyone was able to enjoy a wonderful holiday season with friends and family and are looking forward to a very fine 2009!

As we all know, each new year brings a bevy of New Year’s resolutions and goals. It’s a natural thing isn’t it? A full year has passed and there’s a break, a natural point of delineation when we just seem to feel right making promises and goals with ourselves for how we want to be better or more productive in the future. And that’s really what we’re doing aren’t we? I mean I don’t know anyone that says I want to sit around a little more or eat a little less healthy or make a goal to get less done, do you? We seem to naturally feel like we can do more, or perhaps more to the point, that we should be doing more or at least doing what we’re doing better.

The other half of this is that we also have a natural tendency to be able to conveniently “forget” the things we wanted to do so badly on December 31st. I know, for myself at least, that around mid June I find myself thinking “What resolution? I don’t remember saying that.” Or maybe “No, no, no … I didn’t mean that I wanted to eat healthy all the time. What I meant by that was that I just didn’t want to eat junk food everyday…. Yeah that’s it.”  And because of that I’ve come up with a little bit of a way to back myself into a corner so to speak.

Write it down!

This is a prime opportunity for anyone that wants to accomplish something, change something or get better at something to really try and commit to it. It’s also a perfect time to get those goals on paper. I started doing this a couple of years ago and have found it to be a great aid in focusing myself. Personally I don’t use paper, instead I use my blog as a digital catch all for the things that I hope to accomplish and have found that putting it out there for the entire world to see seems to make me take them just a little more seriously.

So how does this relate to country living, the Grit lifestyle or even small scale growers like myself? It applies because as we look forward to this next year, no doubt we’re making plans. It’s just part of who we are, isn’t it? Perhaps we’re living on a 100-year-old homestead that we’re working to bring back to its former glory or we’re trying to simplify our lives a little by doing more with less. Maybe you’re like our family, pretty average except for your desire to work the little bit of suburban ground that you have to make it productive and provide food for your family. Either way, regardless of your circumstances, those plans are what give us direction for the future. They allow us to define how we will move forward, and what is important to us. They give us a road map for the next year, keep us focused and in the long run will make us more successful.

Whether it’s a calendar pinned up in the office, a handwritten list of goals stuck to the fridge with a magnet your 3 yr old made in school or a journal that you post up to the great expanse of the blogosphere, take the time to write those goals down and revisit them once and a while. And if you don’t meet them all that’s OK too. Hey, there’s always 2010 right?

I’m Looking forward to a great new year here at Grit getting to know you all a little better.

P~

You can reach Paul Gardener by email, or check his personal blog at A posse ad esse.