Friday, December 9, 2011

Going green? no way, we INVENTED green!



With the new house we have had many plans for continuing our quest for "greenness," such as building garden beds, installing rain barrels, composting our food wastes, and keeping chickens. The rain barrel demo was recently posted so i wont go into detail about that, but Peanut and I recently worked on building a chicken coop and a compost turner.
At the trailer that Peanut and I shared with my brother Chris, we had a compost "pit" in the far corner of our garden. The pit idea isn't realistic in the new house, and wasn't great in practice anyway because you had to turn it with a shovel and couldn't move it readily. Another thing is that the food waste would attract critters of all kinds and could stink. The compost tumbler keeps the decaying process under control and away from animals and other outside influences and helps the keep it aerated with out having to use a shovel and bend over so much.
Also, the chicken coop there... it is not finished and we wont be ready for chickens for some time, but we got a head start... this is going to be the permanent coop house as it is sheltered and will be secure, but we will also have a "tractor" style run that we can move around the yard to let them truly be "free-range" chickens, without fear of the local red-shouldered hawks snatching up a quick meal of our egg layers. There will be more pictures to follow as we finish more of the chicken house and runs.

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