Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
I have become quite the joiner this past week! Although I love the virtual community of gardeners, I have been searching for ways to join a community of gardeners here in Portland. It’s proven more challenging than I first anticipated. I began the search with gardening clubs. To date, I have found only a couple gardening clubs and their members are mostly 60+. Probably the
Three of my hens found a new, wonderful home tonight. A longtime member of the PDXBackyardChix group through contacted me about adopting some of my hens. It’s been really occupying way too much of my mind figuring out exactly who would go and who would stay. I still wanted a blue egg-layer in the group. I wanted to keep at least one of my original
My chickies are chicks no longer! It wasn’t so long ago that they were sleeping in a pile in my guest bedroom (pictured right), but now they are big enough that it’s time to find half of my flock a new home. Although I already had three grown hens, I decided to raise these five baby chicks this past Spring. After trying to convince other
I can see how my routines look awfully strange to people sometimes. When I recap my weekend, for example, it’s usually a stark contrast to other people’s weekends. My evenings typically stray this direction as well. So I thought I would recap my evening tonight as an example. First things first – I stopped by New Seasons on the way home from work to pick
Today I wrapped up the “Chick Condo”. It’s a roughly 4′ long x 2′ wide wooden box I have attached to the opposite end of the big girl’s hen house. There is a small doorway opening to the run, so the new chicks and the older girls can get know each other. When the chicks grow up into the big house, I can store my
It was a perfect day in Portland today. The sun was shining all day and the it was actually shorts and T-shirt weather. This morning I started in on renovating the chicken coop, which meant the girls were allowed to free-range for the day. My chickens don’t lay eggs until late in the day, so a good part of late morning and early afternoon was
It seems like the chickens just sprouted overnight. Here is an updated profile on each of the girls (hopefully) and my crazy idea to follow these pictures: Chick #1 Breed: Araucana Coloring: Grey/White Egg Color: Blue-Green Additional: She’s a “floater”, neither the top nor bottom of the pecking order. She is still the cutest. Chick #2 Breed: Rhode Island Red Coloring: Reddish Brown Egg Color:
The baby chicks are babies no more! The baby fuzz is being replaced with real feathers and they have just grown so much in only a couple weeks. I caught one of the little girls standing on top of the waterer this morning, to the dismay of her sisters. They were squawking at her, trying to get her to come down. I think they were
Strange things are afoot in my backyard. And front yard. First: the weather. The temperature has been dropping here, close to or at freezing some nights. Strange for Portland in April. This evening I was walking through the backyard feeling very lucky that I came up with my raised bed cloche things right when the weather turned sour – hopefully those lettuce, spinach, and collards
