Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
We found Milt a farm! Our drake, or male duck, is now spreading his love among a large flock of ladies living on a farm just south of Eugene. Whew! We were not looking forward to having him for dinner. I think Bess, Pepper, Gladys and Ramona are enjoying the peace and quiet. We are getting a steady supply of eggs already from both Gladys
Like a crazy woman, I went back to the local farm to u-pick more strawberries. Our cupboards are stocked with jam and I am getting tired of standing over the stock pot stirring. So this round I decided to just freeze them all – easy and versatile. I lightly rinsed the berries, since they can be little sponges and soak up excess water. I then
Our chocolate runner duck, Milt, needs to go. He is four months old and humping everything in sight! How do you wrestle being a modern feminist with the animal world? He will corner one of the ducks, bite the back of her head to keep her in place, then mount her. It doesn’t look fun, enjoyable or kind. It’s kind of a frustrating spectacle to
Just like any garden, homesteading life never stays the same. There is always some new challenge, right when you thought you were finally getting the hang of things. Change was inevitable for our backyard ducks. Right before the raccoon attack, I realized we had a drake among us. Drake is what you call a male duck. They are not illegal in the city, since they
Time flies and here we are already at the summer solstice. The sunrise was at 5:30 am and the sun will set at 9:00 pm. It’s going to be 81 degree outside today. Boy, did this just turn into summer overnight? The changing of the seasons is always time for me to take stock of what’s happening on our little slice of homestead. There is
I have a book signing tomorrow (Saturday) in Portland at the St. Johns Bookstore at 10:30am that I have been looking forward to for weeks. It’s a cute little independently owned shop and the farmer’s market will be going on just a block away. Our original plan was to stay up for a long weekend with friends and family. After yesterday’s raccoon attack, I’m going
Last night I went to bed and started to feel terrified. It was a really spooky, windy night. But I wasn’t terrified about the weather – I was worried about the ducks. Our original intention with our backyard flock of ducks was to lock them up every night in their duck house. Unfortunately, after a week of that they became completely frantic whenever they would
Ducks need more outside room generally than chickens, so we set about building a large run for our new flock. We planned on about five square feet of outside space per duck, which meant we needed a run that was twenty square feet total. Since we are renting this year, nothing can be permanent about the duck house and run. The chickens and ducks each
There are lots of ways to make a duck house and the one you build is based on any combination of the following factors: safety from predators carpentry skill level time money portability In our case, we are currently renting our homestead while I finished grad school. (So excited to get back to our permanent plot in Portland…) So what we build has to move
