Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
***Warning: This is a pretty graphic post about how to butcher a chicken, complete with pictures and lots of description. My intent is to help people who are preparing to butcher their first bird.*** On a recent Sunday morning, a local Eugene friend invited people over to learn how to properly kill and butcher chickens. She raises broilers every summer in her urban backyard, feeding
Our move to Eugene was a bit more frantic than moves from the past. It was challenging to juggle moving boxes and unpacking with the strong desire to plant seeds in this new patch of dirt. The most pressing piece of business, above all of these other pressing tasks, was building a temporary chicken coop for the girls. The chicken coop in Portland has been
I truly despise renting, which is part of the reason I have been so stressed about housing the last few weeks leading up to my move to Eugene and return to graduate school. My motivation for buying a house was driven in a large part by my desire to paint the walls whatever color I wanted, grow my garden however I determined, and keep a
First off, everyone is now safe and alive. But we have our first brush with death here on the urban homestead with our flock of chickens. It wasn’t a raccoon or a possum. It was a much friendlier and surprising culprit. We have a gentle greyhound, Howard, who is a retired racer and leaves the chickens alone completely. We decided to dog-sit for another greyhound
The first post in this series covered the roles of different bees in the colony. The second post in this series talked about reproduction, swarming and environmental needs of a colony. This final post will focus on equipment needed to start keeping bees in the city and potential disease. Glen Andresen advised that a love of nature and a love of puttering is a good
This is part two of a three part series on the beekeeping workshop I attended recently. Reproduction: It was interesting to learn that it is up to the female worker bees to determine when it is time to hatch a new queen bee, more worker bees, or drone bees. The worker bees are the ones who prepare the cells (areas in the comb where eggs
Last summer I was introduced to Glen Andresen, a local bee-keeper, at the Lents Farmers Market. He gave a short overview of bee-keeping and I signed up to receive notices about future workshops he typically hosts in the Spring. I was lucky to snag a spot in one of his recent “Intro to Beekeeping” workshops in Portland a couple weeks ago, which eventually sold out.
Today is the first day of Spring, and there are signs of it all over our urban homestead. We are back in full egg production! Maude and Florence have been laying steadily for a couple months now. But even our old biddy Pearl decided to hop on the egg band wagon! We estimate Pearl is about 4-5 years old and she stopped laying altogether last
One giant compromise of letting the chickens free-range in our backyard is allowing them to ravage our vegetable beds from time to time. They scratch up seeds, eat young shoots, and sometimes decide a newly planted bed is a terrific place for a dust bath. Every year I get a little smarter with how to protect my loved green things from the girls, and this
