Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
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
We finally settled on names for the newest additions to the backyard homestead. There were some really good suggestions from comments my earlier post, my Facebook page, plus a few Twitter messages. Several would have been good future kid names, so we reserved those π But here they are, the newly named ducks: Pepper is our black runner duck and one of the first to
We love having our chickens free-range in our backyard. They eat a wider range of food, which saves us some money on chicken feed and also makes their eggs taste ten times better. But they can be really destructive in the garden beds – trampling seedlings in search for the next great worm. It’s even more important for backyard ducks to have some free-range access,
The ducklings are getting so big so fast! We change their bedding out about 2-3 times a day now. When I come home from school it smells remarkably like a barnyard. Not the most welcoming smell I could imagine coming home too… The other day I thought they looked kind of dirty on their bellies. The yellow duckling was starting to look brown on her
