Developing the grass in your yard for increasing free ranging nutrition

[LeslieDJoyce]

You could try a burro/donkey as a LG animal and some around here are switching to those due to the wandering habits of the LGD. Plus...the donkeys are just easier to get and are pretty cheap.

Ohhhh. Donkeys!

Could I also get one of those miniature horses? A REALLY shaggy one?

 

[Beekissed]

Wow!!! I'm getting farm envy long about now! What a wonderful place for livestock and growing food....you've got it made! I wish "they" would let you manage things...I bet you could make a profit within one year of doing so, on all counts. I can't wait to see what you do with it....please continue to post pics on the pasture growth so we can all drool over all your space and land.

You could rotate your pasture and even reserve one field for baling up for winter feed...with the variety you want to plant it would be perfect winter feed for sheep. There's plans for a nifty little single bale, manual, baling doodad drifting the forum for those who want to bale grass, leaves, weeds, etc around if you wanted to do it the old fashioned way, or you could store it loose in a barn or shed. I've always wanted to do that...just cut, dry and rake my own hay for storage...but, alas, never had the land.

How exciting!

 

[crazyaboutchickens]

Beautiful view, LJ!!!  Yes...lucky chickens indeed! 

You're not off base...I get the same tone from him in many of his articles.  A very sarcastic, pompous tone that many would think stems from being confident or intelligent~as I've heard said of Salatin..supposedly successful men are allowed to be rude ~but a sensible person knows that truly intelligent, confident people don't feel the need to down grade others to teach a concept. 

I remember one MEN article where his garden was on the front cover...beautiful, lush growth with dark soil..just lovely.  The article was about how easy it was to have a no-till garden and how much better it was for the soil culture, etc.  As I read further he describes the dump truck load of mulch that he brought in to make his garden and I pause and say, "HUH???"   Easy..yes!  Expensive and impractical~OH, YEAH.  City folk might do this but no true homesteader has that kind of money and most people who do no-till gardens do the double dug method of turning the soil with a spading fork, etc.  One really cannot call that any level of successful growth caused by a cultured soil if the cultured soil was trucked in from a mulch plant....that's the mulch plant's success, not Harvey's.  But he's standing there grinning like he developed that cultured soil all by his lonesome through hard work and dedication to a principle of not disturbing the soil cultures over many seasons. 

It seems like every article I read of his has one or two inconsistencies that red flag him as being a homesteader wannabe but not truly what I consider a practical, down to earth homesteader/farmer/poultry guy.  I think he is very good at gleaning information and passing it off as his own but that he has very little concept of true, dirty under your nails homesteading and flock keeping...at least, not enough to be writing and teaching about it.  But..it makes money and that seems to be the primary goal.

I actually stopped subscribing to my favorite magazine over one article they printed of his...it was a lengthy diatribe of sarcasm over the creation of this world and his Darwinian views on it all, all the while making fun of folks who believed differently.  That was the final straw for me.

The Emperor is nekked...those aren't new clothes at all. 

Perhaps I have been reading the stuff of writers and non-homesteaders for too long without noticing it, but could you please elaborate why this seems impractical and not feasible to you?

The idea of building no-till gardens has been around for ages, the most famous and recent method starting with Paul Gautschi's video Back to Eden ( backtoedenfilm.com ). Well, technically it isn't his video, since he doesn't own a computer. And the concept of no-till gardening was invented thousands of years ago by the one who created trees to mulch the topsoil with their leaves, branches, and trunk, mining minerals dozens of feet below the earth with the help of the sun. Since the video's production, without advertisement, people worldwide have started using wood chips to mulch gardens and coming visit his farm in WA, finding proof that is works. Also tree mulch often comes, free, from roadside tree trimming companies, although that may not be the case in the article you read.

In addition, the fact is that it really doesn't take too much space to grow a good amount of food. One good example it Carleen Madigan's book, The Backyard homestead, where she outlines the plans and arrangements so as produce 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, 75 pounds of nuts on a quarter of an acre. No doubt that requires a lot of work and support from outside sources, but it still can be done. She is, yes, admittedly a writer, and an editor for Storey, but has also lived on a farm where she learned the things she put in the book.


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[Beekissed]

Perhaps I have been reading the stuff of writers and non-homesteaders for too long without noticing it, but could you please elaborate why this seems impractical and not feasible to you?

The idea of building no-till gardens has been around for ages, the most famous and recent method starting with Paul Gautschi's video Back to Eden ( backtoedenfilm.com ). Well, technically it isn't his video, since he doesn't own a computer. And the concept of no-till gardening was invented thousands of years ago by the one who created trees to mulch the topsoil with their leaves, branches, and trunk, mining minerals dozens of feet below the earth with the help of the sun. Since the video's production, without advertisement, people worldwide have started using wood chips to mulch gardens and coming visit his farm in WA, finding proof that is works. Also tree mulch often comes, free, from roadside tree trimming companies, although that may not be the case in the article you read.

In addition, the fact is that it really doesn't take too much space to grow a good amount of food. One good example it Carleen Madigan's book, The Backyard homestead, where she outlines the plans and arrangements so as produce 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, 75 pounds of nuts on a quarter of an acre. No doubt that requires a lot of work and support from outside sources, but it still can be done. She is, yes, admittedly a writer, and an editor for Storey, but has also lived on a farm where she learned the things she put in the book.


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No till gardening is very feasible....homesteaders...true homesteaders...don't have the money to have dump truck loads of rich mulch trucked into their homes to create a no till garden. Hence the "impractical" part of my assessment.

. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of foodstuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale. Pursued in different ways around the world — and in different historical eras — homesteading is generally differentiated from rural village or commune living by isolation (either socially or physically) of the homestead. Use of the term in the United States dates back to the Homestead Act (1862) and before.

Trucking mulch into your land has about as much to do with self-sustainability as a duck has to do with building a highway. I've homesteaded...there is no money left over for the luxury of mulch and definitely not whole dump truck loads of it.

As for producing that much food on a quarter of an acre....I'd have to see it with my own two eyes to believe it. There is no way a typical quarter acre of land would even be considered a homestead or support homestead endeavors to that degree. She might outline plans for it..in theory...but I've never read of such a thing, nor have I seen such a thing being done.

That's a case of many city and town dwellers who have never scratched out a living on some soil believing what is supposed, in theory and drawn out as a possibility, as being fact, but though a lot of food can be grown on a homestead and even a lot of food on small spaces, there's no way anyone has accomplished what she is outlining in fact. She might have learned to grow some food on that farm, but she wasn't growing that kind of food on a quarter of an acre unless it was the Garden of Eden. I'd have to see where that was documented by some outside, independent overseer that could verify those results as being true and factual before I would ever believe it.

Makes for good writing though. Impractical....but sure makes a good story.

 

[crazyaboutchickens]

Perhaps I have been reading the stuff of writers and non-homesteaders for too long without noticing it, but could you please elaborate why this seems impractical and not feasible to you?


The idea of building no-till gardens has been around for ages, the most famous and recent method starting with Paul Gautschi's video Back to Eden ( backtoedenfilm.com ). Well, technically it isn't his video, since he doesn't own a computer. And the concept of no-till gardening was invented thousands of years ago by the one who created trees to mulch the topsoil with their leaves, branches, and trunk, mining minerals dozens of feet below the earth with the help of the sun. Since the video's production, without advertisement, people worldwide have started using wood chips to mulch gardens and coming visit his farm in WA, finding proof that is works. Also tree mulch often comes, free, from roadside tree trimming companies, although that may not be the case in the article you read.


In addition, the fact is that it really doesn't take too much space to grow a good amount of food. One good example it Carleen Madigan's book, The Backyard homestead, where she outlines the plans and arrangements so as produce 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, 75 pounds of nuts on a quarter of an acre. No doubt that requires a lot of work and support from outside sources, but it still can be done. She is, yes, admittedly a writer, and an editor for Storey, but has also lived on a farm where she learned the things she put in the book.



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No till gardening is very feasible....homesteaders...true homesteaders...don't have the money to have dump truck loads of rich mulch trucked into their homes to create a no till garden.  Hence the "impractical" part of my assessment. 

[quote url="[URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sufficiency[/URL]"]
 Broadly defined, homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. It is characterized by subsistence agriculture, home preservation of foodstuffs, and it may or may not also involve the small scale production of textiles, clothing, and craftwork for household use or sale. Pursued in different ways around the world — and in different historical eras — homesteading is generally differentiated from rural village or commune living by isolation (either socially or physically) of the homestead. Use of the term in the United States dates back to the Homestead Act (1862) and before.

Trucking mulch into your land has about as much to do with self-sustainability as a duck has to do with building a highway.  I've homesteaded...there is no money left over for the luxury of mulch and definitely not whole dump truck loads of it. 

As for producing that much food on a quarter of an acre....I'd have to see it with my own two eyes to believe it.  There is no way a typical quarter acre of land would even be considered a homestead or support homestead endeavors to that degree.  She might outline plans for it..in theory...but I've never read of such a thing, nor have I seen such a thing being done. 

That's a case of many city and town dwellers who have never scratched out a living on some soil believing what is supposed, in theory and drawn out as a possibility,  as being fact, but though a lot of food can be grown on a homestead and even a lot of food on small spaces, there's no way anyone has accomplished what she is outlining in fact.  She might have learned to grow some food on that farm, but she wasn't growing that kind of food on a quarter of an acre unless it was the Garden of Eden.  I'd have to see where that was documented by some outside, independent overseer that could verify those results as being true and factual before I would ever believe it.

Makes for good writing though.  Impractical....but sure makes a good story. 
[/quote]
You may have miss the part about how the mulch acquired is usually free, as it is a byproduct trimming companies usually pay to send to a landfill. There's even a website for it. https://freemulch.abouttrees.com/#!/home They're just chipped tree branches. Not finely composted materials, yet.


1,400 eggs is about 5 hens laying 265 eggs a year, which is less than some leghorns on light....with 10 sqf per hen = 50 square feet... She does not mention the money required for feeding them, but any of FF, fodder, worms, black soldier fly larvae, or mealworms will suffice.
50lbs wheat requires about 250 square feet.
A dwarf apple tree provides 3 to 6 bushels of fruit, one bushel being 42 pounds, taking up about a 10ft radius(314sqf).
Say two almond trees(40sqf per tree)...18 feet radius, 453 sqf total...
A nice pig pen... 16x16, 256sqf.... looks a bit of an overkill for 280lbs, but it seems pigs dislike being alone, so I made it space for 2....totaling that meat amount at, conservatively, 500lbs.
Upon first look, you would need a great garden for 2,000lbs of vegetables. But taking a random crop that first comes to mind, tomatoes... the average yield according to ISU, 16,000 per acre, or 2,000 pounds for 1/8th of it... That's 5,445 sqf.

50+250+314+453+256+5,445=6,768 10,890=1/4acre. That's 4,122square feet left over for house, lawn, and feed crop. I'll admit, there's nothing like real experience, but everything adds up.

The above paragraph is my own quick research after reading your post, not hers, though. If you feel the need for more documents, feel free to re-check the numbers. You may find discrepancies depending on source, climate, and variety though.... I never knew the right size of a pig pen was so often debated!

All that said, I completely agree that 1/4th of an acre cannot be considered a homestead. The lack of dairy animals, meat chickens, bees, other trees, etc would not constitute a truly self-sufficient lifestyle.

 

[HEChicken]

You may have miss the part about how the mulch acquired is usually free, as it is a byproduct trimming companies usually pay to send to a landfill. There's even a website for it. https://freemulch.abouttrees.com/#!/home They're just chipped tree branches. Not finely composted materials, yet.

Exactly! The town closest to me offers both free mulch and free compost to its residents. All you have to do is pull up and start loading, and there are no limits. I.e., you can pull a car up and load a 5-gallon bucket in the back, or pull up a truck and fill the bed. Very few places have soil that needs no amendments and where I am, I've benefited greatly from being able to go and load up compost to add to my soil. In fact, my plan this week is to enlist DS's help to go and get several loads to spread onto my garden now, so that the spring rains can help to wash it in and create a fertile environment for my seeds when I start planting.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

I think what we've got here is a vocabulary issue. (I could be wrong, but this will be useful anyway as it will discuss various options for people hoping to improve their "back yards," either for chicken pleasures or for gardening, etc., most of which most of you probably already know, but it is easier to communicate if we're all using the same nouns and verbs in the same way)

If I'm understanding Beekissed right, what it sounds like the author in question had delivered in vast quantities was this stuff ...

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Miracle-...t-Garden-Soil-72859650/100665135#.Ut1OYCitsy4

not this stuff ...

http://www.wikihow.com/Find-Inexpensive-Mulch

(for those of you not wanting to follow the links, the top one is a link to a bag of organic top soil on Home Depot's website @ $7.47 for 1.5 cu. ft.), and the second link is a wikihow article on how to find "inexpensive" garden mulch).

We run a landscape business, and if you're buying top soil in bulk, it is sold by the "yard," and here it costs approximately $25/yd (and then of course we get to charge for delivery and distribution, too). BUT ... if you want special soils for potting or amending they are between $30 and $40 per yard ... and if you want "Certified Organic," I'm not sure what the options are ...

Another way to get to the super rich top soil Beekissed was describing she observed in the photo in question ... if it isn't native to the property and one does not wish to spend the years of time building it "naturally," ... is to amend the soil (either existing or trucked in) with a lot of compost. We do this a lot when landscaping, usually in combination with bringing in top soil (this is especially a good idea in new construction where often any existing top soil was "disturbed" beyond usefulness by the various builders involved and everyone wants immediate results) ... install good top soil, then add a nice thick layer of compost, and then put the landscaping on top of that. When I called around looking for "Certified Organic" compost in the area I did find a source, and if I remember correctly it was competitively priced, but I don't remember off the top of my head what the price was.

Sometimes we add layers of drainage stuff under the soil ... that's a whole extra discussion, I think.

How much a "yard" (that's American yard, or 324 sq ft) of soil or mulch will cover depends entirely on how deep you want to spread it. If you want a good 3", you'll get 10 sq ft of coverage out of your yard of soil.

This, of course, is ALL directly applicable to the notion of improving garden/pasture conditions for the birds. If a person has a "spent" area where the chickens have been for a while so have it looking like the surface of the moon, then it is possible to bring the area back with time & rest & pampering, or the "fast" way with the importation of lovely rich top soils and garden composts.

A good way to protect the soil, I think, is to cover it with mulch that can help retain moisture, retain soil, slow down weeds, and give the kids several inches of something to scratch around in besides the actual soil.

Top soil, compost, mulch.

 

[Beekissed]

Yep. What I saw in those pics was not chipped trees...it was dark, rich, composted material and I can't imagine anyone giving that away for free....if they are, they are missing a way to make some money and I don't imagine, even in the city, that folks are giving away money.

Quote:

Again....THEORY. It works out grand on paper and as a supposed scenario....show me someone who is actually doing this. And to say that this quarter acre is producing all this food is a misnomer as a lot of that "food" has be fed from outside sources, such as the hogs, chickens and even the vegetables....I don't know of any soil that is currently producing 2,000 lbs of tomatoes per quarter acre unless it's a commercial farm that is irrigated, fertilized and worked by immigrant labor. If that. I'd still be skeptical if they are producing 2000 lbs of tomatoes on that amount of land. Maybe in California? Not around here, surely...I've visited the commercial tomato farms around here and it just ain't happenin'.

A dwarf apple tree COULD produce that much fruit...theoretically...and in some areas of the country...on any given year, but most likely not consistently as fruit trees produce in cycles. Two almond trees throw off a goodly amount of shade when mature...can't garden those spaces so those must be shadowing pens?

Maybe in California these things are happening? I've yet to read anywhere that this is in actuality happening for anyone...but would be willing to read about it if you could point me to the article.

Homesteading is about self-sustainable living....there is no such thing as self-sustainable on just a quarter acre...it's impossible. Even for one person, to produce all they would eat for a whole year would be hard pressed to provide it~and I doubt they would want to eat all tomatoes, wheat, eggs, and pork for a full year.. And they would have to be in the right climate for it...maybe a tropical place, which isn't the best place to grow wheat.

You see..I've homesteaded. I've actually been in on growing enough food to feed a family of 5-9 people for an entire year....it takes way more than a quarter acre to achieve it~even for one person~ and it takes more variety of foods to do it well. Oh, a person could live off of apples, almonds, wheat, pork, tomatoes and eggs and survive...but it's not exactly a diet that anyone would want to subsist on.

It's a lovely idea and I love reading about the possibilities as much as the next person and far be it from me to rain on the possibilities parade...I'm a dreamer and love the possibilities. I love thinking outside the box about most things....but what this lady is proposing is just nigh impossible when put into practice. I apologize and will eat humble crow if anyone can show me anyone who is actually putting this theory into practice and getting consistent, accurate results as outlined by this theory.....but I'd have to see that one to believe it.

That dog won't hunt.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

Shoot, I can't remember now the exact episode, but I listen to Food Chain Radio, and they once interviewed a guy who had conducted experiments to see how little land is required to sustainably provide adequate nutrition for one person (or one family, or 100 people, I can't remember exactly). It was not a lot of land. BUT ... when pressed for details they did admit that you probably wouldn't be very happy on the diet that "smallest amount of land" would produce ... it would be limited in variety and not the most tasty stuff to begin with. Still, it was a super cool experiment. I'll see if I can figure out which episode it was and post a link here ...

Otherwise, I love reading about urban farming results.

Here is a fun blog: http://www.onehundreddollarsamonth.com/

And then there is this fantastic group (Growing Power Community Food Center):

Edited to add: I just googled the question "How much land does it take to be self-reliant?" and found this great article! http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-be-self-reliant/

 

[HEChicken]

Yep. What I saw in those pics was not chipped trees...it was dark, rich, composted material and I can't imagine anyone giving that away for free....if they are, they are missing a way to make some money and I don't imagine, even in the city, that folks are giving away money.

Imagine away, because what is given away in my town IS compost. Yes, rich, dark, composted material. I go there on a regular basis to pick it up. The town has an area where residents are encouraged to go and drop off compostable materials - christmas trees, leaves, lawn clippings etc - rather than send them to the landfill. The town then organizes the materials into long rows, which it turns on a regular basis. As you drive down the rows, you can easily see where some are still in the process of composting while towards the end, the compost is "finished" and ready to load. Residents are offered free compost (there is a separate area where free mulch) can be obtained for the taking. One has to load it oneself - which means remembering to take a shovel - but if willing to put in a little effort to load, there is no charge for the product itself.