Green Friends Thread!

[Baby Chick]

Are you going green this year or want to learn how!? Come here! Everyone can share ways of getting green and helping the earth! We all have different ideas & plans so lets share them. Have a website you want to share with more info? Great! you can even do things with chickens to help! So lets all come together and make a difference!

 

[mickey328]

Great thread! I'm subscribing as we're really trying to move toward a more green lifestyle. I'm rather proud of the fact that with a household of 4 adults, we produce only about 1 bag of actual landfill stuff a week...or less. Everything else is either recycled, composted or fed to the chickens. We use absolutely NO chemicals in the yard; for bugs in the fruit trees, we use either ladybugs or plain old dishsoap and water, weeds are either pulled and given to the chickens or we move the run and let them pick it themselves. We till the garden, but only to about 4 inches and add plenty of composted organic material, and plan to use quite a bit of green manure next season. We really try to use everything one way or another. From processing our last chickens, I canned the meat and froze everything else for making stock later...after it's crock-potted for about 24 hrs, all the stuff will go to the chickens...what they don't eat will be composted. I also have a bag in the freezer where I toss various veggies that are past their prime for use in stock later.

We took out all the sod in our front yard. Why water stuff that serves no purpose other than needing to be mowed? LOL, some of our neighbors were aghast, but as we mulched and put in specific plantings, they've come to think it's not so awful and we're just a bit eccentric! We also took about 1/4 of the sod out in the back...all around the fence line...mulched everything to about 4 inches with free wood chips the city made available after a huge storm last year. It conserves an enormous amount of water, which is really important in our high desert climate. We put in a nice under structure of flowering perennials and shrubs (you need to feed the soul, too Next spring, the unplanted space will be filled with veggies and herbs and patches of grain and alfalfa for the chickens. We have some oats in the front I planted for herbal use this spring, but it's all gone to the chickens, LOL. I cut just the tops off and either drop it in the run or dry them for use later on. Then I cut the oatstraw and use it for bedding. The stubble will be worked back into the soil to add bulk and organic material. We plan to put in several patches of winter rye and wheat this fall...some will be tilled under as green manure in the spring, and some we'll let grow so we can use it like we did the oats this year.

Can't wait to hear what others are doing!

 

[Baby Chick]

Well in my signature I have 2 websites. The first is mine to collect donations to save tigers. The second is a survey for a girl scout project to cut carbon dioxide from the air. Also if you have fb you can like our troop's page for the project, its call The 2 Degree Project.