Back to one of the original questions about a simple recipe for homegrown food, I recently picked up a great book for chickens, self-sufficiency, etc. called The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery. I would HIGHLY recommend it. It's about 900 pages of everything you need to know from a woman who's lived it her whole life: grasses, grains, & canes, gardens, herbs, orchards, food preservation, poultry, goats, cows, bee, rabbit, sheep, & pig. The layout and writing style are excellent as well.
Anyways, Carla's big on home-grown feed for the economics of it. She says free-ranging chickens tend to do just fine supplemented with table scraps (nothing moldy or citrus fruits) and grain. Table scraps should include greens, garden stuff, etc., which she says can make up to 20% of their diet. According to the book they don't even have to have grain except for during the winter, though they will grow and lay better with it. Her mixture is flexible and can be corn/buckwheat/sorghum, or corn/oats/barley, or corn/oats/wheat, or any mixture of those. That's "scratch". Other important points are chickens naturally raised by free-ranging mothers will be more efficient natural feeders and chickens, like people, need Vitamin D so if they're cooped up in the winter they need something like cod-liver oil. Like earlier posts said, bugs you grow and re-using egg shells can't hurt. You'll know how well you're doing by the health of the chickens and the quality/quantity of eggs.
I haven't grown grain personally but I know it's easier than a vegetable garden if you have the space. For one thing, there's no weeding or working in it at all. You plant, water, and wait to harvest. But there's a whole section on that in the book too. Good luck! My goal is 50% self-sufficient in the next 5 years. I just want to do it because of the sense of fulfillment from actually having a hand in directly supporting my own (and my family's) existence.
I'm so excited that I am not the only one thinking this way.......well, I figured I wasn't, but it's nice to see other people's thoughts on it validating mine. I have been trying to gently nudge my DH in this direction for about a year now. I am now trying to convince him that we need to put solar panels on the roof.......lol.......he's interested but not convinced....YET. Wait until I tell him that if we have enough of them, the electric company will start paying US instead of us paying them! I think that'll push him over the edge.
