Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Perris]

It was a rural village. It's an urban village now. It's squeezed between Avonmouth docks and Bristol city.
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/shirehampton-evolving-become-next-north-6491718

I guess the reporter visited during the day, not the night!

 

[TropicalChickies]

@Iluveggers I'm sorry for your chickens.
I hope you are not feeling too angry at the dog and guilty at yourself. I don't think you could have foreseen this.



Regarding plastic, I would be interested to know how you do with less plastic and replace it by other materials. For a few examples, we freeze most of our garden vegetables in plastic bags. Sure, I reuse them once or twice but no more. Don't tell me to can - we don't have the appliance necessary to heat for canning without spending way more energy than a year freezing does.
I tried to go with metal feeders and waterers for my chickens, and they rusted. I try to replace my food and storage plastic containers with glass, but glass containers have become so expensive that I can't afford to do it for all.

I don't think recycling plastic is a totally satisfying solution. Recycled plastic retains the toxic harmful chemicals from the original.
(see for ex : https://rethinkplasticalliance.eu/w...n-Costs-of-a-Plastic-Planet-February-2019.pdf p. 48)
I do use recycled plastic whenever possible rather than new.

In the actual system, self sufficiency isn't possible for all. We would have to completely adjust our ways of living, but who is really ready to do that, apart from maybe @TropicalChickies ? And I don't think rich countries will be spared the devastation that's about to come- all the recent studies show that Europe is one of the places in the world where climate warming is going way faster that predicted.
I consider myself very lucky to have gone out of the city, we are not people who enjoy money or material things, and still we are not being sufficiently virtuous and keep consuming things we "want" but don't really "need". Just spending time on BYC is an example of this : we are all aware here I think of the environmental cost of spending time on the internet.

Last year the drought meant most of our harvest was poor. We usually grow garlic for almost the year round, but this time we had only for four months. We did make without, but ended up buying some twice : both times it came from Argentina, we just couldn't find any from France ! Logically enough the drought that caused our garden to produce less, had the same consequences for bigger AG.
I personally don't see any reason to be optimistic. Which doesn't mean I will not try to do better.

As for the coop, I don't think big sized coop are useless here. I've mentioned before that as my chickens are growing a bit older, they really appreciated hanging out in their coop in winter. It was a cold one for here, meaning mornings between -5 and -10c ( 14 / 23 f) for 2 weeks in a row three times between December and February, and my ex-batts stayed in their coop most of these mornings. Sure, they would have survived outside, but I think it was a confort for them. I get it : I love being outside and I am as soon as the weather allows it, but I'm also happy I dont have to jump from my bed directly outside in those temperatures!

4 january 2023. Chilling inside.
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Hi @ManueB, thanks for the mention... I just want to say I don't mean to come off as all 'woke" and "virtuous" over here on my off grid mud house. There's nothing worse than sanctimonious holier-than-thou posturing on the internet. Our lifestyle isn't perfect. We have a jeep, for example. Living out here without a vehicle would be more difficult than I can handle right now. I use the internet. In many ways, I have to in order to keep the farm going by having visitors and programs to supplement our income. But I also use it recreationally, and thank goodness I'm limited by the sometimes poor satellite connection. And after living like this, in relatively splendid isolation for seven years, I'm not sure I even could go back to urban or "normal" life, not without some serious psychological problems...

But, yes, the way my partner and I live is very different. I'm not optimistic that we can really change the destructive trajectory humans are on, but perhaps we can leave a roadmap for future generations to say, "ah now, these people were on to something..."

I don't think people in rich countries will necessarily be completely sheltered from climate crisis. But they can certainly act like they are "in their bubble" for a longer time. Just the other day I saw a photo of a suburban house renovation underway in California USA with an eerie orange sky in the background from an approaching wildfire. I mean, who does this? Comfortably middle class people who don't think this crisis will touch them.

For people in Southeast Asia and Central America, however, it has already begun in earnest. Over a billion people have already been displaced by rising ocean levels, heat, and drought. Mexico has its own border crisis as people from Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala flee their scorched farmlands. Cities in SE Asia now have new ghettos of refugees whose homes are underwater. These stories don't often make the news, but they are happening.

Plus, to be honest, I have reasons for living like I do, and not all of them are altruistic. I like animals, trees, and books more than people. enjoy the satisfaction of building structures with dirt, pulling food put of the ground. Hand washing clothes, not so much. But it's part of the package. And I don't overestimate how much individual actions like mine can really impact the situation. The nefarious actors, the big banks, the multilateral institutions, the mega corporations, the one percent -- they are a much bigger problem than your plastic freezer bags or my Jeep. We need a real uprising, a revolution, and the people willing to go to the front lines.

Anyway, those are just a few reflections your comments prompted. I'm off to check on my first batch of homemade fermenting chicken feed!

@Perris, I covered my jar with a cloth and put a ring around it (yes, plastic, I know...). Your comment about leaving your jar slightly ajar made me a bit nostalgic for life without so many insects around -- if I did that, the jar would be a bug buffet in seconds. But the cloth is porous and should let the microbes float in and gasses escape.

 

[Shadrach]

I guess the reporter visited during the day, not the night!

I'm not convinced the reporter ever visited. I can't find 10 hairdressers and the addition of a nail bar isn't really a sign of impending gentrification.
That word community. That means everybody knows everybody else, doesn't like them and gossips about them behind their backs doesn't it?
I lived there for five years many years ago. The great advantage Shirehampton has is it is surrounded by some spectacular countryside barring towards the city and even then there is the Avon gorge before the city takes over.

 

[TropicalChickies]

I think I could defend this position without looking like a hypocrite on the basis that the plastic used is recycled...


Weekdays and Saturdays are usually fine. I have to go into the local village to catch a bus on Sundays. During the day, the village is almost bearable but at night it's plain depressing. Picture a naked tungston lightbulb behind dirty net curtains above a shop with roller shutters and an accumulation of litter outside, while a few drunks stagger around the high street and cars with loud exhausts going too fast tear past. The contrast from the peace of the allotments with late roosting birds chittering away in the trees and the smell of earth and flowers is hard to come to terms with.

Oh my, this sounds like a great Tom Waits song. Or a Charles Bukowski poem. Goes with Henry's nicotine stained feathers ...

 

[notabitail]

Well, it's just not the done thing in refined circles. I've had this discussion with my eldest and ended up looking like a snob with a poor grasp of physics. The snob bit I can live with; the poor grasp of physics was too much for me to deal with so I let people boil their tea as they please.

I boil mine in a refined way with a electric tea kettle. Though I wonder, how refined is it if it is just the cheap one from Amazon?

 

[no fly zone]

I think of English villages like the BBC shows on USA TV.
Quaint, clean and full of murderers

. https://www.pbs.org/show/midsomer-murders/

super high murder rates in those little villages

 

[Molpet]

I don't think people in rich countries will necessarily be completely sheltered from climate crisis. But they can certainly act like they are "in their bubble" for a longer time.

My brother insists that we are in a normal warm up coming out of the last ice age. When I point out it's warming up in a 100 years what took over a couple thousand years in the past ice age warm up he ignores it and says people can't effect the planet.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

^^ This. I couldn't see how plastic could be better than wood, despite being able to see some wood options are much better than others (type of wood, where it comes from, and such). I can now see plastic can be better in some situations.

No mites. No insects that I didn't carry in to feed the chickens other than:

• a few paper wasps try to build nests sometimes (3 so far). I would leave them but dh's family is deathly allergic to bee and wasp stings so he is phobic about them.
• a half dozen flies, maybe
• A few pantry moth larva in one partial bag of feed that I forgot about long enough for them to hatch. The chickens were happy to clean them up before they matured.

No chemicals other than direct shots of Raid into the wasp nests. If I see any more, I will take them down without chemicals before he sees them.

The only preservatives are treated wood for the three skids under the shed. And paint on most of it.

We just don't have the insect issues some other climates have. Wood will eventually rot if left alone enough years.

No rats. We get field mice in the garage in the winter but have had no rodents in the shed.

One ground squirrel per winter has made a stash of walnuts under the shed. I like watching him so have let him so far. He hasn't tried to chew into the shed. The first year, he made a shallow hollow but last winter he deepened it nearly as deep as the bottom of the cement blocks the skids rest on. So, I will lay the mesh apron before the walnuts ripen this year.

The wood is local except, maybe, for the three skids. My dad had loggers in to harvest the mature trees from two of the ten acre woodlots about every ten years. The young trees then have room to grow.

My dad also planted pines in plantations. These were thinning every ten years or so - usually the loggers took every third tree.

These two practices are how logging is done in this region most of the time. About half of the land in this region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan) is timberland - not counting the forested parts that are not timberland.

Neither are remotely like clearing rainforest. Or managing trees in the UK, either, from the little I think I understand.

The third ten acre woodlot was never logged because my mother loved to look at it as it was. It was a mix of pine plantation and maples on hills that she could see from the kitchen sink. It stayed beautiful for at least sixty years. About twenty years ago, I tried to tell them that the pines in it needed to be logged; they were starting to die (that is when I found out why they had never logged it.) It is now about half dead - some standing dead trees and some fallen. It is a fire risk the way it is now - a bit of a sore point with all the smoke drifting across the region from Canada these days.

I took these pictures of the woodlot my mother loved in the early spring so it looks a little more dead than it is.

You are right it needs to be cleaned up and log what is needed to let the good trees survive.

Good Luck.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

A tree at the end of his lifespan will fal down and rot. If you let a forest grow and do nothing you have a status quo (over 100’s of years).

Growing trees for wood is not taking 10 years but often over 100 years. Depending on the type of tree.

Harvesting trees before the end of its growth and using the wood as building material and furniture is not wrong by itself. It will contribute to storage of carbon dioxide. But harvesting trees is often done in an impropriate (wrong) way.
We also need to renovate houses and furniture to last > 100 years to let the world profit.

Good
A forest will regrow/grow on and on, if the foresters do a good job. Taking out the big trees and harvest part of young trees that get too dense (for poles) is a wonderful way to grow and harvest materials for our benefit.

Wrong
What is happening in many rainforests nowadays and the recent past is that greedy people harvest the whole forest and plant palm trees for oil or fields for corn and soy, or let cattle in to clear the ground. For even more profit. I agree: the big multinationals you mention are a problem. They are NOT good foresters.

In the past (in Europe) the landowners harvested whole forests for wood (for fuel and building ships) . After harvesting they often let the land become a desert. This is even more stupid and certainly not the way either.

My bedroom furniture is made from aspen pine that are dead.

The wood is only harvested after the order is placed.

 

[Ladies-Eight]

I have some sad news. Lost my EE yesterday. I had earlier this year nursed her back after a few bouts of soft-shelled eggs. Once I realized she would eat only the veggie scraps I put out in the morning and ignore the oyster shell, I got her back on track & deliver scraps in the afternoon.

Yesterday hub & I went to run some errands and left the kids (teenage + ages) in charge at home. Well, somehow my EE flew over the gate (which she has never done). We have a second gate as a backup just in case anyone ever flew over. My kids let the dogs out with them to play in the yard. The chickens have a regular covered run, plus two huge fenced in areas to range. (The benefits of large property)…We only let them out of the fencing when the dogs are safely inside. When we got home the kids were on the front porch and I heard the chickens yelling. Turns out my poor hen flew over the first gate, and my dog got through the backup gate (which hadn’t been secured). The dog got to her. The only thing I am thankful for is there was no blood…I think her neck just broke. My kids feel terrible for not keeping a better eye out. Today hub & I are working on raising the 5 ft gate up to the 8 feet of the rest of the fence, even if it means a temporary flexible plastic enclosure over the top. Lesson learned the hard way by everyone.

I’ll pay some tax later when I get outside to work on the gate. We are down to 8 hens…so glad my chicks will be ready before the end of the month.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

Glad you have some chicks.